Submitted by “The Compiz and Beryl teams are discussing a merger. Posts on the Compiz forum and Beryl mailing list indicate that the projects are discussing how to execute a merger and work together to deliver a single compositing window manager to give ‘bling’ to the Linux desktop.”
Compiz, Beryl Teams Consider Merging
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Seeing how Compiz and Beryl seem better to me than, for example, Aero anyways.
“””
Seeing how Compiz and Beryl seem better to me than, for example, Aero anyways.
“””
I dislike Microsoft as much as anyone, but these premature claims of victory are not good.
I have tried Compiz and Beryl on a number of machines, and in the cases that worked at all… each was very buggy.
I have not used Aero, but it would have to be awfully unstable for Compiz and Beryl to claim any sort of victory at this point.
IMO, we are still playing catch up. I am writing this from my laptop with a video chip set that is one of the many, many, many chip sets not even supported.
Aero is pretty bad.
People complain about compiz and beryl making java apps show up blank but in Vista java apps just turn off Aero completely. Flash does the same. And Aero only comes back on when you close the web browser that was running flash.
“””
People complain about compiz and beryl making java apps show up blank but in Vista java apps just turn off Aero completely.
“””
Well, that doesn’t sound good.
But of the two options, I would think that getting out of the way and not messing up the actual app would be the preferable thing to do.
While I’m unimpressed with composited desktops in general, when the eye candy starts getting in the way of actual work the eye candy needs to go.
Edited 2007-03-25 17:30
Again ypu can’t blame compiz for not supporting your chipset. MS should be supporting your chipset, you pay 200 and up to get the OS you expect things to work, oh, wait you have to get the drivers form the manufacturer if you installed windows yourself nevermind vista. Linux kernel devs have offered to write drivers themselves under a NDA so there really is little excuse for hardware manufacturers to not support Linux.
As for Aero, I won’t say its awful, I’ll just say its resource intensive, while compiz/beryl will run on much older hardware with pretty much the same effects and animations and then some. Macosx runs even faster but with less shiny things such as pixel shaders (Leopard is supposed to address that). Compiz/Beryl is till in its infancy you have to remember that this project is one opensource with a lot of it being submitted by volunteers, two not very old. The project is about a year and change old while macosx had 4 versions and Vista had 5 years of development (the UI stuff was being worked even before that, as many MS people like to point out that Macosx wasn’t the first to do the whole gui on video card thing). Compiz/beryl is still just starting, not to mention that initially compiz was just supposed to be a proof of concept which the (now beryl) community turned into what it is today. I must give credit where its due the enthusiasm of the (if not skill) of the compiz-quinn community is why we are here talkign about compiz. Everythign Dave has worked on is for inclusion in xorg, compiz was what he was workign on so that other WM such as metacity could see how to implement the features.
One thing that is great about Aero is that it switches mode depending on the level of support for a feature. The reason compiz can’t do this is because it requires hardware acceleration and there is no current support for using 2d drivers only. to switch to a supported Wm requires that either metacity or kwin get started so the transition isn’t anywhere near as smooth as it should be.
> […] as many MS people like to point out that Macosx wasn’t the first to do the whole gui on video card thing […]
Of course not. Games used 3d hardware for their GUI before OSes thought of it, and older OSes used 2d hardware acceleration before 3d hardware was common. The whole thing is a really old story.
“””
Again ypu can’t blame compiz for not supporting your chipset.
“””
I just want to clarify a point. I am not blaming compiz for not supporting my chip set. I don’t care for the current composited desktops and prefer standard 2D, so it is not really an issue for me personally.
What I’m saying is that Compiz and Beryl are not better to that majority of people who cannot run them due to lack of driver support, no matter who’s fault it is.
That is not a criticism of Compiz/Beryl. It is simply an observation about reality.
I am criticizing the overconfidence and premature claims of victory that I have been noticing among some of the fans. Not the people who are working so hard on the projects themselves.
Edited 2007-03-26 02:00
“What I’m saying is that Compiz and Beryl are not better to that majority of people who cannot run them due to lack of driver support, no matter who’s fault it is.”
This is my simple observation of reality.
Intel 60% of graphics market. Intel drivers work well with the current composited desktops, unlike say “Aero”
Let me just Clarify a point.
Nvidia *were* not well supported.
AMD Open-source drives were poor…but supported AXGL
AMD own Drivers are better(sic)..but don’t support AXGL
Accelerated graphics on Linux is poor, and is getting better fast, its not stable; universally available…but its getting there about 4-5 for xorg 7.3 which I suspect will change everything.
I also agree with your post. Saying that Compiz/beryl is crap because it doesn’t work with everything is wrong. Aero works with less hardware because the specs are so stringent. Linus will on older hardware with effects still working while on those machines Vista wil most likely shut them off. I say that Aero is not better because the majority of people that can’t run it due to lack of hardware support, I say that Apples GUI is not better due to lack of hardware support. You see he same can be said of any OS. The majority of people need to stop whining becasue the majority of th people won’t be abelt ot use their so called hardware with Macosx or Vista. Like the cyclops said ATI and Nvidia aren’t the only game in town and the Nvidia drivers work pretty close to their windows counterpart.
“””
I also agree with your post. Saying that Compiz/beryl is crap because it doesn’t work with everything is wrong.
“””
*sigh*
That is not what I am saying and never has been. Please quote where I said that your pet project^W^W^WCompiz/Beryl is crap because it doesn’t work with everything.
I am saying that the ability to run it on their own hardware weighs in heavily to people who do not happen to be loyal devotees of Linux/Compiz/Beryl.
I am also saying that on the several machines that I have tried them on, each with different distributions, versions, and video chipsets, they both have been buggy.
Based upon that, I conclude that it is too early to claim victory as some want to do. That is my point. Nothing more and nothing less.
I suspect that the Compiz/Beryl developers, as opposed to certain overzealous fans, would actually agree with me on that; Which is why they are working so hard to make the software better.
Certain fans of every project seem to have trouble understanding that there might be a middle ground in which constructive criticism can live, in between the realms of “unconditional support” and “frontal attack”.
I mght have misconstrued your post, but i don’t see how Aero is primetime and compiz is not. Anyways I’m not an overzealous fanboi. I hardly use compiz/beryl as I totally agree with you about the stability. Thats not the only reason but thats one of the reasons I don’t use it. My whole point is that people can’t say something is not ready just based on hardware support when the same can be said about the other players. Had you just said its not ready because its unstable I would have agreed with you. The majority of people can’t run Aero in vista either, their hardware won’t support it. Now the majority of people who just got a new computer most likely can run Aero.
I don’t really want to make a long flame war of this. I believe that once one states his case two or three times, it is unlikely that a fourth time will be any more effective, and would be a discourtesy to innocent bystanders who are not involved in the war.
But I will make a couple of very brief comments and stop.
From what I am hearing, Aero may *not* be ready for prime time. I confess that, if true, that fact gives me a certain amount of satisfaction.
Secondly, I believe that the whole package counts. It doesn’t matter how great Compiz/Beryl are. If the user cannot use it, OSS, as a package, has not won.
Cyclops makes some very encouraging observations on that count in the post you replied to.
I’m not really trying to argue with you. When you say that OSS has not won. I’m a Linux user, I don’t care about marketshare or if a windows users suddenly wants to use Linux. I only care about more people using linux in the sense that they will hopefully bring more support from vendors. There are a lot of areas where Linux doesn’t meet my needs, as mention before music creation software is one of these areas among many. What I was trying to point out is that it can’t all rest on the shoulders of the OSS community, we need help from the manufacturers, if only to release specs or to agree to the NDA that the kernel devs have proposed. The OSS community is not at blame as they have put their foot forward and have offered to alleviate the issue if the manufacturers won’t. We haven’t seen any vendors step forward yet.
“””
Intel 60% of graphics market. Intel drivers work well with the current composited desktops, unlike say “Aero”
“””
60% of *new* desktops, perhaps.
I agree that Intel’s (relatively) new interest in Linux drivers is highly encouraging.
In fact, over the weekend I ordered an Intel Pro Wireless 2200 based wifi mini-pci card for my laptop to replace the Broadcom based one, simply on general principle.
(I also sent an email to Broadcom’s local sales rep explaining Broadcom’s poor support of Linux and why I had chosen to avoid their products in the future.)
So I am totally with you on Intel.
I expect that in a year or so, I just might be ready to claim a victory of sorts for Compiz/Beryl over Aero.
Just not today.
BTW, do Intel chipsets really not work with Aero? *Ouch* for Microsoft. As you say, Intel is an important supplier.
Thank God! I hope this happens. If for no other reason than to end all the whining and bickering between the two camps. Too many in the community forget that we are all exercising our own freedom to choose. The developers should be allowed to do the same.
I agree. Infighting is part of the reason why Linux is not moving forward as fast as it should. When ppl look at all the different flavours it confuses them. One flavour per platform with everyone working towards making each flavour work would be great. But alas everyone is not one the same page even though we all want the same goal which is to provide a stable useable alternative to Windows and OSX.
There are really no reasons why these projects should carry on apart.
Looking forward for a faster, stable and standard way to do composition on X with no pain.
Edited 2007-03-24 19:11
I hope they start thinking about creating a real pluginstructure instead of exposing all internals to plugins. This would allow for a standard for plugins, so beryl and compiz could share the plugins with other windowmanagers. It’s also better for securty, right?
(if they already did this, I’m sorry, but afaik they still expose their whole app to plugins, effectively making it impossible to reuse the plugins anywhere else)
I hope that this will also bring them more support from big companies like Redhat or IBM, plus the Ubuntu’s Canonical, of course.
I am using Compiz in Fedora, have tried Beryl a little, but sometimes I just have to turn off the effects for sake of some Java-based sofware, like Zend Studio.
But I like the cube, the expose, and other things. I also use them to attract the kids (my own and others). They like it and they never saw anything like that on Windows Everybody said “wow” for Linux
Edited 2007-03-24 19:30
Somebody should write a Geek Opera about the open source world, because sometimes it’s more fun trying to untangle the plot-line than it is using the actual software.
As for the proposed merger: if their combined effort is going to produce a better product, then go for it. If competition is going to produce a better product, then they should stay apart. By the way they are talking though, it sounds like the former is a better idea.
Hmm “copying” my name.. are you a fork? OSS projects should work together. If this happens it will show strength and can be used as an example for other projects.
One day the KDE and Gnome teams will merge too.
One day…
One day Novell and Microsoft will merge as well? any takers?
Wishful thinking, but still: imagine a desktop environment with the simplicity and well-designed interfaces we see in Gnome, but with the optional customizability we’ve got in KDE.
Or what about if the various distros could decide on a unified package manager? Maybe software would spread faster if it was easy to install anywhere?
Or perhaps eliminating the idea of “distros” altogether? Something like the idea described here:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/customize-download-cd
for a start?
Competition is healthy; maybe it’s a good thing in the long run. However, I do sometimes wonder what the open source community could accomplish if we spent just a bit less time competing with each other and instead used it to make existing software better and make new ideas a reality.
In any case, I think this merge is a small (but appreciated) step in the right direction.
A point that made Ubuntu more successful than Debian was that Ubuntu narrowed its scope, officially focusing on a main core. If Ubuntu tries to be infinately flexible that may undermine a big part of the current formula that has brought it soo much good fortune.
So i would be wary of something that suggested allot of customisation, but perhaps a couple of checkboxes asking how you would use your PC, i.e. server, desktop, multimedia, composite etcetera could be good. Maybe even some preconfigured themes, say a half dozen, of which you can preview online and choose one to be your default post-installation.
nLite doesn’t seem to have killed Windows.
Any word on when nLite will be supporting Vista, BTW?
Eventually I may have to deal with the bugger, but not without thoroughly gutting it.
http://www.vlite.net/
It won’t happen – and that’s good. I don’t want a Ubuntu kernel. That’s only for a start. I want a rock solid Debian system, and I don’t care if it has Gnome 2.14, 16 or 18. This may be important for Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora – for other distributions it is not vitally important.
Anyway – every distribution has Linux, every distribution has Gnome, KDE, the GNU tools, and the LSB. What else do we need? I don’t want “Ubuntu” (any name might do) everywhere – that’s a nightmare. I want specialized distributions, and I want three or four “big” distributions, that are out for a challenge (Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Debian).
One day, the gazillions linux distro will merge into FreeLinux, NetLinux and OpenLinux.
I see the humor, but the BSD’s went in reverse of that.
FreeBSD was a fork of 386BSD
NetBSD was also a fork of 386BSD
OpenBSD was a fork of NetBSD
I don’t see that way. Until now, the number of bsd distro is still countable by two hands (i.e. less than 10). The number of linux distro can’t be counted by two hands, even with binary coding (i.e. 2^10 or 1024).
While I never had a problem with the forking of Beryl from Compiz (I’ve been using Beryl since the Compiz-quinn days,) everyone benefits when energy is no longer wasted duplicating efforts and a single, high quality project prevails. Long live composited X!
With great power comes great responsibility lol..I wish this would happen more often. Right now there is a TREMEMDOUS amount of duplication of effort in linux. This can be good, as it allows for diversity in offerings..But it can also be bad, because you get alot of jacks and no Aces. This is a good example of 2 programs seriously duplicating effort for no real reason. Give us one product with a stable version and a testing version similar to debian.
I sincerely wish mre developers would put egos aside and take a good look a teaming up to create a few great programs, rather than alot of small hacks. Sure it would be nice to have “A” linux desktop environments rather than multiple, but this is not as necessary as some common grounds for creating programs that can co-exist across environments.
I say go for it..and hope more people with like goals would do the same.
> there is a TREMEMDOUS amount of duplication of effort in linux.
While some of this duplicated effort is counter productive, I highly doubt that most of it is. For example, people often complain about the duplicated effort between Gnome and KDE. The thing is, these are rather different environments. If I were stuck with KDE, I would probably use Mac OS X full time because I hate the complexity of KDE. If it went the other way, there would be people using Windows because they would simply find Gnome too limiting.
For more abstract projects, projects that probably end up looking quite similar to the end user (like Compiz and Beryl), you still have to deal with the needs of the developers. Just because one group thinks one API is great, doesn’t mean that another group will think the API is great. Or what about the teams themselves? Just because you have 1 team + 1 team doesn’t mean that you get the output of 2 teams when you combine them. If people cannot agree on goals, or they cannot stand working with each other for social reasons, then you aren’t going to see a combined output. You may see a slightly higher output. You may see a diminished output. But it probably won’t be additive.
What sometimes seems to be unnecessary in other parts of the software industry seems to be the rule of thumb in the open source world – choice!
It often seems to come down to this sole property when discussing open source software.
Sometimes, though, I seem to think that some choices are unnecessary – at least as soon as you have made a choice of your own.
As the user of one particular Linux distribution, you might very well consider every other distribution non-existing, but every one wants its own ‘share’ in the open source world, giving us hundreds of different distributions to choose from, but yet again it might very well not be necessary …
It sometimes seems to me that open source software is too loosely organized and that it could often gain substantial benefits from defining not only goals for a certain project, but also by defining how to get there on target. Focus often shifts as we see it here, with the talks of ‘reuniting’ the Compiz/beryl development efforts…
In this case, I simply do not see the reason for NOT working together – hell, why not make the compositing engine a part of X.org and give users a switch to turn on or off the eye candy that it offers?
I’d like to see this happening along with a unified plug-in structure for the compositing effects, so that the quality of both products (Compiz/Beryl and its plug-ins) can be ensured through a more unified approach to the developing efforts, that already keep Linux ahead of e.g. Windows Vista in the eye candy department.
Compositing is part of X.org. There is actually server-side compositing. The problem with server-side (anything) is that it becomes too constraining after a while, just like the fonts were.
lot of news about linux bling, while the foundation is still rather unfinished. there are at a few projects in xorg i would like to see finished more than compositing. 1 modesetting, plugin you lcd and make xorg automagicaly select the correct resolution. 2 multi monitor with gui tools for kde/gnome. 3 non root xorg? hotplug for monitor/input also with gui setup apps. we are not there yet, and no beryl is not enough for me…
Browser: Palm680/RC1 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; PalmSource/Palm-D053; Blazer/4.5) 16;320×320
I think you will start to see that with Xorg 7.3+ with the upcoming and promising randr 1.2
I currently run xorg-server 1.3RC2. It perfectly detects and sets up my widescreen monitor and all the input devices without a xorg.conf at all Oh and hotplug works too. The only thing I wish to get better is a proper suspend/resume support.
BerlPiz ?
Or perhaps:
PizBerl ?
(lol)
RTFA. It’s Coral!
Aww, it is nice they are considering getting back together again. I had read previously that the developers of both compositing engines didn’t see eye to eye over design decisions. It is a good sign when people learn how to compromise and can work together.
On a bad note with Compiz I tried to use it with Limewire and the UI doesn’t work. I don’t think Java Swing works right under Compiz. I had to go back to good, stable Metacity so I could use Limewire again. Bling is nice but posibly stability is even better?
Edited 2007-03-25 02:20
Small wonder desktop linux has never caught on, the developers just don’t get it. Developers are practically tripping over themselves trying to overload linux with more and more bells and whistles and eye-candy.
But, is that stuff really what’s keeping linux off the desktop? Every talk to people who have rejected the idea of linux on the desktop? I have. The reasons are always the same: “linux won’t work with my winmodem”, “linux won’t work with my wireless card”,”linux won’t run world-ship”,”linux won’t run my favority game”, and so on. It’s never: “linux doesn’t have enough cutesy-poo dancing monkeys.”
I have the upmost respect for linux developers. I think linux developers are generous, and technically exceptional. But, they don’t get marketing.
And how is it the developer’s fault that the hardware manufacturers don’t support linux?
And yes, bling will only get you so far and yes, it can be fun (as a developer) to see what kinds of neat effects you can get out of the system.
At least people are enjoying themselves developing on this system. (I can’t really same the same about developing on windows).
I’m sure all the people who don’t use Linux for all the reasons outlined in the previous post give a sh!t about wheather developers enjoy themselves while developing or not.
“And how is it the developer’s fault that the hardware manufacturers don’t support linux?”
———————————
For end users and the widespread adoption of a Linux based desktop OS, it is utterly irrelevant who’s fault the lack of support for hardware is. All people know is “Linux doesn’t support my hardware (or software in many cases), therefore I won’t install it” (and the same story for any other OS in the same boat as Linux)
So no-one cares if it is the fault of the hardware manufacturer for not providing the specifications for their hardware or releasing open source drivers, and since the only other option for developing drivers is to reverse engineer them, developers spending time on non-functional eye-candy could be construed as misdirecting their efforts into something that is not very important. So in that sense, it could be said that it is as much the developers fault as it is the hardware manufacturer’s with regard to drivers, not that end users give a monkey’s arse about where the blame lies anyway.
Having said that, the hardware support of Linux is generally very good, considering the number of devices out there that have had drivers written from scratch without any help from the hardware manufacturer.
The main thing holding me back from using Linux as my main OS is the lack of decent music creation & sequencing apps – there is nothing out there in Linux land that even vaguely compares to Sonar, Tracktion, Abelton Live or Cubase, and until there is, I can’t seriously consider switching completely. I would much prefer a few developers put the eye-candy to one side for now and wrote a decent multi-track audio/midi sequencer with native VST support (without resorting to the complexity of trying to get it all working with Wine)and simple, uncluttered workflow…
I totally agree with you on that. The only reason I boot into windows at all on my machine is to use Reason and Recycle, otherwise I would have formatted the drive a long time ago. If Linux could something half as good as Logic then I would be happy, no Rosegarden and Ardour don’t cut it. The issue with linux is that sound quality doesn’t seem to be a priority and I really think that Linux as a desktop should focus on that.I hate to say it but Vista has a kick as sound backend that I must say impressed me a lot. I would love to see some of those features travel over to the Linux desktop. I’m planning to get a Mac just to use reason and Logic express. BTW,is anybody working on getting a macosx equivalent of something like wine? There is fewer software so I would think it would be a smaller undertaking.
Windows and Mac both have 3d compositing. A side by side comparison would make linux look archaic by comparison.
And I think you are being a bit harsh, if even 5% of the developer community is working on bling, I dont think thats such a big deal.
You’re right about that. Shiny buzzwords sell.
This is just the latest round in the feature war.
You cant’ really blame Linux for a winmodem not working properly, You have to put the blame on the hardware manufacturer. The same for software not running in Linux, the blame goes to the developers of that software for not porting their software. The hardware thing is always why people seem to say that Linux is not ready for the desktop, yet OSX runs on far less hardware and yet it is considered ready for the desktop. Linux supports far more hardware out of the box than both macosx and windows. Windows supports very little hardware when first installed, Linux supports all types of hardware that will usually just work right out of the box without having to install a whole bunch of drivers from all over the internet or having the install cds. If you are going to say Linux is not ready for the desktop please do it on something that Linux doesn’t do better than the other dekstop systems out there. Say Linux is not ready for the desktop because they lack 3rd party support or Linux is not ready for the desktop because the Gnome/KDE/XFCE doesn’t cut it as a GUI. This whole hardware thing is just old and tired and is not true for the most part, because out of the box Linux supports more hardware than the other players in town. Now when OSX is running on all kinds of x86 hardware, we’ll see how well they do. When windows installs my video card drivers by default then I’ll say Linux is not ready for the desktop. Otherwise you can’t really blame Linux because you can’t run photoshop, or can’t use a WINmodem, talk to Adobe or the manufacturer who was stupid enough to create hardware that relies so heavily on one OS.
Edited 2007-03-25 05:48
The difference with hardware for Mac is that Mac users know where to buy hardware for Mac, but Linux users don’t. Sites reviewing hardware and testing it on several popular Linux distros, and online stores selling Linux-ready hardware, would be very useful for end users. Maybe even a “Linux ready” branding or certification would be good for both Linux and hardware manufacturers. So if something works out of the box on Linux, anybody could find it easily. I’m aware that some distros provide a list of compatible hardware, but those are usually incomplete. There is a lot of work to be made in this area.
> The hardware thing is always why people seem to say that Linux is not
> ready for the desktop, yet OSX runs on far less hardware and yet it is
> considered ready for the desktop.
That’s entirely correct, but you don’t go to a store and buy OSX for your computer. You buy a Mac/iBook/whatever and OSX works on it, because much effort has been put into this combination to work.
> If you are going to say Linux is not ready for the desktop please do it
> on something that Linux doesn’t do better than the other dekstop
> systems out there.
Linux is presented as an OS that runs on generic PCs or notebooks, yet on many of them something doesn’t work. Many have pointed out that if you carefully select your hardware for Linux, then it will work fine (which is no surprise given the amount of hardware it *does* run fine on). What we need is more shops doing hardware selection and pre-installing Linux (maybe even a fine-tuned specialized version of some distro) and selling this as a complete package to end-users, much like Apple does. Add to that a good selection of software, *not* choice! Choice is good for the system builders, but not for the end users. They want one name they can trust.
And I’m not talking about Dell here, but the “little ones” who are far more flexible.
In that I agree with you wholeheartedly. The thing is that there are already companies who do this but the Linux community rather bang on Dell’s door to be let into the party rather than getting one from a Linux specific manufacturer like Sytem76.
The problem is that when hardware isn’t supported out of the box it’s far harder on Linux to get it working. Some of that is due to lack of manufacturer support but the kernel developers certaintly don’t make their jobs easy.
i don’t see how it can be easier. As a manufacturer provide decent specs and the community will write the driver themselves. If you are afraid of showing your specs to the world, the kernel devs have agreed to sign NDA agreements and still will write the driver for you. I don’t see the how much easier it can get.
Edited 2007-03-26 15:57
“linux doesn’t have enough cutesy-poo dancing monkeys.”
I can agree with this! We need some plugins that will have dancing Monkeys and maybe some squirrels that eat your application when you close it.
As far as Linux and hard ware goes, others have answered that, I’ll just add that most wireless cards do work fine in Linux, and if someone has an issue with one, I always just recommend that they buy an Intel wireless card. They’re inexpensive, and work flawlessly with Linux. Winmodems are also supposed to work with the right driver. The odd thing about that though, is that the company that provides the full driver charges 15 USD. For 20 USD you can buy hardware modem that will work a lot better. Maybe even less now.
As far as applications go, Wine is making huge inroads lately in getting things to actually work quite well (I remember back in the day, the only program I could EVER get to even load was notepad, and that usually crashed on me.) Granted since there are really a billion different ways for Windows apps to work, it’s almost impossible for any API layer to work 100%. Hell, even Windows itself isn’t 100% compatible with other versions of Windows. How many people right now are saying the same things as you listed about Vista?
This would be FANTASTIC NEWS.
So often you just hear of OS projects splitting up, we need more merging and consolidation, especially with regards to the very important desktop rendering system!
I hope they merge as they describe!
Wasn’t one of David’s previous complaints that the quality of code going into beryl was pretty low? Is he now saying the quality is better, that he was lying previously, or that he’s now willing to accept low-quality code?
Adam
He doesn’t really seem to care what you do with plugins, he is concerned with making core the best it can be.
Most (all?) beryl plugins can work just fine with compiz core the way it is now so…
http://lists.beryl-project.org/pipermail/beryl-dev/2007-March/00037…
the merged project should be renamed thus:
“Luftschokolade”
you know, the kind of chocolade with little air bubbles in it. because over here in .de, the most famous brand of that stuff is actually called “aero”
I personally prefer Compiz, its rock solid for me and doesn’t seem quite as silly as some of the Beryl effects, that also seem to have a higher hardware requirement.
And a merger? Beryl was a fork of Compiz!