shiny desktop, anyone?

[Valent Turkovic]

On 5/29/07, Steve Hill <steve at nexusuk.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 28 May 2007, Valent Turkovic wrote:
>
> > I don't agree. I had 3rd party Compiz and Berly packages on FC5 and
> > FC6 6 months ago and had better exeperience and less bugs with them
> > than with compiz that is now in F7! To me this looks like lack of
> > attention for these packages.
>
> I've been running Beryl for months and I'll tell you my experiences:
>
> My workstation at home has an nVidia FX5200 in it.  Of course you don't
> get any 3D with the Free drivers (yet), but after installing the
> propriatory drivers you get the black windows problem due to the nVidia
> AGP aperture bug.  After manually setting Beryl to AIGLX mdoe it works
> reasonably well, although if you want to run full screen video or GL
> applications at any reasonable performance then you need to shut down
> Beryl (yes, I'm aware that an FX5200 isn't very powerful).
>
> My workstation at work has an nVidia NV37GL.  Again, you need to
> propriatory drivers and the first thing you see is a *lot* of corruption
> all over the screen.  The work around is to manually set the rendering
> path to "copy" mode.  Additionally, if you make the assumption that all
> nVidia kit needs to be in AIGLX mode then you'd be wrong - switching this
> system to AIGLX mode results in Beryl running at approximately 4 frames
> per *minute*.  Also, every so often Beryl goes mad and starts sucking up
> all the CPU (this seem to happen when resizing FireFox windows).
>
> My notebook has an Intel 945 integrated graphics chipset.  This mroe or
> less works straight out of the box.  However, Xvideo doesn't work *at
> all*, you're reduced to using X11shm (which you have to set manually in
> vlc, mplayer, etc. since they try XV first and bomb out when it breaks).

Have you reported bugs regarding this - especially mplayer?

> Also, anything that does OpenGL itself is very dodgy - lots of flickering
> and the openGL stuff doesn't get transformed when you do things like
> wobbly windows, cube rotation, etc.

Jup, my experience also. Plus great matrox cards aren't supported.

> So all of the above tells me that whiles Beryl is excellent, due to driver
> problems it is not ready to be shipped turned on out of the box.  I would
> prefer to have a rather plain looking desktop than a non-functional
> desktop when I first turn on a Fedora machine.

Agreed. But there should be an option for users to test it and see if
it works good enough for them - disable it again.

> I'm not disagreeing with you that theme improvements would be nice, but I
> don't think turning Beryl or Compiz on by default is an option yet.  All
> that said, I think that a lot can be learned from Emerald as a decoration
> manager - it's theme customiser is excellent.

I completely agree.