I downloaded and installed Mandriva 2007 Spring RC1. I am pretty impressed. I have been using PCLinuxOS, which is a fork, but I find the packages way to limited so I may switch to Mandriva for a bit. I used Mandriva, or Mandrake, for awhile a couple of years ago because it was so advanced over many other distros, especially when it came to Wacom and widescreen support. The Mandriva distro never fails to amaze me, but this release is amazing! If you think Beryl or Compiz is cool then Mandriva pushes this a bit further by using Metisse. Live CD using Gnome and Metisse can be downloaded here on Mandriva's FTP area.

To me Beryl and Compiz are usless toys that are merely there for the coolness effect, but on older machines they can really slow you down, even though they work perfect on my 64mb ATI card, but I have a 3ghz HT machine with lots of ram.

Metisse has more features, will run on older hardware, and extends features to your desktop windows in 3-D like ways, like flipping windows, etc.

To qoute OSNews, "Metisse is a window manager developed by the In Situ project. Available under the General Public Licence exclusively for Linux, Metisse differs from a classic 3D desktop ('the cube') in the way that it offers innovative windows interactions, thus enforcing work efficiency."

To see Metisse in action check our the videos and screenshots on their site.

The only thing that turns me off to Mandriva is that it's commercial so some things are limited, like the updater. I haven't played with 2007 enough to know if that is true, but I may load it tonight here at home to get a feel for Metisse. I may try to get Metisse working on Ubuntu once I know more about how to configure Metisse since I like (K)Ubuntu the best.

When I first read about Metisse a couple of years ago I wasn't willing to play with it, but I am glad it's getting incorporated in a big distro. Let's just say, it's cool!

Also take a look at Project Looking Glass , which runs ok on Ubuntu. To bad it's written in Java, still damned cool. To get Project Looking Glass running on Ubuntu go here. To see this running on Ubuntu go here.