Just when you thought fancy effects on Linux desktops started to get remotely understandable, focussing on Aiglx/Xgl with Compiz, a fork of Compiz is announced: Beryl. This is the logical continuation of the popular compiz-quinnstorm branch, used by many Ubuntu users. "During this summer, and during the last few weeks, some major additions were done in compiz-quinnstorm, bringing a whole new decorator, cgwd, which was designed to be fully themable, and a new settings backend, csm, which intended to drop most of the gnome deps - there were other reasons for this, but this is not our current subject. Consequently, we reached a situation where it's quite impossible to come back." The main reason is general unwillingness to work with and unresponsiveness to the developers of the -quinnstorm branch from the official Compiz guys.
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Member since:2005-07-13
Member since:2005-07-06
Xgl, AIGLX, and Xegl are three different methods of supplying the underlying compositing support to the desktop environment.
Compiz, Xcompmgr, and Beryl are composite managers, kindof like window managers (though they usually have a seperate program such as gnome-decorator or cgwd to manage window borders/themes). Metacity will have native compositing support in the near future from what I hear.
Member since:2006-06-22
Yes that is correct, Compiz/Beryl are just the window managers, XGL is the underlying software that provides all the openGL infrastructure. Both Compiz and Beryl share XGL in common and can also make use of AIGLX if you tell the wm's to do so.
As for the merits of quinns packages, yea they are prone to crashing and have many glitches. SO basically, i use metacity. Talk of a stable branch is music to my ears if they can achieve this. But there have been bugs in the works that they havnt been abl to track down since the compiz release, quinns been hoping on upstream to solve them ... so they definitely have allot of work for themselves i think, but i am quietly optimistic. And i think greater community openness is a good thing and will bolster the projects activity.
Edited 2006-09-19 20:12
Member since:2005-07-06
The quinnstorm branch started as a patch to the official compiz to include some experimental plugins made by the comunity but in the later times it has become a window manager for itself.
As compiz developers didn't realize that themeable windows was a good point in modern desktops, the quinnstorm branch developed GCWD (Gnome Configurable Window Decorator). Later, just because the complains about using gconf to configure compiz (as it declares to be desktop-agnostic) it changed it's configuration system to CSM (Compiz Settings Manager) so since then all the tools made for the official compiz were incompatible with the quinnstorm compiz. I personally think that the fork was actually the first version using csm, now comes the official confirmation.
Anyway, for me it doesn't matter because in the end, Metacity and KWin will implement their own effects and we are going to use the official window manager of the Desktom Manager of choice.
Member since:2005-07-08
As compiz developers didn't realize that themeable windows was a good point in modern desktops
That does not seem like a fair evaluation to me. To quote from the TODO file of the gnome-window-decorator:
* Plugin interface
* Plugin with SVG-based theme support
* Plugin that supports old metacity themes
cgwd made a very rushed and somewhat buggy impression on me. While it is good to have, I would not consider it a complete superset of gnome-window-decorator just yet. In any case, this is hardly a problem since window decorators are replacable already.
Member since:2006-02-21
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Member since:
2006-01-10
Normally I'm all for forks and choices, but in this case I think having a single "desktop glitzer" would really have helped adoption. Especially when it seems like there weren't any solid reasons for a fork (besides "not invented here" syndrome). I could see if XGL was abandoned or something, but it is still in the development phase, and seems counter productive to fork now. Almost like a case of the forkers saying "Well if they don't want our help, we'll take our toys and go home!".