Beryl... a desktop environment...

[flipjargendy]

There is apperently a 3D desktop environment for Linux, called Beryl. It looks better then Vista's 3D environment. Switching between desktops is the best part! Apparently it uses transparency in Ubuntu also! Check out this video of the desktop in action.

[benjamin20]

ok, beryl is not a desktop environment. it is a window manager and composition manager that is able to make open-GL calls to the underlaying X system. the X system has to support these calls, either with gxl or the much more common and supported aiglx.

beryl broke of of compiz, which used to be the only project, beryl contains many additions compiz didn't want to put into there product. also, medacity is now able to make some of these calls.

you still can have a regular DE on top of it, usually it just replaces your window manager. its still in development and has some problems, like for me it sees my widescreen monitor as two individual monitors. i get two rotating cubes.

[ImNeat]

Yea, Beryl runs on top of XGL. I've been running it for a while and am more than pleased. It's still only beta - but I have yet to experience a problem.

[tronic]

"Yea, Beryl runs on top of XGL"

doesn't have to, aiglx.

[flipjargendy]

i obviously haven't read anything on the website yet. i just saw a link to the video somewhere and it said desktop environment.

ImNeat, how smooth does it run on your computer? i'm thinking about giving it a try soon.

[benjamin20]

its buggy, but cool

[@trapine]

Metisse looks very promising as well http://insitu.lri.fr/metisse/ Beryl is very nice but had a few probz running it on kde. It is defiantly better than aero and flip3D.

[zba78]

Beryl's great. I've been using it in my OpenSuse for a few weeks now. Crashes every now & then at startup but for the most part runs fine.

It certainly looks good and there are actually some very useful facets to the eye candy like the expose type feature (called scale) and the interactive zoom.

[Zelmo]

I loved playing with Beryl; I just didn't like how my custom settings in KDE's window manager were lost when Beryl took over. Once KWM supports compositing, I'll be all over it again. This is really cool stuff!

[bigtomrodney]

I have been using it since it split from Compiz and had been using Compiz before. I'd have to downplay the buggy thing. Once your ATI/nVidia drivers are sorted out I find it very stable, even moreso when using AIGLX over XGL. Also try to use the SUSE packages as using the developer svn builds is bound to cause trouble at times.

It's pretty cool. Best of all if you are using AIGLX you can run other OpenGL apps without any trouble. I have an nVidia GeForce 6200 which isn't a great graphics card but it can run everything without a glitch on Beryl. the only thing that strains it is some of the extreme settings on the blur plugin but I just don't use that anyway. Check out the official SUSE packages and you should have good fun with it.