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Beryl User Interface for Linux Reviewed

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the yo-ho-ho-and-a-beryl-of-rum dept.

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."

22 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Could we have that in English please by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Perhaps:

    Beryl (note spelling) is buggy. It isn't finished yet.
    Feisty Fawn is still a bit buggy. Its only just released.

    1. Re:Could we have that in English please by cosmocain · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Could we have that in English please by Haeleth · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Beryl, well, who cares? I mean, really? I don't think many linux geeks care about Beryl other than maybe to turn it on and say "wow, that's neat" and turn it back off.
      Don't conflate Beryl with the silly effects like wobbly windows and raindrops making your desktop splash and windows catching fire when you minimise them and so forth. Those are neat for a few minutes and then quickly turned off. But Beryl can bring things to the table that are of real value, and it's unwise to dismiss the whole think just because the parts that get exposure on YouTube are silly.

      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.
  2. After reading TFA... by brennanw · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... 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
    1. Re:After reading TFA... by JanneM · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
    2. Re:After reading TFA... by ScottSCY · · Score: 5, Funny
      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.

      Go to openoffice; do a word count. Shift cube left or shift cube right onto new workspace. Where is the wordcount now? Huh? Where? Not there!

  3. Network-manager blaim game by KeyserDK · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?
    1. Re:Network-manager blaim game by pathological+liar · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Network-manager blaim game by LighterShadeOfBlack · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A release of an OS distro that is supposedly the great hope of Linux for the consumer desktop, knowing full-well that it's default setup will break wireless networking for anyone using RALink chipsets is a great big fucking mistake on Canonical's part. It may not be a bug in the OS per se, but the second the "average user" that Ubuntu is supposedly trying to win over upgrades and finds that their wireless stops working is an immediate black mark on the desktop Linux concept. This is especially true since we're talking about networking here. If support for some random peripheral like a printer or a camera failed then that's one thing, but with Linux's absolute reliance on net access to solve problems a broken wireless setup could well have just removed the user's only hope of solving the problem. Leaving the user looking for that Windows CD they were led to believe they'd never need again.

      You can go on and on about how this isn't the OS's fault, but you'll be missing the point. The end user doesn't care whether it was the OS proper that's responsible or "merely" a driver that was provided with it. The bottom line is that what worked in 6.06 and 6.10 works no more and as long as things like this continue and worse, are defended with irrelevant arguments like yours, the further Linux looks from ever becoming a legitimate OS for the average computer user.

      --
      Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
    3. Re:Network-manager blaim game by LighterShadeOfBlack · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.
  4. 0 results found for "berly" by TodMinuit · · Score: 4, Informative

    Did you mean "beryl"? Seriously, you got it right in the title but not in the blurb.

    And you can find the project here. Has web 2.0 killed direct-linking? Let me write a blog post and submit to Slashdot to find out.

    --
    I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
    1. Re:0 results found for "berly" by FreeGamer · · Score: 5, Informative

      Not only that, but this is a review of a project that is being merged back into the original; Compiz. What's the point in running a story about something that is basically going to disappear? A compiz article would be much more appropriate since that is even installed on a default Ubuntu installation these days. Beryl is just the name for a now-dead fork.

      --
      Free Software games list and commentary
  5. What is being reviewed here? by jrumney · · Score: 5, Informative

    TFA is slashdotted already, but from the summary I can't tell if he's reviewing Beryl, the unstable fork of Compiz 3D window manager, which is itself unstable and not enabled by default in the latest Ubuntu and most other distros, or the recently released Ubuntu 7.04, AKA Feisty Fawn.

    1. Re:What is being reviewed here? by TheMeuge · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  6. keep it secret by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    Those of you who are on Feisty and need help with your RT2500 cards are welcome to e-mail me for the bash script.


    No no no! Please don't give us detailed information, publish this "special script" or link to it. Just keep it as a secret.

  7. Come again? by rjamestaylor · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  8. It's not turned on in Ubuntu for a reason. by Baavgai · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."

  9. Beta Software by onion2k · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I believe that one day Beryl will prove to be a fantastic option for the casual PC user. However, until it leaves Beta, this is best left to people who have a machine that they can take some risks with.


    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
  10. mirror of TFA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    *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?

  11. News Flash!!! by Spudtrooper · · Score: 5, Funny

    Beta software has bugs. In other news, Avril Lavigne can't sing, people hate paying taxes, the sky is blue, and your "girlfriend" from Nigeria who keeps asking for money is really a man.

  12. Mod parent up! by khasim · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  13. Will be better by Yetihehe · · Score: 4, Funny

    Ubuntu FF will be stable after second servicepack. (hides from a tossed penguin)

    --
    Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers