I’ve been slowly working on moving my Linux desktop to the Xgl/Compiz combination and have been impressed and disappointed with the results. With how young this project is it is expected as the bug reports fill up and slowly get knocked out. Xgl Was developed by Novell a few years back and have released several demo videos showing the oohs and awws off, but the project wascompletely internal until August 2005 when they open sourced it. It wasn’t until January 2006 that people were able to display results. Since then the project has been moving at a very rapid pace and is now included in the latest Xorg release (7.0.1)
Compiz was developed as an OpenGL Window Manager. This is the part that all the tricks take place in. Wobbly windows, cube effect for multiple desktops, a very snappy alt+tab window switcher, transset gives true alpha transparency and a very nice zoom feature to mention a few.
I’ve been using CoffeeBuzz’s xgl-coffee overlay for portage in Gentoo and recently switched to the compiz-quinnstorm which contains the more experimental plugins like trailfocus (my favorite).
I’m currently trying to set it up on my laptop wiht an ATI Radeon (desktop uses an nVidia) but running into a few snags with unrelated packages needed to build Gnome. My desktop runs great except for a few problems, mostly with games. Puzzle Pirates runs great, but the cursor doesn’t update often enough which is more then a little disorientating . Fullscreen games currently require you to run some tricks, like using xinit -e GameExecutable -- :1 to start the game on a new X session or use xgame. I haven’t gotten to point of trying these yet.
I’m hopeing in the future Xgl/Compiz will be much more stable and popular, the possibilities will surely give OSX some good competition 
the Gentoo HOWTO XGL page is constantly updated to accomidate for any new changes and should be checked often if anything goes wrong with your current install after an update
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