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."

Comments

After reading TFA...

[brennanw]

... 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.

Come again?

[rjamestaylor]

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.

It's not turned on in Ubuntu for a reason.

[Baavgai]

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."

Re:What is being reviewed here?

[TheMeuge]

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".

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. ... and just to think that I installed Linux as a gag.

Re:Network-manager blaim game

[pathological liar]

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.

Re:Network-manager blaim game

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

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.