Out of complete curiosity, I unmasked and emerged the Beryl Window Manager to see what all the fuss about pretty 3d interfaces was about. I replaced KDE’s window manager with Beryl’s, started it up and watched the pretty effects take over.
Immediately I had windows that wobbled, menus that shimmered in and out of existence, and a workspace changer that acted like faces on a rotating cube. Nice, but ultimately worthless. I guess I can kind of see the appeal — desktops are a bit boring, and this is a neat way to spruce it up.
There was a ton of customization that one could do thanks to a little GUI config panel, like customize how menus and windows faded in and out (or not, if you disable the effect), how certain effects behave, and so on. So it seemed like it was a very capable and complete (or at least, nearly complete enough to count) 3D system, and it didn’t require horribly ridiculous system requirements like Vista’s effects will.
However, the whole thing was very buggy — several times the whole thing crashed on me, leaving me with a desktop without a window manager. Fortunately, a system tray program was running by default that allowed me to either restart Beryl or switch to another window manager. Worse, however, was attempting to play a 3D game in this environment — after going fullscreen into the game and it running slower than usual, trying to leave the game locked X and disabled my keyboard. Being lazy, I just reset the system.
So Beryl has some work to be done on it, but it does look sort of neat. I am not very interested in it, however, since I feel that these effects are pretty much worthless and bog down one’s system. But for those who like desktop eye candy, it seems Beryl will become the de facto 3d window manager for Linux when its stability issues are resolved.
