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."

Network-manager blaim game

[KeyserDK]

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) ;)

Re:After reading TFA...

[bedonnant]

the blurb actually is more about knetwork-manager than about beryl which is supposed to be the focus of the review.

Re:After reading TFA...

[JanneM]

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.

Re:Could we have that in English please

[cosmocain]

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.

XGL

[pjameson]

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.

Beta Software

[onion2k]

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.

mirror of TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

*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'd have to agree, but it isn't a stable release

[digitalderbs]

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 [beryl-project.org]. 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.

Mod parent up!

[khasim]

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.

Re:What is being reviewed here?

[GauteL]

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.

Re:Network-manager blaim game

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

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.

Re:Who authored Beryl?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Open Source Lacks That Commerical Polish

[i_should_be_working]

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"?

Re:Beryl is pointless

[HardcorePooka]

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.

Re:What is being reviewed here?

[TheMeuge]

Maybe my definition of "stable" is different, given that I'm coming from Windows.

Re:Could we have that in English please

[liliafan]

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.

Re:Could we have that in English please

[hax0r_this]

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.

Re:Network-manager blaim game

[pathological liar]

There's only so far you can go. Ralink chipsets can not be supported without either:

1. Sticking with an old and outdated version of network-manager
2. A significant rewrite of either Network-manager, wpa_supplicant or rt2500 (or completing rt2x00)

Option 1 isn't feasible. Network-manager switched to using wpa_supplicant for a reason. Maintaining the old version with the feature set of the current one, as well as backporting code changes would be extremely difficult. Option 2 is just as bad, since they can either propose patchsets that will likely get rejected or write their own driver.

Even then, that's a single chipset. What about all the people stuck on broadcom, or d-link, or anything else that currently requires ndiswrapper + a windows driver?

I understand that people are upset because their hardware doesn't work, but I mean, neither does my sound card (some X-FI something-or-other), and you don't hear me complaining about how it's a fundamental flaw in Ubuntu because people like to listen to shit.

Re:Could we have that in English please

[Haeleth]

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.

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

These "reviews" are stupid.

Perhaps they are inevitable.

Ubuntu's joe-linux has been happily clicking 'upgrade' every few mornings when the Upgrade Manage tells him that there are updates. With the release of Fiesty, there's a new line: "New distrubution release 7.04 is available. Upgrade?"

Joe-linux thinks, 'Wow this Ubuntu is great. Even major upgrades are simple.' Tears and screaming and monkeys ensue. "Stupid" reviews follow.

The update from 6.06 to 6.10 was a similar disaster for many people. The typical unhappy story was 6 hours lost with a hosed machine before installing 6.10 from CD to an empty drive. All the new Ubuntu users who started with 6.10 won't remember that, and will go ahead and click the 7.04 update button without doing any research about potential problems.

Canonical should probably emphasize testing your system with a 7.04 live CD first, and/or look at having an installer smart enough to probe the target system for likely success, then back out and present the user with a list of issues that will likely have to be solved if the upgrade proceeds. Or something along that line. Right now their emphasis on "easy" and "trust us" has trained their users to leap without looking.