Beryl or Compiz?

[jonantice]

I just installed beryl on Debian last night. Was just wandering your opinions comparing the two. Will they both continue to be developed into the future? Is beryl to compiz as xorg is to xfree86? As far as I can tell beryl is more user friendly but I haven't really used compiz much.

[Javasnob]

Beryl's a fork off of the compiz code; as far as I can tell it's better maintained and more actively developed. It has way more features at the moment as well.

[Vergil83]

My take is a little different (I haven't used either one). I view compiz as the conservative approach, only including useful and stable. Beryl tends to include tons of stuff that may have no use (other than wow factor). Also compiz uses gconf while beryl just uses a text file.

[chadders]

I have tried both. Compiz is basically a less comprehensive version of Beryl, but I will say this. I disliked the ease of use of compiz, I have found beryl much easier to use. I would recommend beryl over compiz any day.

[bigtomrodney]

As mentioned above Beryl tends to be more experimental whereas Compiz aims to be rock solid stable.

One of Beryl's original goals was to make Compiz desktop-agnostic (remember Beryl was Compiz-Quinn originally). Compiz is heavily Gnome oriented with its config in gconf. More recently I have read that Compiz is supposed to be a Window Manager replacement for Gnome, as in possibly to take the place of Metacity.

Either way I find that a lot of the updates to Compiz are backports of plugins from Beryl. Word from around the campfire is that the coding standards around Compiz are more strict and less hack-ish but I'm only basing that on rumour. Either way I run Beryl as I like the config tools and it tends to produce better performance for me. I don't use Emerald with it though, I prefer the lighter GTK-Window-Decorator.

[tuxv]

Beryl is better than Compiz, My ATi card works well with beryl than with compiz.

[placeb0]

aiglx accelerated x11 server with beryl. The way to go