when you have VLC set to float on top on a mac and then you open the file dialog to watch something but you can't see it because VLC is floating on top of it
you see, you would throw the window, and it would bounce off the edges of your screen. Now. Some important context. The main reason anyone used compiz at the time (And if they say otherwise, they are lying) is it let you represent your virtual desktops as faces of a cube. (this is important foreshadowing)
So one day, sleep deprived after finally having made it work thanks to the problems of linux in the mid-2000s (your distribution package maintainer had some opinions that it turns out were changed out from under them 3 releases ago, and moving configs around so X works again) I check the bouncing windows button.
they have 50% friction by default, so I was safe. But I wanted to play around with the friction.
Dear reader, I grabbed a slider on a bouncing window. Which moved, and set the slider to, just about but not quite 0%.
btw I also set it to 'always on top'
Thanks to a bug in compiz at the time, you could not interact with windows moving faster than a certain rate. Not the mouse, not tabbing through it. So I just had to wait, as it agonizingly slowed down to an interactable speed several minutes later. It would bounce a nearly full screen window, all around the 4-pane-loop of the cube (top and bottom were disabled by default or it would be way funnier).
Just sitting there, unable to read anything on how to fix it, because every half line a window would come fling across. This was, of course, before mobile phones had internet, and the only computer in our house at the time was this one.
I have never been more at the mercy of a computer in my own livingroom since.
