By the early 2000's, both
ATI and
Nvidia drivers became increasingly common on
Linux. Advanced
OpenGL development was no longer restricted to expensive
UNIX workstations. Around the same time,
Xgl,
Xegl and
AIGLX gave
Xorg the possibility of using OpenGL for transformation and effects on windows surfaces. With foundations finally available,
xcompmgr pioneered the features of a
compositing window manager.
Luminocity An effort called Luminocity began with some
GNOME developers to make use of recent developments. In March 2005, the Luminocity project already featured effects like "wobbly windows", "physics models for window moving", "live updating workspace switcher" and "alpha compositing". Given Luminocity was mostly a prototype, its development soon was abandoned, but some of its effects and behaviors were later implemented by Compiz.
Compiz The first version of Compiz was released as
free software by
Novell (
SUSE) no later than February 2006 in the wake of the (also new)
Xgl. It was one of the earliest compositing window managers for X. In March 2006 Compiz was ported to
AIGLX by
Red Hat.
Beryl Beryl was the project name for the
quinnstorm branch of Compiz, announced on September 19, 2006 after Compiz developer Quinn Storm and the development team decided that the fork had come too far from the original Compiz started by
Novell (). After the Novell XGL/Compiz team (mostly David Reveman) refused the proposition to merge the Quinnstorm changes with compiz-vanilla, the decision was made to make a real differentiation. Among the differences to Compiz, Beryl had a new window decorator named Emerald based on
cgwd along with a theme manager called , used a flat-file backend instead of
gconf, and had no
GNOME dependencies.
Merger of the Compiz and Beryl communities On March 30, 2007, discussions between the Beryl and Compiz communities led to a merger of the two communities which results in two new software packages: • Compiz, (also Compiz-core) which contains only the core functionality of Compiz and base plugins • Compiz Fusion, consisting of the plugins, decorators, settings tools and related applications from the Beryl and Compiz communities. Compiz Fusion concentrates on installation, configuration and additional plugins to add to the core functionalities of Compiz. Outcomes include plans to fund a code review panel consisting of the best developers from each community who will see that any code included in a release package meets the highest standards and is suitable for distribution in an officially supported package.
Further branches In the fourth quarter of 2008, two separate branches of Compiz were created:
compiz++ and
NOMAD; compiz++ was geared toward the separation of
compositing and
OpenGL layers for the rendering of the window manager without compositing effects, and the port from
C to
C++ programming language. NOMAD was geared towards the improvement of
remote desktop performance for Compiz installations.
Merger of the Compiz branches On February 2, 2009 a conference call was held between developers of
Compiz,
Compiz++,
NOMAD and
Compiz Fusion where it was decided to merge the projects into a unified project, simply named Compiz, with a unified roadmap.
Compiz 0.9 series On July 4, 2010, Sam Spilsbury, lead Compiz developer, announced the release of Compiz 0.9.0 with a new API, rewritten in C++.
Canonical Ltd. hired Spilsbury to further develop Compiz for
Ubuntu in October 2010. Since then Compiz development mostly coincides with Ubuntu development. Main development moved to Canonical's
Launchpad service. The 0.9.x versions up to 0.9.5 were seen as unstable/
beta software. With version 0.9.6 in progress, Canonical hired developer Daniel van Vugt to work on Compiz full-time. While 0.9.6 never officially released, Compiz 0.9.7.0 was released a month ahead of enterprise-targeted
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (
Long Term Support) and declared stable. A few days before the official release of Ubuntu 12.04 a new development branch, 0.9.8, was created in preparation for
Ubuntu 12.10. For Compiz version 0.9.8 development has moved to a new Launchpad page. In November 2012, Spilsbury announced that he had left Canonical and stated he had no plans to port Compiz to
Wayland. A small team continues to work on Compiz with version 0.9.13 being the focus of development as of July 2016.
Compiz Reloaded A group forked the Compiz 0.8 series code base and modernized it and maintains it as of 2025. ==Features==