OLD NEWX: I'm on the Xgl/Beryl Tip Yo!

Journal eno2001's Journal: OLD NEWX: I'm on the Xgl/Beryl Tip Yo! 3

Journal by eno2001 on Thursday February 08, 2007 @05:55PM

Being the kind of guy who loves the power of the command line displayed with the full beauty of eye candy like transparency and all sorts of animated effects... I finally got the time to sit down and get Xgl and Beryl working. Here is my loose review:

It's... neat. Ultimately not too useful, but neat. And I've always felt that there's no better way to compute than in style, which is why I've always gravitated towards the platform with more eye candy options: Linux. With that out of the way, I also think it's important to mention that the themes that come with Heliodor (the Metacity compatible window decorator portion of Beryl) and Emerald (the KDE kompliant window decorator for Beryl) still don't hold a candle to the themes I've enjoyed in Enlightenment over the past half a decade. There's room for improvement in theming overall for all window managers, but E still has my vote as the prettiest in PC land save for Mac OS X.

So onto the goodies. There is, of course, the much balleyhooed desktop cube that you can rotate for multiple desktops. It works. it's interesting and it provides a few ways to switch between multiple desktops. I showed it to one of my co-workers who never really "got" the multiple virtual desktop thing and he said, "Oh wow. That makes it easy to see the value of virtual desktops". He said his problem is not knowing which one to switch to. But with Beryl you get to see enough of each desktop to quickly decide which one you want to get to. I guess that helps some folks... To me, it's pretty easy to remember which desktop which applications are on . But not to everyone. So I'd say this is a vote for the desktop cube for the average person.

There is also a Beryl configuration utility that allows you to set TONS of settings for Beryl. For example, you can set the animation behavior for windows depending on what is happening to them. Close a window? You have your choice of eighteen different animation styles. My personal favorites are burn and beam up (think Star Trek TNG transporter effect). Burn, has the window go up in flames from the top down. And this is useful how? It isn't, other than to say "because it can". I can recall back in the late 80s having this mental picture of closing a window on a computer and having it blow away as grains of sand. I thought it would be really cool and give the desktop a more realistic feel. Back then, my thought was to have a video of sand blowing and scale it and overlay it where the window had been. The burn effect is actually a rendered effect as are all of the animations.

With the cube rotation you have many options as well. For example you can set a distance setting that will cause your application windows to space apart outward from the surface of the desktop so they are tiered front to back. Neat effect and it makes it a little easier to see what apps you have layered. The cube currently only uses four sides to provide you with four virtual desktops. On the other two sides of the cube (the top and bottom) you have what's called a "cap" image. It's just a still image that is drawn on as filler. You have the option to make the cube transparent or translucent. I opted for translucent as it makes it even easier to see the apps open on the other desktops as you look at them in reverse video through the cube.

The performance is amazing no matter if I'm on my P4 here at work (with a crappy on board Radeon R300) or my P4 at home with an NVidia GeForce 4 with 128 Megs of RAM. It's much smoother than I would have expected even in Xinerama mode. Over the weekend I hope to give it a try on my media center which is an old P3 866 with a GeForce 4 128 Meg card. As a sidenote, I have to say that ATI's driver install via Gentoo sucked balls deeply and frequently. NVidia, as much as I hate to support them (I still hold a grudge about Voodoo) has a much better and more up to date driver.

There is also real transparency with Xgl and the Gnome desktop I use integrates with it well. My terminals now actually show me what's REALLY behind them instead of just a quick cap of the desktop background. Even full motion video. Just dragging the terminal window around and seeing the web browser's text behind it is a bit of a thrill. Of course a lot of the older folks where I work say that the transparency would drive them nuts. ;P

I also tried an experiment with a running video while rotating the cube. The video continued to play smoothly even when I was looking at it from an odd angle or through the back of the window. I have to say, in terms of technical ability, this beats the pants off of anything anyone else is doing. Sadly I can't give 100% credit to the Xgl and Beryl/Compiz folks. The first person to come up with these ideas that I'm aware of was Raster of the Enlightment project. He was working on getting compositing features into E using OpenGL with hardware 3D acceleration back in the 90s. Of course, he didn't produce. Apple came out with it first, but both Raster and Apple probably got the ideas from somewhere else to begin with. Still, it's nice to see this stuff moving along.

What I hope for the future is that there will eventually be real 3D spaces that will prove more functionality driven. I can easily envision a file manager that would be easier to deal with than most current approaches. That's the one thing missing from the Xgl world. A 3D file manager. Hope that's coming soon...

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