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- shrewduser, on 10/12/2007, -14/+99wow beryl is really becoming a diamond of open-source development.... its superior to any competing commercial product in every way.... (I'm looking at you aero)
- roosterjm2k2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+49As an "avid" linux user, you would know that beryl is community developed, and that the plugins for the most part don't come from the core developers...who are, in fact, working on performance issues as well as exploring new ways to make use of the power they have.
More plugins = more eyecandy = more youtube videos = more linux converts = more potential developers.
Sounds like a plan to me. - Cossins, on 10/12/2007, -2/+35"Coolness" is far from the only benefit of fancy animations and effects.
Providing visual cues is detrimental to helping the user orient himself around multiple windows, and in the case of popular Linux desktops, desktops (yes, I am aware this functionality is also available on other platforms, but it is not in widespread use yet).
I agree that many popular effects (such as the burning windows, watertrail, etc.) are superfluous, but others (some accidentally) have proved very useful. The most immediately useful on is the Exposé (or "Scale" in Beryl) effect, that quickly provides an overview of all your windows, WHILE maintaining the feeling of where on the screen the window originates.
The Wobbly Windows effect, that was mostly implemented as an example of what could be done with GL compositing, has actually also proved useful. If configured properly (!!), it gives the windows a different feel, which helps organizing. Obviously, not everyone will like that particular effect, which is why it can be easily turned off.
Having a shadow under each window makes it much easier to visually distinguish stacked windows, and so on and so on.
The point is that time is not an argument against composite effects in a window manager, since these effects often ease that particular task: Managing windows. Thus, time, and more importantly, frustration, is saved in the end.
- Simon - roosterjm2k2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+30Actually, they don't wast much time, really...
I use the "burn" plug in for closing windows, "beam" min/maximizing. Both are set to very fast animation, so it may be as much as 1/4 second. They both provide visual cues as to whats going on. They don't slow me down in the least bit...the underlying OS is so slim on resources that my system is really just wasting away on power thats not being used, so why not use a little of it?
The wobbly windows are useful in that they give windows feedback to user actions, it gives the feeling that the system is somewhat tactile and fluid...after using them for a while, I feel awkward on a windows PC now with static windows. Same for the Cube desktop. I have about 10 friends that use linux (all of whom I've talked into it). One of the most underused features of just about any linux distro is the multiple desktops. Its just not a built-in logical feature to most people. However, giving the desktop spacial orientation fixes that. Now instead of remembering that program X is on desktop 3, you just kinda remember that its to your left, or your right, or on the other side of the cube. It just makes more sense to some people (including me)
Purists will always complain about the next big thing. You will get over it though.
But the best part? It's a choice! You dont have to run it, or if you're really looking for efficiency, you dont even need to start X, just chill in the console all day...talk about a slim OS...but why, tell me, do you feel the need to spout ***** from your mouth about it if you dont like it? Just dont use it...why go out of your way to be hateful? - roosterjm2k2, on 10/12/2007, -5/+32Maybe "nutjob" is a well-deserved name for you.
Beryl/Compiz is actually very-very-very lightweight, put that on top of a very lightweight OS, and you have no problems.
Sorry, your argument is just *****. I run linux on all of my laptops, my oldest laptop with some cheap intel mobile crap video card and 512MB of ram on a P3 runs beryl just fine with anything other than the (totally useless but cool for demos) water effects.
When you have an OS thats using such a small footprint, you have a wide range of things you can do on top of it without affecting performance. I'm still a windows fan, I see its place in the tech world...but people who use it are used to having 20% of the power available to them after the OS is done with it, so you get these kinds of comments. - annoia, on 10/12/2007, -2/+24Looking glass is useless. At least what I've tried. While Beryl, OSX, Vista etc. are as snappy as anything, what I experienced with Looking Glass (on my 3500+ w. 7800GT gfx card, no less) was extremely sluggish - even the mouse behaved badly. I couldn't find any way to tweak it, which is bad, since the key bindings are different from everything else. The camera keeps zooming slightly in and out, which very fast becomes nauseating. The colour theme is horrible. It doesn't always catch the windows created, so some windows are running outside the window manager.
All in all it's a nice tech demo, but I really couldn't see myself use it. - mercurysquad, on 10/12/2007, -13/+31*Yawn* While this is great and all, as an avid Linux user and Beryl fan, now I am getting annoyed every time a new visual effect pops up in Beryl. Time to actually work on some usability features instead of turning Beryl into WindowBlinds+DesktopX+ObjectDesktop and all that. 20 minimize maximize effects are a bit too much.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -16/+29Ooh, nice video. Does it have a star wipe and dissolve modes too?
What's with the name Beryl? It sounds like a lunchlady in some school cafeteria's name. - roosterjm2k2, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16Avatar,
You cant talk about the "average" user and then be talking about Photoshop and Outlook.
The average user needs Internet explorer, Outlook Express, and a couple of games. Most people just don't know linux exists, or if they do, they have the impression that its full of stuck-up geeks. Things like this make the OS "fun" and will actually help to being people over. - roosterjm2k2, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13What's to learn?
Im not being insulting, I just hear that argument alot. My mom, who really isnt computer savvy at all, uses it with no problem. Just recently she started to us it, actually, because she had to send her laptop for repairs (power plug broke out). She picked up my laptop, asked my what my password was and I told her, waiting for the "what the hell is this, come help me" ... it never came. I came down and she was playing some games (tuxracer and that 5 in a row or whatever it is) and browsing the net with no problem.
For some more advanced stuff...admin duties are handled through the admin menu...most are labeled fine. My only problem ever was getting my broadcom wireless to work, though now that takes about 30 seconds to do (my main laptop gets a new OS like every month, im constantly trying new versions of all of the distros, so im informed, though i always seem to come back to ubuntu)
Again, not being insulting or condescending, just curious as to what was your particular barrier? - drmangrum, on 10/12/2007, -9/+17It looks cool at first, but would get really really irritating after a while. If I want a window to minimize, just minimize it. Don't give me a headache watching an animation.
- mrblack, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9I agree cossins. I think, the art into implementing these technologies is not too much in their technical ability but how they are configured (like not in this video). We can have 3d everything and wonderfully Beryl and Xgl allows us to do this, however most people will keep the default settings, the ones which were homed by a usability expert. Lets see how the distributions take this on.
- bills534, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8When is somebody gonna come out with a slick 3D animated CLI interface? These fancy GUI interfaces take to much processing power to run.
- joesnow, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6last i checked, they're completely adjustable in more ways than i could ever imagine, to make them not so "big and in-your-face".
I know this cuz i feel the same way, when I ran Beryl 2 months ago I had minimal effects set up. I was just annoyed that at the time I couldn't VNC effectively or at all, and I couldn't right click "move to workspace" on apps like I normally could.
but that was 2006 ;-p - berwiki, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I'm also going to have to digg you down.
There isnt a single operating system on this planet that is difficult to navigate with a graphical user interface.
I would understand if we still had DOS and Linux Consoles to deal with, but those days are LONG past. To each his own, but don't say it is too 'difficult' or too 'time consuming' to spend 5 minutes reading the Introduction page that Ubuntu presents you with. That is called 'laziness' or 'apathy'. - calvmari, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9@insom & rooster
There's a neat little button next to the article called bury and there's a thumb's up and thumbs down icon if you don't like comments. They're handy for exercising your opinion! - shakin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5That's why these effects are optional. I think the default is fading when you open or close a window and a genie effect when you minimize or maximize. I think they should increase the default speed of the fade and change the genie to a fast zoom, but the defaults aren't too bad and it's extremely easy to configure if you don't like them.
The crazy effects like fire and whatnot are ok when you speed them up a lot, but for tech demos it's nice to be able to see what's going on so they slow them down. - jbus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5The effect you are referring to is called "Magic Lamp" in Beryl and it CAN be configured to look exactly like Mac OS's Genie effect if you want it to. In this video it has been configured different than Mac's Genie effect. With the magic lamp effect you can configure the smoothness of the curves, the maximum number of waves, the minimum and maximum wave amplitude, the starting & ending width of the effect and the duration of the effect. You can also configure the minimize and unminimize animation completely independently of each other. So it is easy to have one effect for minimizing and a totally different effect for unminimizing. This is just one of many available effects, each with their own settings.
- berwiki, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Sabayon is awesome, don't get me wrong, but it only runs beryl 0.1.3 now, and performing an "emerge update deep world" would be an absolute nightmare.
If you havent used Beryl, you might as well pop in the Sabayon Live DVD and enjoy. - sepelester, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Haha, now we have Water (OS X - Aqua), Air (Vista - Aero) and Ground (Ubuntus brown down to earth colors). But Ubuntu is supposed to be Human (the fifth element). That leaves Fire.
Should be a hot one! - neko, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Now that we've got our window managers using the Composite extension, I'd like to see the standard desktop apps start using it. Nautilus perhaps?
Completely off topic; has anyone else noticed abysmal performance in Nautilus when copying to/from a partition on a SATA drive in a removable rack? Standard cp is lightning fast, it's just Nautilus. I'm not sure where the best place to go to track down this problem is. Perhaps it's a Gnome-VFS thing, and it's mistakenly telling Nautilus that the drive is "removable" and needs to be sync'd with every write... even though the drive is in my fstab and not mounted with sync...
What's the best place to ask about this issue? - Justathought, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I am currently testing Vista at work. Sure Aero is pleasant. I sometimes feel I am in Linux (the old version of PCLinuxOS looks just like it). But, then when I try to right click on the title bar of an application to send it to another desktop I am reminded that it is no Linux.
- roosterjm2k2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Changing the default soundcard? Who the ***** does that? I have 1. Most computers have 1.
Also, she couldnt do it in windows either without being shown how first, same in linux. As for the others...
Screen Resolution...yeah, she probably couldn't figure out Admin...Screen Resolution in the menu, thats far too difficult.
Browsing the network...hmm, "System...network" ... tough again...it even automagically recognizes the windows computers...though the windows computers don't see me without work.
Repair the connection...hmm, right click the network monitor, disable/re enable...damn that was hard, its almost exactly as hard as windows.
Maybe the problem is you, because the things you pointed out as difficult are really easy...nice examples to prove my point though. - StealthTomato, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4So far, the only thing to irritate me about Beryl is the fact that it keeps dying on me a lot. And that's just because it's in version 0.2.0b
Seriously people, it's pretty, it's useful, and it's surprisingly resource-efficient. - tmahmood, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4At the beginning I also thought beryl is a waste of time and some useless eye candies, but after using it a day now I'm using it everyday and I can't think of my desktop without it. It is very useful, depends how you are using it. Yes Some effects are for pure eye candy but scale, cube like animations are very very useful. and don't forget the wow factor! Few of my friends got impressed enough to install Linux on their system. And at the end its run very decently in my System that has 512MB RAM & a NVIDIA Geforce2 with 64MB!!! where I would have to buy a set of new hardware to run Vista.
- hovland, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Some Beryl effects seem useful, but most of them are a perfect example of why you don't let nerds handle design.
- macewan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I love using Beryl. You can waste time without going online.
- Cossins, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5See my reply above.
- Odweaver, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7http://www.sabayonlinux.org/
Sabayon has beryl and xgl built in along with other fun things - cmost, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Does anyone know which SVN version these new effects will be present in? I'm currently running a 0.20 SVN build but do not have these new animations. They look great. :-)
- Darkyuubi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Wow...an advancement in the visual department for sure (especially since its open source =D), but I'm not going to even comment on the accessibility and usability of those transformation effects.
Boy those will get old (and annoying) real quick. - mercurysquad, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2As said above, your window decorator is not working.
In case you dont see the Beryl icon at all -
Applications > Accessories > Terminal
then type:
aquamarine &
That should fix it. - sepelester, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2You're wrong. This has been under development during the last 8 years. I remember an IRC conversation about it with Keith Packard in '98 when he said it was impossible, still later he developed KDrive, which was supposed to be a temporary replacement to the X11 driver model, allowing for 3D acceleration in the root X window through bringing on the transition from a monolithic architecture of X11 to the modular driver loading model we have as of X11R7 (now defunct and replaced by X.org). That was what was needed to spur the development of XGL (which itself is a temporary solution en route to XEGL) and AIGLX.
There have been (and still are) several projects with the same goal. The first that comes to mind is DirectFB-GL.
In fact, most groundbreaking technologies I've seen implemented in OS's today stem from open (yes, open source) projects which have either gone defunct or development slowed down due to lack of funding. That's why the OSS community has been given a bunch of patents to use as leverage against larger software developers who try to steal Intellectual Property (see SCO vs Novell case) and file patents despite prior art.
Sorry for not providing links. Do a Wikipedia search. - sepelester, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Your Window Manager isn't working. You probably have no driver loaded. Try the beryl-manager (the red icon in you notification area) and switch window managers and renderers.
* Beryl as WM
* inactivate gl-yield
* try aiglx as your rendering path (or nvidia if you have the driver loaded)
(And don't complain to me about it not working, see my previous post(s) )
Good luck! - sepelester, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3They are just technology demos. Some of them are really useful, and some are just for show. It's _beta_ software for heavens sake! ;)
It's supposed to be fully implemented in April though, when Ubuntu 7.04 - Feisty Fawn is released. Although the result most surely depend on Ubuntu funding. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -6/+8Yeah, um, if I actually had to see these animations constantly on my screen, I think I'd probably hurl from motion sickness. These animations are too big and in-your-face. While I'm not against 3D effects and such, they should be extremely minimal and tasteful.
- Blue_Eon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2What I have found with most of these little 3-D effects on windows or apps is that they aren't really practical. It looks cool, but after a while, it could get tedious and annoying.
- synapseattack, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hello glev2005,
It sounds to me like your window decorator is not working correctly. I have a title bar on all my windows which works just fine and has a minimize, maximize and X button on it. I would recommend checking out kubuntu's we forms as I do not know what kubuntu installs with. But I would imagine that its basically the same as my Sabayon install. On thing you can try is right clicking on the Beryl icon on the system tray and (I'm at work here so I might have the names wrong since it is not in front of me) choose window decorator and then choose either KDE or Gnome or Beryl or Emerald.
I hope this helps. If not check out Kubuntu's web forms :-)
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/
damn sepelester beat me by 17 minutes. - roosterjm2k2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3dude, seriously...REPLY to the comment thread you start...keep the conversation connected..
- glaureglin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3All of the effects in Beryl are fine, but the default animation durations are set *way* too long! I understand wanting to show off the animations, but if a minimise/maximise takes 0.7 seconds by default, that's a ***long*** time! They need to be less than a third of that. In fact, time the Mac OS X genie/scale/suck effect and I bet it comes in at 0.2 or 0.25 seconds. It's long enough to see the animation and get the visual cue, but short enough that I can't be doing something else in that time. All of the animations are like that. They look gorgeous, but the devs are engaging in a bit of advertising by setting the default durations so high...
Just my 2cp... - RetroEvolute, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'm not gonna lie... I think that those animations are hideous. I mean... Cool; good for them, they've got 3D windows, but... That doesn't make it look good unless used correctly, and, well... Honestly, I think that they've over done the animations.
- SEMW, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Ever wondered why the the MS Office team -- specifically those in charge of creating the slide transitions in Powerpoint -- are kept in a seperate building from the Windows UI dept? Wonder no more!
- mercurysquad, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Well you can make your home explode if you use a few hand grenades, but does that mean you *have* to do that? Simple as that: turn it off if you don't like it. Your argument is sort of like, If I dont like it, no one should!
- roosterjm2k2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1What he was saying, and did say, is that your window Decorator isnt running/configured properly.
It could be a driver conflict. Try running emerald from the command line (emerald is the beryl window decorator by default) and see what errors you get. Its possible that you didnt install emerald in the begginning as well, so make sure thats there. - sublime, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1To all of you wondering where the name came from, I think this may be a clue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berylium - technique, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Sounds like TV
- synapseattack, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1he was referring to the window decorator I believe.
- thepxc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@berwiki
I'm a Sabayon user, and upgrading Beryl (or anything else with portage) is really, really easy.
Step 1.) Sync your Sabayon overlay:
layman -s sabayon
(should take less than a minute)
Step 2.) Update
emerge -u beryl - resplence, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1So am I the only one who considers this kind of "eye candy" utterly useless and pathetic?
- duxxyuk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Just got Beryl working on my version of Debian ... the dogs danglies.
-
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