3d Acceleration and effects for the desktop have been with linux for ages, and not necessarily limited to Open Solaris or nVidia. It seems the screen shots you have posted is for Compiz-Fusion project which has been around for a very long time (which does all that), and you can get Compiz-Fusion working on any *nix distro, not just on OpenSolaris. Most new distributions of Linux has the Compiz-Fusion project in their repos by default, making it a snap to get and install.
And as for nVidia, it will work with both nVidia and ATI, or anything else that supports OpenGL.
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Compiz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiz-Fusion
And here is a demo of it on Fedora 10 (I am currently using on my laptop, very stable with CompizFusion on Gnome)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXKrmWRAW4A