Beryl 0.2.0 download

The defaults themselves might need additional tweaking notwithstanding the fact that current Beryl defaults are quite sensible is a minor point. Linux is a hobbyist OS, and thus Beryl reflects that audience entirely. What Vista and OSX accomplish is moderately customizable eye-candy without any of the useless effects that Beryl was created to employ. If Beryl wants to compete with that ease of use, then it needs to adapt a more flexible plugin-based structure and allow the users to independently specify what effects they would like to even have installed, not just enabled.

Which is why the current defaults are sensible, and not over-the-top as many here have tried to argue. What you might find useless, someone else may find useful or pleasant.

Someone else might prefer other effects. Beryl was created to be open, which has sparked a development frenzy for new plugins. Will they all be useful? Certainly not, but some really cool ones will prop up, some might even become essentials. I completely disagree — who cares which ones are installed or not? Most people would rather install the whole shebang than start shopping for which ones they want. My desktop is beautiful, functional and efficient, and it turns heads and drops jaws whenever I show it off.

Just wondering what it is that makes you say that? When the most conservative numbers put us on par with OSX. However, people also want to be able to customize things to their own styles without too much effort.

Most people have better things to do than to spend hours at a time discovering all options that are available.

Look at it another way. Imagine if everything were configurable and no sane defaults existed for anything. Best to have both tools one for those who want minimal changes and those who want to tweak it up. 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. Even though many say that 3D effects Bling as some are calling it is not useful; I have to disagree.

Scaling, thumbnail view, and transparent cube are all very useful. Having a bunch of apps running on a bunch of workspaces can sometimes be hard to manage. Being able to quickly identify and select what you need is great. These guys are truly making Linux a pleasure to use. I fully agree. Many of those effects ARE usefull. People saying something different have obviously never used it — perhaps only seen it.

But who knows what other useful effects Beryl will offer us in a few months or years. Both OS X and Vista can easily do all these effects. All the over the top effects add nothing to usability. Animation in OS X is quick, simple and straight to the point, letting you know where things are going to. Beryl is like being on a roller-coaster ride of special effects that makes you want to throw up afterwards.

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. 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 guess people easily forget that Microsoft was demoing longhorn with these types of effects back in and possibly earlier. I have to use OSX at my university and, in my opinion, a lot of the effects are extremely annoying.

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. 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.

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. 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. The eye candy has to make sense, it has to make my work easier.

I believe Beryl can really do this, but it needs some tweaking for it to be a good work environment. It had a few things that were not compatible with the way I use my computer.

Damn, as much as I appreciate the efforts, I am still not really comfortable with the 3D-metaphors that beryl uses. A spinning cube inside a screen? Windows with thickness? To me, they are a bit awkward extensions wrapped onto the classic 2D interface. Unless they work like ones in Minority Report. That was kinda cool. 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.

But you come down to the same problems you have in real life:. Each dimension you add makes things quadratically more difficult to find you add that much more space.

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. 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. Both OSX and Vista show much more polish.

Beryl is full of potential though, and a great option for Linux users. I would definitely prefer a small core and set of plugins. Beryl DOES use plugins. More goofy eye candy for people too stupid to figure out how to use a taskbar or task switcher….

I very much agree with what you said. All Berly effect can easily be turned on and off with a click of the mouse. Arguing it makes OS X and Vista old and atiquated because of number of features, visually impressive features and most configurable features…. They just want what I said: the right features in the right place.

Even Microsoft pretends to understand that on their new version of its feature-overbloaten office package. I do agree with you there. 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. Also, how easy is it for enthusiastic coders to experiment and add new plugins now one had thought of yet or replicate those available on other OSes?

To even think of admitting that Linux might be ahead as far as eye candy goes is anathema to them. Well, who cares. I tried Beryl some month ago. Is it possible to run 3D programs without having to hack Xgl scripts now?

Or you still have to stop it for that? 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. All I would get is a blank white screen right after the Beryl splash screen. All four sides of the desktop cube is just plain gray. Is there a bug reporting page somewhere?

Have devs seen that particular post but no one has just cared to reply or look into it? Because Apple and Microsoft control a single window manager they can apply a more integrated and polished look than beryl can. 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? 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. What version is that from? I mentioned it on the beryl forums when I first encountered it about a month ago, I guess. Maybe it is just my hardware, but I doubt that. Vista, BTW, does not sacrifices the scrolling performance to 3D. It is quite important to have scrolling fast, because it is one of most frequent and important UI operations.

I noticed the same problem, but not with all apps. All I see is mostly white windows with black text smudges scattered about. I find it a lot easier to identify an app by its icon, especially since icons are made to be unique and easily identifiable. Otherwise the thumbnail is too small to enable me to tell them apart at a quick glance.

Now, some features do help usability. Fortunately, the recently released Xorg 7. To install Beryl on Ubuntu 6. Those of you who aren't using Ubuntu may be able to find installation instructions for your own distribution at the Beryl wiki. The Beryl wiki provides installation instructions for a relatively broad selection of mainstream distributions, but there are some popular distributions that aren't included.

If you can't find installation instructions for your distribution on the wiki, you can ask for help in the Beryl forum. Keep in mind that Beryl is still experimental, and it won't work properly on all hardware. Additionally, some users may need to install proprietary graphics drivers in order to use Beryl.

Beryl uses the Emerald window decorator to draw window borders and title bars. Emerald is highly flexible and supports theming. Users can make, install, and configure Emerald themes with the Emerald Theme Manager. To launch the theme manager, click the Beryl icon in the notification area of your panel and select Emerald Theme Manager from the context menu. The Themes tab contains a list of all of the themes currently installed on your computer.

To switch to a specific theme, you can simply click its entry in the theme list. The Edit Themes tab provides complete access to all of the settings used to construct the currently active theme. Users can change the images used for the title bar buttons, change the size and color of the window drop shadows, alter the font and layout used by the title bar, and alter the settings used by the decorator theme engine.

The Repositories tab provides two buttons that will automatically download and install new themes from the Internet. Additional themes can be found in the Themes section of the Beryl forums, and on the official Beryl themes page at the Beryl web site.

To import a theme downloaded from the Internet, go to the Themes tab in the Emerald Theme Manager, click the Import button, select a file with the. The new theme will be added to the Emerald Theme Manager theme list. The latest version of Beryl, 0.