Because it conforms to the ICCCM conventions, Compiz can be used as a substitute for the default Mutter or Metacity, when using GNOME Panel, or KWin in KDE Plasma Workspaces.

Around the same time, Xgl, Xegl and AIGLX gave Xorg the possibility of using OpenGL for transformation and effects on windows surfaces.

The first version of Compiz was released as free software by Novell (SUSE) no later than February 2006[6] in the wake of the (also new) Xgl.

After the Novell XGL/Compiz team (mostly David Reveman) refused the proposition to merge the Quinnstorm changes with compiz-vanilla, the decision was made to make a real differentiation.

[8] Among the differences to Compiz, Beryl had a new window decorator named Emerald based on cgwd along with a theme manager called emerald-theme-manager, used a flat-file backend instead of gconf, and had no GNOME dependencies.

On March 30, 2007, discussions between the Beryl and Compiz communities led to a merger of the two communities which results in two new software packages: Outcomes include plans to fund a code review panel consisting of the best developers from each community who will see that any code included in a release package meets the highest standards and is suitable for distribution in an officially supported package.

[10][11][12] In the fourth quarter of 2008, two separate branches of Compiz were created: compiz++ and NOMAD; compiz++ was geared toward the separation of compositing and OpenGL layers for the rendering of the window manager without compositing effects, and the port from C to C++ programming language.

[21] With version 0.9.6 in progress, Canonical hired developer Daniel van Vugt to work on Compiz full-time.

[26] In November 2012, Spilsbury announced that he had left Canonical[27] and stated he had no plans to port Compiz to Wayland.

A small team continues to work on Compiz with version 0.9.13 being the focus of development as of July 2016.

Compiz plugins include the cube effect, Alt-Tab application-switching with live previews or icons, and a feature similar to macOS's Mission Control.

Other window managers like GNOME Shell and KWin would later also implement compositing effects.

Also, distributions increasingly began including KDE and GNOME with their default window managers.