Well, there's a lot being done right now.
On the infrastructure level, there's EXA, a new acceleration model for X.org, which at least NVidia has already promised to support. It's 2D acceleration, but it will hopefully bring full translucency support without X server crashes.
On the 3D front, there is some work being done on Xgl/Xegl, an OpenGL-based X server which will allow for 3D-accelerated desktops. There was some article a while ago on how this was good even if desktops don't use 3D features, basically it had to do with the fact that graphics cards are 3D-oriented today and 3D acceleration will always be many times faster than 2D acceleration because of it, even if it's just for 2D stuff.
On a more "desktop" level, there is work being done both in the Gnome area (the videos in the article) and the
KDE area.
And in a sense of integrating these new possibilities of eye-candy with the working environment, there is some great movement in KDE, namely the
Plasma project, which will be part of KDE4 next year. The idea is to integrate the Desktop (which was already enriched with things like
SuperKaramba), the Panels (including tray and taskbar) and the "3rd Level", which is like running applications. What will this integration bring us? The ability to have universal applets (time, weather, news, CPU monitoring, whatever), that can be placed on the desktop, on a panel, on a window above others, etc.! All of them with nice eye-candy, of course! There's not much to show yet, but they're working on it.
Exciting times
