Saturday, December 09, 2006

Xgl and Beryl on Edgy Eft


I spent most of the day installing and configuring Xgl and Beryl on my computer. Beryl is a compositing window manager for the X Window System which takes advantage of OpenGL acceleration. It has some incredible features such as wobbly windows, "the cube" (each virtual desktop becomes a face on a cube), and a new task switcher. Beryl is extremely customizable, and after tweaking some of the settings I bet that these features could actually lead to an increase in productivity. All of the new 3D effects also run really well on my graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce 6600 256MB). Although it was tough to set up, I think Beryl (and Compiz) will have an incredible impact on the future of Linux. While Mac OS X and Windows Vista boast about their new user interface features, I think Beryl proves to be superior in almost every way.

2 comments:

Adam Dunn said...

In what way do you think it is superior to the other two formats? Aqua (Mac OSX) has had some time to stabilize, and figure out all their features and work out the kinks/bugs. Microsoft has money to throw at the problem, so I assume their implementation should at least work reasonably well. Beryl is new to the market and has little money (Novell develops Compiz while Red Hat does work on AIGLX, but other than that...). There are some showstopper bugs that one can run into easily (the blank window problem on NVIDIA drivers being one, but I think this is recognized as being NVIDIA's fault), and it will take a while to work out the kinks. From Beryl 0.1.1 to 0.1.3 there were some great speed increases, so it is going in the right direction. Perhaps one of the good things that Beryl has going for it is the open source community. Lots of volunteers who have nothing to lose (in other words, they will take on projects in their own time, for fun) can try out cool ideas that a big corporation wouldn't have time to try. The silliness that is Kiba-dock would be one example. I would have to say that Beryl is not currently the best out there - Aqua probably has that title. I'm sure your statement will come true in about 1-1.5 years though (depending on how Illuminous turns out).

If you are going to demonstrate the fact that a video works in this 3D environment why did you have it paused?

Nice props to Yoko Kanno. Boo-urns to the Internet Exploder 6. (Boo-urns is Simpsons reference)

Your Multiply RSS feed doesn't show the screenshots, while the Blogger feed does. Boo-urns to Multiply.

Byron Knoll said...

"In what way do you think it is superior to the other two formats?"

Beryl is extremely customizable, allowing you to combine features based on personal preference. Although I do not have very much experience using Aqua or Aero, from what I have seen the majority of screenshots/screencasts look very similar.

"I would have to say that Beryl is not currently the best out there - Aqua probably has that title."

Comparing user interfaces is very subjective. I propose a study in which we put a bunch of monkeys in a room with two computers. One of the computers is mine, while the other is running OSX. After each monkey has had turn using the computers, we conduct a survey to find which UI they preferred. My hypothesis is that the majority of monkeys will prefer Beryl to Aqua.

"If you are going to demonstrate the fact that a video works in this 3D environment why did you have it paused?"

Maybe the raven was just standing very still ;).