So weird. I usually rearrange my desktop every two weeks, often when I am bored. Sometimes I want a quick lean, smallish desktop and other times I want the whole shebang, all possible animations, SVG icons, mouse gestures — you name it and I will already have tons of it!

Today I wanted to enable Compiz again and it just wouldn’t start. After a couple of tries that turned out to be dead ends I finally got this:

/usr/bin/compiz.real (core) - Error: Could not acquire compositing manager selection on screen 0 display ":0.0"

Some more digging around Google gave me the answer: Metacity and Compiz fight to be “compositing manager” …

… as soon as I disabled /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager I could enable Compiz again!