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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."
... I think the author needed to include a little more information.
For example, exactly how does Beryl interfere with OpenOffice Write's word count feature? I'm trying to make a connection and I'm flummoxed.
Also, given that the author spent most of his time reviewing Beryl on Edgy, how exactly does Feisty's network manager reflect on the stability of Beryl? I think he was including the network manager as an example of how buggy Feisty is (though I haven't really noticed any problems myself, perhaps Kubuntu's network manager is a different beast) but there were a few connections that he made internally that didn't necessarily make the transition to the article itself.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Wow -- different experiences for different people, I guess.
I'm running a Dell Optiplex GX520, all standard corporate hardware, with 2GB of Ram and an Acer AL1912 monitor off the integrated video subsystem -- and running Beryl. Everything "just worked." No configuration needed to install from the 7.0.4 CD & update from the network.
Actually, I have one problem: a page refresh problem with FireFox. When I scroll "up" a page that has been scrolled "down" I get repeated horizontal lines as artifacts. Touching the top window bar clears the page. Minor annoyance that I'm not worried about enough to investigate.
I couldn't be happier.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
In a recent Mark Shuttleworth interview posted on Slashdot, the interviewer criticized Fiesty for not having the eye candy turned on. He responded "The actual software itself - Compiz and Beryl - is not good enough."
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".
... and just to think that I installed Linux as a gag.
In my experience, Linux with Beryl is so vastly superior in terms of looks, productivity tools, and usability, to anything other operating systems offer, that having no programming or Linux experience, it took me 1 week to stop booting into my Windows installation.
still using feisty beta that i installed monday last week. beryl works great and i haven't needed to boot windows for ANYHTING since the install. didn't even bother to download the release iso - seems to be working fine with the beta+updates. using an nvidia gpu on a latitude d620.
installed the same disc on my desktop at home and it was a little funny. had to get the alt iso because it didn't like my ATI all in wonder x800. after some tweaking i got it working pretty well.
some things i've noticed - on my laptop i had to set the renderer to aiglx instead of auto - was getting black empty windows after a while. have not had that problem since changing that setting. at home i get some flickering when rotating the cube.
other than that i couldn't be happier. fawn/beryl are working great for me and i have everything i need to do my job.
"...if you don't like your job, you don't strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed..." -Homer
Sort of. Network-manager runs everything through wpa_supplicant, which simplified the backend greatly. The rt2500 driver doesn't (or at least didn't) work properly with wpa_supplicant, instead of implementing WE19 they sorta went off and did their own thing. That may have changed, I stopped tracking the development when I stopped using the card.
So you could blame network-manager for not having a backend for every random card, wpa_supplicant for approximately the same thing, or the rt2500 guys for not sticking to the right standard.
It's not really a bug in anything though, it's just unsupported.
When using Beryl I feel dizzy because my eyes try to focus on the blurry windows when I move them around. After 5 minutes of use I have a strong feeling to puke because of that, its very uncomfortable and I am not using it because of that.
Don't get me wrong, the fluff is nice but I can't use it. Same goes with OSX's and Vistas "enhancements"... nice but in the long run its just in the way.
i'm liking Metisse a lot. i only played with it a little, but it seemed to be actually useful eye candy. dont get me wrong, i like compiz/beryl, but it doesnt seem to be geared toward productivity.
Metisse, on the other hand, seems to be all about giving you quick access to the window you're looking for, and being able to store more windows on a single desktop.
Just as a counterpost to the very negative summary: I am currently running feisty with beryl enabled on a dual screen, running nvidia drivers. I made a complete switch from windows about a month ago, while feisty was still in beta, but I haven't looked back since. No way am i letting go of my scale plugin for beryl :) (That feature is worth the whole switch just by itself.)
Doolittle :
Bomb no.20 : To explode of course.
"#1. Review the distribution with hardware that WORKS WITH IT."
/. before.
It did. The hardware doesn't any more. Not to mention, you overlooked where the hardware CAN work but simply doesn't because, as is becoming oddly typical, release schedules is getting more and more important than good software.
"#2. If you want to review how it has problems with "Card XYZ123" then right your review about that card."
Removing one bias of card no longer supported and report on only approved hardware? This is Linux, not MS Vista.
"#3. If you're going to review hardware, review hardware."
*head explodes*
Hardware and software go together when you're talking about features or support within an OS. What are you are advocating is ridiculous: "The motherboard was about 1 foot square, height of 1.75 inches, rich green PCB with a centrally located CPU. It looks nice, but you're going to use it in a case. I didn't run any software on it, because this is a hardware only review."
All in all, I don't find the review stupid. The distribution is dropping support for hardware between releases and even betas. The review is clear that this is supportable hardware that does not work.
Ubuntu has a lot of things going for it, but since the upgrades to 6.10 and 7.04, it seems they are rushing things BADLY, but the community is just letting bugs sit over and over again. Old bugs don't get fixed handily, and the new releases are adding more bugs to the overall distro. From 6.02 to 6.10 or so, there were unresolve display and interface problems. Now, 6.10 to 7.04 is dropping straightforward support for previous supported cards.
Let's spin this another way for you--my present XP setup has less apparent, known bugs to me than my Ubuntu 6.10 box does. If you are only going to stay with support for major hardware, I might as well return to XP and Vista and get officially supported drivers than this aggravation. And yes, I can point out bugs not fixed from 6 to 6.10 that are documented and have just sat there, unfixed, despite clearly reported and demonstrable and repeatable. They're on the forums, documented, and have been mentioned on
I'm a Unix geek (Linux on the desktop, FreeBSD on the server) and actually, the Expose-like features in Beryl interest me greatly. I already use multiple-desktops, and the cube, while neat, is like most of the other effects--just eye candy. But Expose is useful, particularly for low-resolution displays, and is one of the reasons I've been considering getting a Macbook Pro. Having used the feature, it impresses me that much.
Some of the other OS X effects do have uses, though. Bouncing on the dock is a pretty good means of notification, particularly for people who notice motion more than color- or shape-changes. I don't know if there's anything like this in Beryl, since it may be highly dependent upon the desktop environment, rather than the window manager.
And I'm not sure how many people noticed--he's running it with XGL!
If you're going to make a review, do it using the supported software. If you go off and use unsupported (for a good reason!) software, then it's your own damn fault.
True, XP and Vista both lost their own share of hardware support. However there's two points I'd make about that:
1) Even if XP and Vista didn't/don't deserve their user-base, they had it as the natural successors to the existing Windows user-base (not to mention being pre-installed on just about every new PC manufactured). Ubuntu/AnyOtherOS doesn't have that luxury. Again that may not be Ubuntu's fault, but that's the way things are and there's nothing to be done about it but to accept that it's an uphill struggle and that for Ubuntu to make the gains it will have to meet or exceed Windows for each and every requirement any given user may need.
2) XP and Vista aren't contiguous upgrades in the way that Ubuntu 6.06 -> 6.10 -> 7.04 are. They're essentially different OSes that are simply marketed under the same name and share common APIs. Let's face it, the vast majority of people who "upgraded" Windows didn't really upgrade, they just bought a new PC with a new Windows which naturally fully supported the hardware it was pre-installed on. Microsoft gets by on it's own market dominance rather than maintaining hardware support, but again this is not something Ubuntu has and with Ubuntu versions being true upgrades there's no reason it shouldn't maintain hardware support (at least for current hardware).
Bear in mind this isn't me just shitting all over Ubuntu. My XP box was recently diagnosed with severe schizophrenia presenting as random BSODs and repeated filesystem corruption, so I'm trying hard to like Ubuntu. And I do like it overall. But right now I'm typing this from a Windows laptop while I'm in the middle of compiling a legacy rt73 driver on my Ubuntu box so I can hopefully get my wireless adapter up and running again. I can't help but feel I shouldn't need to be doing this.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.