I'm sold to Beryl
Posted by F Thu, 01 Feb 2007 00:27:00 GMT
I’ve been trying Beryl (a 3D Window Manager for X) and I’m pretty impressed.
True, it’s full of useless graphical effects and pure eye-candy. But it also provides practical features and is very configurable.
Among the actually useful things: fast and practical ways to change windows, desktops, to expose the desktop area, scale and pick a window (ala Mac OS X’s “exposé”), visual notifications, desktop zoom, screen annotations.
Unfortunately, most demo videos concentrate on the graphical effects instead of the useful features, but they still give you an idea of what it can do.
I really like the idea of using a “water-ripple” effect as an unobtrusive -but impossible to miss- way of receiving notifications.
It integrates nicely with KDE, Gnome and pretty much any desktop environment. And you can easily switch back to your previous window manager at any time on-the-fly.
I have it running on my work laptop, with Fedora 6, KDE and AIGLX.
Very nice.