The Uber cool Seth Nickell, previously of storage fame has released some AMAZING videos of what’s coming up in the desktop for Linux.
To sum it up in a nutshell, Owen Taylor, of GTK fame, has written a cracktastic GL compositing X server where everything is rendered as a GL texture, ala Mac OS X. This allows us to do all sorts of cool stuff with the desktop, just like Mac OS X does. Also, he shows off some of the really cool progress that is being made in integrating GTK with Cairo for great vector rendering on the Linux desktop. Go watch to videos. Grab the theora versions for extra goodness.