shiny desktop, anyone?

[Steve Hill]

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). 
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.

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.

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.

-- 

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence