Compiz has a lot of nice effects that are mostly useless and I wrote about it before. In my quest to find a work place without distraction compiz effects doesn’t really fit in. Even though examples of compiz effects can be used to demonstrate a superior desktop experience compare to other OS, in reality most of the effects don’t have any practical use other than, “It looks cool”. Few weeks ago when I read about the formation of a new Compiz Council, I was interested to give compiz another try and in the process I actually found some of the effects that actually enhances my desktop experience (unlike wobbly window) and be more productive. Here are five effects that I actually found useful:

1) Desktop Wall: If you work with many workspaces, this effect will give you a wide view of all your workspaces without having to visit each workspace to look for your application. In this screenshot you can see ten workspaces and the active workspace is highlighted:

Desktop Wall

2) Scale: Scale takes on where Desktop Wall left off and it scales all the active windows inside a workspace to get an uncluttered view.

Scale Effect

3) Group and tab: This is an amazing feature which you can use to group many applications into one single window and switch from one application to another from the tab. Its hard to explain what it does with a screenshot, so here is a quick video:

4) Window Switching: This gives you a preview of all the active open window and you can view them very quickly and switch from one window to another. Very helpful if you work with many open applications.

5) Window Previews: This gives you small window preview of a minimized application. Because the preview doesn’t scale to show a sharp view you can actually increase the size of the preview to look as large as you want. This is a screenshot of a large preview window: