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A Look at the Compiz and Beryl Merger
invisibastard writes to mention that Linux Tech Daily has an editorial on the merger between Compiz and Beryl. "This state of affairs was a shame. Something that was finally getting the general public excited about Linux, the 3D desktop, was wasting time with duplication of effort and fighting. There were concerns about the long term viability of Beryl. The perception in the community overall was, Compiz = old and stale, Beryl = fresh and exciting. This despite the feeling in the Compiz community that the "real work" was being done by David Reveman and Compiz, and there were exciting things with Compiz core (like input redirection, etc...) on the horizon."
Site's back up.
http://lists.beryl-project.org/pipermail/beryl-dev /2007-March/000371.html
(ok, so that might go down in flames too)
corel cache is up here.
http://www.networkmirror.com/9VoYxUYQ4uLdx_2F/www. linuxtechdaily.com/2007/04/editorial-compiz-and-be ryl-merger/index.html
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I got through after a number of retries...
Editorial: Compiz and Beryl Merger
It isn't official yet, but Compiz and Beryl are merging. For the last few weeks I have been following the mailing list discussions on this topic. A lot of the work has been started. It is sort of unofficially announced, so I feel now is as good a time as any to comment. First some back story:
The war between Compiz and Beryl has been entertaining if counterproductive. Originally I planned to interview Quinn (Beryl's unofficial leader) about the Beryl project. That turned into an interview with the team that never really got anywhere. I dropped the ball. My feelings at the time were typical of those in the community. Beryl seemed to be this fantastic project that saved Compiz from being boring and a slave to Novell. They launched a beautiful website. It was exciting to see the frequency of their releases. At the time, I decided to check out Compiz to see what it was up to. It was surprising. Their forums were very helpful and positive. The more I read, the more I realized that I had made a mistake. There was more to the story than I was aware.
The communities were getting along a lot worse than I had realized. People in the Beryl camp dismissed David Reveman (creator of Compiz and XGL among other things) as a bad coder. Compiz dismissed Beryl as hacky code. Personal attacks flew around. Through decisions made with (hopefully) good intentions, like the insistence that Beryl code be GPL (thus unable to move upstream to the MIT licensed Compiz core) or the desire on some Beryl developers part to rip apart the Compiz core and " improve" it, it looked as if the teams were hopelessly split.
Meanwhile, Beryl continued to grow. Resentment grew in the Compiz community. One estimate was that Beryl used 95% Compiz code while taking all the credit. YouTube filled up with tons of spinning transparent cubes and burning windows. Any Digg story mentioning Beryl received a lot of Diggs. Flamewars in comment sections broke out regularly. Things reached a low point when a frustrated Compiz community member hacked the Beryl site.
This state of affairs was a shame. Something that was finally getting the general public excited about Linux, the 3D desktop, was wasting time with duplication of effort and fighting. There were concerns about the long term viability of Beryl. The perception in the community overall was, Compiz = old and stale, Beryl = fresh and exciting. This despite the feeling in the Compiz community that the "real work" was being done by David Reveman and Compiz, and there were exciting things with Compiz core (like input redirection, etc...) on the horizon.
It was a pleasant surprise to see talks of a merge start to show up on the mailing lists. This article by Kristian Hogsberg seemed to kick it off. The talks so far have been bumpy. There are fights about whether to rename the communities. There are heated discussions about what the merger means and where things should go from here. Old wounds have been reopened. There are complaints about the egos of the developers in the forums. At one point, reading a twenty-four page forum discussion, I wondered if the merge was a good idea after all. Little by little things seem to be working out, though. Quinn mentioned in one forum post that the fork was a mistake and regrettable. It takes a big person to make an admission like that.
I have to hand it to both communities. This is a brave and bold step. Not many of us can check our egos, put hurt feelings aside and move forward. The road ahead won't be easy, but the benefit to the Linux community will be immense. Energy won't be wasted on fights and duplication of effort. Confusion over what to use will be eliminated. Hopefully more effort can be spent by the distributions on getting the combined product packaged properly (How many times can I install a distro and the 3d desktop only to have no window borders in KDE?). The discussions I read are passionate. It looks like the project will be a meritocracy,
thegodmovie.com - watch it
If the merger fails we still have Englightenment
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Springy windows are a neat effect, and tunable so they aren't distracting. You can tune the friction and spring strength so they barely wiggle at all. But they are also incompatible with the window-snap module, which I prefer. A separate but similar effect is the focus-shiver effect, which I find very useful, as it makes the window that receives focus shiver a little, calling attention to it. The really useful window-movement plug-in is transparency, to make windows semi-transparent while dragging.
For a really fun time, try turning on springy windows, turning the spring strength all the way down and the friction all the way up. Then try to drag the window. You can stretch it practically all the way around your desktop cube.
All in all, this reminds me of way back in the day when Enlightenment (the window manager, kdawson, not the metaphysical oneness-with-all thing) first came out. Everyone started making these obscenely complex themes showing off how cool E was. Then it seems like everyone uttered a collective "Meh," and went back to FVWM. I did, anyway.
Beryl/Compiz does have other modules that enhance functionality such as tiling/cascading, and some that are mostly for show but have some use, like trailfocus. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that all the effects are scriptable, so that different effects or placement schemes can be applied to different classes of window
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I like my bling, I run Beryl, and I've got windows that go up in blue flames when I close them. (Nifty.) There are some really great usability improvements, though, that are only marginally related to special effects:
I also do image processing research, so that last one is great when I need to see fine detail. None of these by themselves are any great reason to have an OpenGL desktop (except Zoom if you've got bad eyesight), but they make a very compelling case in the aggregate.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Did you know that the default gnome keys are cntl-alt-arrow to move to new workspaces and cntl-shift-alt-arrow to bring the focused window with you? I jump around so fast that any animation just annoys me.
Those are the lucky exceptions, not the rules. I know from bitter experience. Microsoft breaks some backwards compatibility with every minor revision.
And? You've heard of X11, which is where all this stuff is going when it's mature.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Which is pretty nice, the bling is there, however it uses nil of you OpenGL-compositing goodness, which beryl&compiz are all about. Rasterman specifically said no Xgl/AIGLX for E17.
Excuse me, Opera is closed-source and sells their browser (on other platforms) for a price. How exactly would you go about merging that with Firefox?
I'm not the original poster, but I'd assume he's talking about the fact that rotating a cube that has sides with a fixed orientation will occasionally rotate it to a point where one face is upside-down. For instance, if you are looking directly at a side of a cube, then rotated the cube to see the face on the top, it would be in a different orientation than if you were to see the face on the left or right before going to the one on the top.
I've also never used beryl, but I'd assume it rotates the screen to the proper orientation, or doesn't rotate the cube on more than one axis. It would be rather humorous to see the desktop rotate to find an upside-down screen. It would be great if it were set to do that on a certain day, as a joke. April 1st seems like a good day for that...
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
You *can* rotate the cube "over the top", but basically it will flip over as it rotates, so, no, you never wind up with an "upside down" desktop.
Now, to get back to the OP of this thread: Leopard may - or may not - incorporate these kinds of "blingtop" technologies when it comes out this summer. Beryl (and Compiz) are available now.
#!/usr/bin/english
Uh, no, you have a couple of things mixed up. Xgl/AIGLX is the part that goes into X11 and provides the hardware accelerated 3D functions. Compiz/Beryl is a compositing window manager that actually does the effects. Every window manager has access to the 3D stuff, but they each individually have to implement their own effects. Early in the game it was attempted to separate the compositing manager from the window manager, but there were problems doing this (mostly performance, I think). So now everybody agrees that you have to integrate the two. I think the GP is right. As soon as Metacity, KWin, and whatever the XFCE WM is implement their own compositing effects, Compiz/Beryl will be an obsolete experiment. Personally, I'm holding out for Metacity. I've played around with Compiz/Beryl, and I like it, but I think it can be trimmed down quite a bit, and some major usability studies have to be done to make things like the wobbly windows less annoying.
I would love to take advantage of the eye candy a 3D accelerated desktop provides, but until I can do it with a multi-head setup it won't get used by me. The COMPOSITE extension doesn't play well with the XINERAMA extension. It's a showstopper for me.
Did you read the article? There was actual sabotage involved here, directed against Beryl's (I think) website.
Metacity has some rudimentary compositing support, but it's turned off by default, and I believe the suggested recommendation is you use Compiz instead if you want 3D. I'm not sure what the situation is vis-a-vis KWin -- did it ever have compositing? Presumably they will put it in for 4.0 though.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Generally Open Source projects can cooperate and share code.
However, Compiz is MIT licensed whereas when Beryl forked they slapped on a GPL.
So Beryl can use Compiz code, but not the other way around. This is a rather anticompetitive tactic on the part of the Beryl devs. It serves no purpose other than to piss of Compiz devs.
KWin has a kwin_composite branch where compositing support is being added (for KDE4.0, or beyond).
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel