A few months ago compiz suddenly stopped working. That is, it got to a refreshrate where the redrawing is more than noticeable. It took 5 seconds to redraw a chat window. Ever since I've been using metacity instead, but I've found myself missing some plugins badly. I found the following solution: export __GL_YIELD="NOTHING"; compiz --replace This works fine, everything is fast again with compiz. But how to make sure this variable is always set whenever I run compiz? I'm using standard nVidia drivers, failed to get the open source ones working.