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I couldn't agree more.

Beryl really is impressive, but the settings manager is just terrible.

Give people a nice, easy to use manager that let's them change some settings and choose between different profiles (maybe installing well tested profiles by default would be a good idea here) and leave the tweaking of every last setting to those geeks who want to play with this kind of stuff.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to bash beryl or the effort that has gone into it and I can very well understand that devs would like to show everyone what beryl is capable of, but beryl would be a much better option for distros to use if it had a setting manager "normal" people could use.

Just try beryl-settings-simple

"Just try beryl-settings-simple"

Ah, thanks, didn't know about this.

Looks very promising.

Beryl really is impressive, but the settings manager is just terrible.

What beryl needs are good default settings so that users don't need to tweak too many things to get a good desktop experience without learning what beryl is. Good defaults are more important than a good settings chooser.

Maybe when they believe it's a stable product for regular use they'll do that. I imagine this UI is useful for people developing Beryl and early users who'll be finding and documenting useful tweaks.

Not everything released in the open source world is ready for use.

Jeff,

I hate to say it, but no company seems to be taking an active interest in beryl. As a matter of fact, the software engineers from Redhat who were (previously) working on the metactiy compositor are now working on compiz and you can see them on the compiz mailing lists.

Don't think this is a flame, my desktop is running beryl right now.

This might be due to young age, but I really don't think it matters which one ultimately gets used.

From a purely work point of view, just having a decent 3d accelerated desktop would work regardless of what is running it.

- Jeff.

Well that was pretty patronising.

I'm using Compiz but there's an option to set the time animation will take to complete. It should be somewhere in Beryl too but I guess Beryl's configuration utility let's you set up so many things that you might miss things that are actually useful.

Funny, I have the ability to do that w/ beryl-settings-manager too!

(with remarkable ease)

http://img465.imageshack.us/my.php?image=oopswn4.png

Edited 2007-02-05 17:39

I wouldn't call this utility remarkably easy. There are many usability problems I can spot on a screenshot you have provided and although I think Compiz is not perfect it's way cleaner and follows Gnome philosophy of providing sane defaults and resonable amount of settings (ones actually needed).

http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/3271/compizsettingsfz5.png

Have you ever actually looked at a nicely configured Linux desktop? I doubt.

While I don't neccesarily agree with the "ugly", I definitely don't agree with whoever it is claiming Beryl makes OSX and/or Vista look "antiquated."

Exactly what part of it does that?

People do understand that both OSX and Vista are capable of all the same effects Beryl has, right? Both of them chose to limit the effects because end-user testing showed them to not really help much.

"People do understand that both OSX and Vista are capable of all the same effects Beryl has, right? Both of them chose to limit the effects because end-user testing showed them to not really help much."

Microsoft is spending a cool half a billion on the wow of Areo and its not even available to low and some mid range card users.

Beryl is fairly unique in the fact that there is plug-ins...and provides reasonable default...that will continually be tweaked over time.

Show me Vista running a Cube...one of Beryls most useful features. It doesn't have it.

The reality is as has been said on here, some effects are useful, some are just for *bling*...the difference is every one of the is *optional* and can be tweaked.

Can Vista do this?

Does a user want to do this. Absolutely *I* do I turned off the unnecessary effects, chose one for actions I liked...and speeded up some of the animations.

Can you do that in Vista?

What is most surprising is beryl is 6 months old, and is constantly improving and evolving. Its hard to imagine what it will look like in 2 to 5 years when Windows 7 will come out.

You're completely missing the point -- that we are calling out the statement "makes OS X and Vista look old and antiquated", which is complete garbage.

I never meant to take anything about from Beryl or how impressive it may be.

"You're completely missing the point -- that we are calling out the statement "makes OS X and Vista look old and antiquated", which is complete garbage. "

Is it garbage. Its not...It should have been justified as should your rebuttal.

What accelerated desktop has the most features; the most visually impressive features; the most configurable features; most rapid growth in development...and its only out *6 months*. The Answer astonishingly is Linux.

Nothing can make Vista or Tiger look out of date. These are flagship desktop operating systems, the latest and greatest from the big guys. If someone came up with a desktop that made these look antiquated, it would be unusable for most people.

What we can say is that Beryl can do almost anything Vista or Tiger can do, plus some stuff that they don't do (not to say that they can't), on similar or lesser hardware, with good performance (not outstanding), and vastly more customizations. You can't definitively say that Beryl is "better" than the desktop effects on Vista or Tiger, but it is surely comparable, and arguably better in some respects.

I think this says a lot for the free software desktop. Creating beautiful, impressive, and useful UI features is traditionally not something with which free software is associated. And yet, we're hanging around with the best, presenting solid foundations that will enable continual improvements throughout the Vista lifecycle.

Vista and OSX are NOT old and antiquated, but neither is the free software desktop.

You're also completely missing the point that OS X was in the original statement. This is just a blatant flame towards Vista.

And people always seem to conveniently forget the fact that while, yes, OS X and Vista require more hardware power to do their effects, OS X and Vista have much higher quality and robustness to what they do compared to Compiz/Beryl with an intended lack of customization so that it's easier for the average user to adapt.

OS X and Vista have much higher quality and robustness to what they do compared to Compiz/Beryl with an intended lack of customization so that it's easier for the average user to adapt.

In other words: "we know what's good for you, you'll have to trust us."

I don't know about you, but I like having a choice. I like to be in control of my computing experience...and as far as I can tell this is not a marginal point of view.

gotta disagree with you there. Most I have shown Beryl too (both OSX and Windows) and they think its the coolest thing they have ever seen.

Well using this interface for 15 minutes give me the nausea with all this 'blob' effect everywhere.
I was happy to retrieve a 'static' desktop after that.

I still find funny to see effects everywhere in new linux desktop after hearing for years that mac OS X effects just suck because they was useless and using cpu for nothing.

I fully agree. Many of those effects ARE usefull. People saying something different have obviously never used it - perhaps only seen it. Yes, some effects are just eye candy, and I've turned most of them off, too. But who knows what other useful effects Beryl will offer us in a few months or years.

100% agree.

I have used Beryl for some time, and although the flashy 3D effects are nice, after a very short time, I only used a few of the features. (Only practical/useful ones.)

And yes the other OSes can do these things and even better. The ripple effect in dashboard is much smoother than beryl and the cube effect when using virtual machines with Parallels is cool, but also appropriate.

I applaud the developers, but any effect if not used wisely isn't really useful and is just gloss.
(Then again, we see the sheep are easily lead by this stuff.)

I'm a big fan of Linux, but I hardly see people jumping to it because they can have cool water drops on their desktop.

Edited 2007-02-05 17:25

D'oh! You beat me to it.

I guess people easily forget that Microsoft was demoing longhorn with these types of effects back in 2003 and possibly earlier.

I'm not as familiar with OSX demoing the stuff though, so I can't comment on that.

Look, I agree that some of the effects on Beryl are very annoying, but since they're all easy to turn off it's a pretty minor criticism. I have to use OSX at my university and, in my opinion, a lot of the effects are extremely annoying. The genie effect and the floppy drop-down menu thing were pretty impressive when I first saw them, but now I find them irritating and wish I could turn them off (maybe there's a way to do this, I only looked for a while before giving up).

I think the fact that Beryl has more than its fair share of useless effects is a good thing. It means that even in this early stage of the game, there are lots of people out there experimenting with this new technology and seeing what they can use it for. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a lot of extremely useful and innovative effects coming out of the Beryl project. The high level of community interest coupled with the Free Software nature of the project ought to foster a great deal of creativity. Hopefully the good ideas from Beryl will also be picked up by MS and Apple, resulting in benefits for everyone.

Both OS X and Vista can easily do all these effects. The reason they don't is because Microsoft and Apple have some restraint.

Vista may be able to do them, but I'm willing to bet it will take heavier hardware than it does on the linux side.

I installed Vista on a test machine and if Aero Glass was on the machine was pretty sluggish in the UI department. Same machine with Ubuntu and Beryl and it was very snappy with a ton of effects going.

Restraint? MS? Ms's over-use of info-balloons on the system tray is proof perfect the company knowns no restraint.

That may depend on what video card you possess. NVidia drivers are surrounded by legal issues that (according to most folks) restrict them from being distributed with the distro. Intel cards should be ready to go though, and I believe older ATi cards can run AIGLX with the open-source drivers.

I believe Beryl can really do this, but it needs some tweaking for it to be a good work environment.

Nonetheless I still don't use it. It had a few things that were not compatible with the way I use my computer. Just hope it will be better (as in "having what I want it to have") in the next version.

Great piece of software, it just need some sane defaults.

ack, that sounds even worse

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I really couldn't care less about "3D desktops". Unless they work like ones in Minority Report. That was kinda cool.

It'll be awhile till a decent "3D metaphor" comes out that works.

ack, that sounds even worse

Haha, yes it might actually not work at all. Its just amazing to me that the gaming industry is advancing 3D so rapidly both in look and feel and that the desktop is lagging behind so much.

Oh well, I prefer layered and grouped windows in a simple fluxbox setup over beryl any day ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

This has been tried, allbeit with a different emphasis than you'd probably like. But you come down to the same problems you have in real life:
1. Things only exist in one place at a time.
2. Each dimension you add makes things quadratically more difficult to find (you add that much more space).
3. There's no 3d computing hardware (I'm talking about 3d mice, 3d monitors, not GPU's).

The first one is a problem that's been worked on a lot. Search, relational databases, and other things attempt to solve this in sane ways which make sense in computing. Adding a third dimension just makes this problem more troublesome per number 2!

Also, why make the environment 3d when they user is using 2d interfacing. And if you develop 3d peripherals, would you actually be helping? Is it easier to walk to a file cabinet in a different room rather than open a file browser and move through a few directories? It certainly maps more closely to how we do things on a regular basis, but I remind you that losing things is not a problem specific to computing!

It also proposes basic user inferfacing problems. If you have interactions based on coordinates it's very hard to notice that one window is a mere unit more deeply set back than another. Not to mention, rendering becomes a nightmare: Text will look great at a z depth of 0, but move it to 1 and it turns ugly, either way you go. Bitmap graphics are anathema to the whole system, and regular use would mean regularly noticing how obnoxious they are.

Some of the things you mention might be nice if there were 3d holographic displays.

Beryl DOES use plugins. You can enable/disable them as you like (of course some depend on each other).

Tom

I very much agree with what you said. These "features" waste resources on doing something that was already accomplished better by exsisting, and extremely simple and lightweight technologies.

As long as they can be turned off completely, I doubt I will ever use them.

As long as they can be turned off completely, I doubt I will ever use them.

All Berly effect can easily be turned on and off with a click of the mouse. Also, if you're not interested in these effects, you don't have to install/use Beryl at all...

Edited 2007-02-05 22:10

man im only using an 2200+ and its not using anymore of my CPU then MetaCity normally between 0-3%

weird, it might be some setting or plugin... well, i removed it. maybe the final version (it was a SVN checkout) will work better...

Let me add that I'm using beryl on a NOT accelerated ATI driver (the default radeon one), on a Pentium M 1.7GHz (single core), and rarely goes over 2-5% during animations (normally it stays at 0). Since my cpu is mostly idle anyway it's a fair bargain

Sure, during yum updates and compiles animations can get slow, but X would, too, without beryl.

Then there was something seriously wrong, as i haven't seen a single smooth animation during the whole time of beryl testing...

I do agree with you there. although it is kinda the thing with Linux users many of us want ever option possible and thats not true with most Windows/OSX users they just want it to do what they want and thats all. Most of them are not even aware of half the Power of the software they use cause the never saw the need to use it.

Edited 2007-02-05 18:57

"Only Mac and Windows fans...will argue that it's better *not* to have the option of customizing your eye-candy."

Who have you seen that has said that?

Who have you seen that has said that?

Are we reading the same thread?

I have some 3D programs working well, others not so well. The issue is not with Beryl, but rather with Xgl (which, everyone should remember, is just a temporary hack). As far as I know, there are no such problems when using AIGLX, which is the suggested method for using Beryl (of course, if you're an ATI user, you're currently stuck with Xgl...)

They do, with options on how you'd like to compensate for the multiple screens as well.

For gnome users this may be OK now, but for KDE users or users of other window managers this can be an issue and reveals some "glitches"

For the record, I use Beryl with KDE and the only glitch was the desktop selector applet, which has been fixed. What other glitches did you have in mind?

I do hope that KDE 4 will be Beryl-friendly, though since KDE 3.5 works well with it I'm not too worried.

KDE4 will have its own composite effects built-in to the kwin window manager. You can see this on the KDE blogs.

Yeah I think you will be able to replace the WM. Just like you can do on KDE, GNOME, XFCE and with any other Desktop Environment, the question really is, will you have a reason to do so? I know Beryl is great and I really love it, I can't live without it, but there are chances that Kwin will incorporate some features that we already use on Beryl.

Edited 2007-02-06 08:06