Compiz-Beryl do anything other than fancy graphics?

[danbuter]

Just curious if the Beryl project has any side benefits other than the fancy 3D stuff. It's coming standard in Gutsy, and I'm strongly considering deleting it right after I install. I'm not really wowed by desktop graphics.

[bigtomrodney]

Well having your desktop drawn by your graphics card rather than your CPU is nice. It takes some of the strain off. It runs a lot smoother, and you know that old white window thing you see when a program is too busy? You don't see that anymore.

There are other functional benefits too - the scale plugin allows you to see all open windows, the window preview is handy when maximizing and minimizing. Your alt+tab switcher now allows you to see thumbnails of the window...it goes on. Even if you don't like the effects (especially the likes of fire efects which I dislike) just don't enable them. It is my understanding that only a handful of plugins will be enabled at install.

[danbuter]

Hmm, sounds like it may be ok. My laptop has the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 224 MB shared memory. So I'm thinking the graphics card stuff won't really help. Am I right?

[bigtomrodney]

I run a 945 on my laptop and it compiz goes really well on it. That's with all the fancy stuff. If the 3D in Feisty is anything to go by they will probably only enable alt+tab, scale and window decoration in the basic package.

[FawnOfFeist]

Emerald looks really nice.

I had it working on my ATI 200mobile (after hours of work) in KDE

Now I reinstalled normal ubuntu (64 bit) and can't get aiglx to work correctly. Sort of annoying, but ATI is supposed to be releasing new drivers soon. Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition is hot too. Finally ATI releasing some decent Linux stuff.