Compiz Fusion had its first release today, version 0.5.2. I’m running 0.5.1 and don’t plan on going through the update yet since it seems to work fine for me at the moment (I don’t want to mess anything up). You can install it via the tarball listed on their site, or through your distribution packager. They also have instructions on how to update Beryl to Compiz Fusion. Here is a list from their website of the features in Compiz Fusion.

* New Plugins:
- Firepaint
- Like the ‘water’ plugin, draw fire anywhere on screen.
- Enhanced Zoom
- Zoom and continue to interact with your programs, designed with the visually impaired in mind.
- Colorfilter plugin
- Filter windows or screen colors to enhance contrast or help low-visioned users.
- Desktop Expo
- View all desktops at a glance and move windows between them with a beautiful reflective effect.
- Mouse Switch, Viewport Mouse Switch and Goto-Viewport
- Switch viewports by scrolling on the desktop, by using mouse gestures or simply by pressing that viewport’s number.
- Cube Atlantis and Cube Gears
- Renders an aquarium or gears inside the transparent cube.
- Cube Reflection
- Draws a reflection underneath the cube.
- Cube Caps
- Allows drawing of cube caps on top and bottom and having a slideshow of images on the caps of your cube.
- Scale Addons
- Adds titles to your scaled windows and highlights them when they are hovered over.
- Scale Window Title Filter
- Type the name of a window in scale mode and the windows will filter out as you type.
- Resize Info
- Metacity like window resize information, with Cairo-composited goodness.
- Extra Window Management Actions
- Fullscreen, focus, toggle always-on-top and sticky all with the stroke of a key.
- Ring Switcher
- Switch between windows in a ring, with windows at the back getting darker and a cool new animation
- Shift Switcher
- Switch between windows in a Flip3D style or in a Cover Flow style with a cool reflection effect.
- Window Rules
- With the new window matching system, match windows by name, title and type to assign rules to them, like always-on-top.

* Other new features:
- Multiple resize modes added from Beryl and improved
- Transparent cube re-written and now faster
- Group and Tab plugin now has much smoother and aesthetic effects
- New animations for the Animation plugin
- ‘Airplane’ effect folds windows up into a paper airplane and makes it fly away.
- ‘Dodge’ effect makes windows move out of the way when you focus one behind them.
- ‘Fold’ effect folds windows up and unfolds them on open.
- ‘Skewer’ effect divides your windows in to parts and manipulates them.
- Set as many different animations as you like, you are now no longer limited to 2 Open/Close animations
- Most minimize animations now go to the taskbar where it makes sense

* New Settings System
- A new settings system LibCompizConfig and manager CCSM, written in C and Python respectively enables you to configure the large amount of plugins. It features
- Backends
- GNOME Storage Backend (GConf)
- KDE Storage Backend (KConfig)
- Flat-File Storage Backend (INI)
- Search
- You can now filter out for plugins using the information bar on the left.
- Advanced Search
- Allows you to filter for options and option short descriptions.
- Breadcrumb navigation style through the options
- Profile Import/Export support in all backends
- Each plugin has its own button in the main window, allowing for easy navigation and enabling / disabling of plugins.
- Conforms to GNOME Settings Guidelines

* Translations :
- We now have Compiz Fusion translated into these languages:
- Dutch
- Spanish
- French
- Swedish
- Portuguese
- Chinese
- English

By the way, if you don’t know what Compiz Fusion is, it is a desktop manager for Linux that gives you many different effects for your desktop. If you don’t have Linux, check out Wubi, which is a Linux installer for Windows.