Before heading home from work last night, I decided to do a little investigation of whether there was any more effective (and, okay, yes, pretty) way to preview and switch between windows and workspaces on my workhorse Linux box (Xubuntu 10.04 LTS). One of the desktop features I love about the Mac operating system is Exposé, which brings up mini versions of all the programs running on the system. It looks fantastic and is also useful because, when several similar windows are open you can easily target the right one and the live previews let you glimpse on the progress of background jobs.

I had had a brief look the week before without coming up with anything but last night I stumbled across Compiz Fusion, which does all that I wanted and more too. It is not a new thing and was not an unfamiliar name but it was a joy to discover that my computer was powerful enough to run it without breaking a sweat. It is like discovering a box of tools and toys, some of which will be very useful and others which will simply serve to elicit gasps of awe from passers by.

If you haven’t come across this technology before, you can see it in action in an article from Lifehacker. Publication date for that article? August 2007! I knew I was behind the times but I feel like I have caught up.