As a proud AMD64/3400+ (note the '+') owner, I am happy that I can now use more of the abundance of processing power on candy for the eye. So, I run xcompmgr -cCfF -r8 -o.63 -l-10 -t-8 -D7, enabled the nvidia cursor-shadow feature, and now everything is all-singing, all-dancing and all-shadowy. Beautiful. There seems to be a new focus on getting all kinds of eyecandy features on our Free desktops, and it is good. We have of course the work of Seth and friends, but never forget Rasterman and friends.

Still, I hope they can speed it up a bit; virtual desktop switching will make Xorg jump to 90% or more (in top). And there seems to be some bad interaction with gdesklets, which causes both to eat *a lot* of CPU-cycles when run together, even while not switching virtual desktops.

I am also interested in ear candy. Since I bought a sound card somewhere in 1993 or so (they were not a standard part of PCs in those days), I wanted to have auditive feedback for my interactions with the computer. But, apart from the occasional beep and ploink, current desktops don't seem to fully exploit the possibilities, to put it mildly. But of course I have to admit that I don't have a Plan in this area, on the fine line between useful feedback and annoying beeps. Has any research been done on this?