Comment 6 for bug 769650

Disclaimer: incomplete understanding follows :-)

I seem to recall that, in past versions (lucid and maverick at least), if you expanded your desktop, desktop effects would be switched off for that session, probably by replacing compiz with metacity? Shadows and desktop effects did go away.

This seems to me to be fallout from the compiz requirement for unity (is it possible to switch to unity-2d on the fly like this?) The Ubuntu Classic behavior reported in comment 3 sounds like a potential regression to me, though.