I had around an Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron LTS, so I used it to run its included LiveCD and recover from there. At the same time I was curious about it, as I hadn’t had chance to test it before. One of the things that surprised me most was that Compiz was enabled by default. After a second thinking that this was going to be a problem, making the system unusable (remember, a 5 years old laptop, and I had checked myself compiz some time ago with a catastrophic result), I started to meve windoes, jump from one virtual desktop to other, and minimiza and maximize windows without a problem. The work that had been made amazed me!

So, some fsck and apt-get commands after, I managed to reboot on my Debian system, and I installed compiz. The result: my system goes faster using compiz, with a bunch of effects enabled than running plain metacity window manager. I have a also installed some compiz fusion plugins, and they are running without a glitch and with an incredible speed. Obviously, I have not chosen full quality, but it is enough to show effects in an efficient way.

I have improved my user experience and system speed at the same time… Once again Linux shows that it can get the best of old hardware. Good work, guys!