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Beryl User Interface for Linux Reviewed
techie writes "OSWeekly.com has published a review of Beryl, a very cool looking UI for Linux. Matt Hartley writes, "This release, in my opinion, was the most over-hyped and bug-filled to date. You will have to really hit Technorati to see more of what I'm talking about, but Feisty is as buggy as the beta I tested a short time ago. After completely tossing into the wilds of the ubber-buggy "network-manager," anything running with Edgy supported RT2500 driver shows up, but it will not connect without a special script. Those of you who are on Feisty and need help with your RT2500 cards are welcome to e-mail me for the bash script."
if it's the rt2500 that isn't working then it's most likely isn't network-manager, but your driver. Please complain about the correct part(s) ;)
still reading?
the blurb actually is more about knetwork-manager than about beryl which is supposed to be the focus of the review.
~~~ Paf. Le chien.
This is sort-of off topic to the Beryl thing (but then the reviewer didn't manage to stay on topic either), but my experience of Feisty is that it is a lot more stable and supports more stuff out of the box than Edgy ever did for me - and that includes NetworkManager, which so far has been working with both my Wifi and wired network without a single hitch.
Of course, it all depends on exactly what hardware you have. Which means that making sweeping statements on any distributions' hardware compatibility is pretty senseless based on the experience of one machine.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
full ack.
and - actually - (without the article) i'm still looking for a correlation between the headline and the abstract.
one step further: beryl is buggy? please - take a look at the version-number. included in ubuntu is 0.2 (NULLDOTTWO): this is a mere testing release, not a final and stable. and: it's not enabled in ubuntu by default.
to sum it up: nothing to see here, please move along.
He complained about OpenGL performance, however he is running XGL which is known to be slower with 3d programs. Unless he had an ATI card, there was no reason, really, to not use AIGLX, which tends to run 3d stuff a lot faster.
This is Google's fault. People have come to expect Betaware to be essentially a finished application. It isn't. Final is finished. Beta is for testing. If it's at the point where it works and the devs think they've sorted all the showstoppers then it's a release candidate.
So yes, the author is right, casual users definitely should leave this alone until it's done. That's what "beta" means.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
*rant about beryl still being beta*
*rant about word-count in openoffice not working, no reasons given*
*rant about feisty being the most buggy and overhyped release so far, based on the fact that the new network manager fails to work with his specific network card*
seriously, does he get paid for this?
I haven't been able to access the article, but I'd have to agree with the summary. I've tried running Beryl on Feisty for a few days, and I've had a few issues. The effects worked quite well for me, but the deal breaker for me was the poor fullscreen support. It's a known issue. I had trouble with both non-OpenGL (mplayer) and OpenGL (mythfrontend) programs, and "undirected fullscreen rendering" didn't work for me. Beryl isn't activated in Feisty (or Edgy) be default for reason.
However, I do think that the work the beryl developers are doing is fantastic, even though it's not yet a stable release. I worry that the enthusiasm in developing great software like this is hampered by negative (non-constructive) feedback... particularly of a non-stable release.
These "reviews" are stupid.
#1. Review the distribution with hardware that WORKS WITH IT. You want to review the distribution, right? Not "does it work with Card XYZ123". I know, I know. Finding that hardware is too hard for you. You want to "review" it based upon whatever you have at hand right now. Whether it works or not.
#2. If you want to review how it has problems with "Card XYZ123" then right your review about that card. That means you try that card with different distributions. Again, I know. You don't want to spend more time or effort than is absolutely necessary to get your "review" out.
#3. If you're going to review hardware, review hardware. Which cards are supported? How well? Which are not? Why not? Of course we're not going to see many of these because it takes even more time and effort than the other two.
I don't know what's "unstable". I've set up Beryl on 3 computers in the past few months, on Ubuntu 6.10 and 7.04... and all the installations are "stable".
"Works for me" is not the most common definition of "stable" in software development. I can give you an opposite account. Beryl and Compiz are both still flaky and has numerous show stoppers even on the hardware where it works best. That is also why it is not enabled by default in any big Linux distributions.
First, Beryl isn't a GUI. It's a window manager. The way it manages windows has nothing to do with whether or not your programs are intuitive. Second, it's quite modular, and you don't have to use any of its features. Just uncheck them if you don't like them.
Oh bullshit. If you are a company who wants "commercial" level software you don't use an OSs latest release that literally just came out, and you don't use a graphical interface that is known to be buggy just so your users can have eye-candy. Which is why you won't catch major companies using Ubuntu 7.04+Beryl or Vista right now. There's nothing unfinished about Debian stable or RHEL.
The problem with comparing a lot of OSS with commercial software is that you get to see and play with the OSS before it's done. It's a feature, not a bug, to be able to have the code before the developers are satisfied with it. Instead of complaining about them "shipping" bad code, you could just not use beta software. The developers of Beryl will be the first to tell you that it's not stable. Would it make you feel better if they hid it from you until it's "done"?
The Desktop Effects and Beryl both use Compiz and from what I understand the two teams are working to bring the code together into a unified program. Beryl installed in about 20 seconds for me... works great. Looks great. No problems whatsoever. On another note... the only problem I have with Feisty is that my sound card won't work... which is not Feisty's fault. It is Creative's fault because they suck at supporting Linux.
Maybe my definition of "stable" is different, given that I'm coming from Windows.
Some of the features of beryl are useful, the cube effect for example and the method of moving windows to different desktops with very intuitive hotkeys. I generally use these features and turn everything else off. It allows me to keep my fingers on the keyboard as opposed to clicking through menus with the mouse. Oh and the jotter is useful as well for presentations.
Other than that I agree with the parent, there is a lot of stuff in beryl which is very cool but really not useful or practical, although that said I have managed to convert 3 windows people to linux on the strength of beryl.
GeekServ Unix Consulting Services (http://www.geekserv.com)
I've been running Feisty with Beryl for going on 2 months now and since the day I installed it Feisty has been the most stable OS I have ever used, and that includes a few questionable OSX installations. As for Beryl's usefulness it is great for converting windows zombies, and honestly it makes my desktop feel much more "organic". Using OSX, or to a lesser degree windows or Linux w/o Beryl makes me feel like I am staring at a picture of a desktop and its easy to get lost in it, whereas with Beryl I can sort of "feel" my desktop. Its hard to explain. And of course the expose function is really nice to have.
For example, when I hover my mouse over an entry in my panel's window list, a live preview of that window pops up, so I can instantly tell (for example) whether a long compile process has finished without actually having to switch away from whatever I'm doing. Similarly, when I alt-tab to switch windows, what appears isn't just the icon for each application, it also includes an actual scaled-down representation of each window, so I can tell which picture each graphics editor window is editing far more easily than just going by filenames. The ability to zoom in smoothly on a window is very handy when trying to debug graphics output, and conversely if I want the big picture I can zoom out and see all my desktops at once. (Forget the cube, I'm talking straightforward tiling - but it's just as dependent on Beryl.)
All this adds up to a desktop that's just slightly more pleasant to use than before. Plus whenever smug Mac weenies appear I can switch a few silly effects on and blow their minds with all the cool things "PeeCees" can do these days. Hey, it's a bonus.