thelinuxlink.net

Looks like it's getter better and better:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Fbk52Mk1w

Patrick wrote:Looks like it's getter better and better

I'm not holding breath, for various reasons.

1. Huge code changes = Even more instability, and I haven't been impressed, to say the least, about the stability of Compiz or Beryl.

2. As the video states, the shown plugins are in alpha state.

3. I find it quite ironic how every "cool" video related to Compiz & Beryl shows it running on top of GNOME. Now, this is not meant as an attack on GNOME, but to me it seems like the core group of developers doing Compiz and Beryl are GNOME guys. As the guys who maintain the FreeBSD port of GNOME will tell you, having the core people not care if it runs on anything they don't use is a pain in the ass. For a long time this has caused GNOME to run with less features (I guess some people would argue that as a good thing ) or other various problems. I have tried Compiz and Beryl on both KDE and GNOME, and the experience I have gotten of running it on KDE is significantly worse than running it on top of GNOME.

I'm personally looking forward to the KDE 4 version of KWin, KDE's window manager, which will do desktop effects of it's own. KWin is a very mature, production quality window manager in the first place, and the addition of full-fledged compositing (It could already do some limited stuff using the Composite X extension) seems like a natural evolution. And also, since KWin has a userbase in the millions on a lot of different computers, a lot more emphasis is gonna be put on portability, stability and reliability. Another cool thing about KWin's compositing features, is that at start-up it can detect and say "Do I have OpenGL?", "Do I have AIGLX?", "Do I have the necessary X extensions that Z plugin need?" and adjust it's features and plugins according to the answers of these questions. It can fall back to XRender and just do some extremely limited and mininal stuff, or just go back to what we currently see in KDE 3, aka no effects at all. This is extremely nice when you consider that KDE 4 puts a HUGE emphasis on portability, not just among various traditional UNIX and UNIX-like platforms, but also Windows and Mac OS X (Without X11). Yes! Even SCO UnixWare!
As a huge fan of OpenBSD, this is something I appreciate quite a lot. Because OpenBSD currently does not support DRI at all, for various security and implementation related reasons. There have been talks about adding it in the foreseeable future, although it's no small undertaking.

Wasn't the whole point of the beryl/compiz merger is that you get the stabililty of compiz along with the new cutting edge stuff from beryl? A sort of best of both worlds scenario.

Patrick wrote:Wasn't the whole point of the beryl/compiz merger is that you get the stabililty of compiz

I havn't been very impressed by the stability of both to be honest. For example, on my laptop (Which uses the free ATi drivers, since it uses an integrated Radeon 9200 adapter) if you maximize a window, the entire window decoration turns 100% white, and you can't see anything. The button-functionality is still there, but it's not usable unless you know exactly where to aim the mouse pointer. I have tested this under both KDE and GNOME.
The bugs I want to see fixed in Compiz and Beryl is not so much the big and very obvious bugs, because you are almost guaranteed that those will be fixed, because it annoys everyone. It's the bugs that you only notice when running these things 24/7, because fixing those increases overall stability far more than fixing the huge-ass obvious bugs.

Patrick wrote:along with the new cutting edge stuff from beryl?

In my opinion: Cutting-edge != True stability.

The reason Microsoft has a huge fallacy in their marketing of Windows Vista, is that they refer to Vista's brand new stack as being "secure". If you look in any security-guy textbook, probably one of the first things you're gonna see is that something new is NEVER secure.
Now, I am not saying that OpenBSD's network stack, which has been in development for over 25 years and under HEAVY security scrutiny because of OpenBSD's intense focus on security, is "secure" either. Nothing is "secure" unless it's truly uncrackable, and nothing is. Do I believe that OpenBSD's network stack is "more secure" than Windows Vista's? Yes, because it's old and proven-by-time code (Not old, creaky and outdated code).

When we talk about stability, I usually, largely apply those same principles of security to stability.

Patrick wrote:A sort of best of both worlds scenario.

AFAIK, the merge was because the split was based on bad decisions in the first place, and development would show better results if efforts were united instead of separated.

I had Compiz running on my Edgy desktop with a little nVidia card, and until that nVidia card crapped out on me, Compiz very rarely gave me problems. I'd leave it on for over a week at a time and never have anything other than the most minor of issues. I never tried Beryl, since I wanted stability and heard that Compiz was considered more stable, and it was pretty stable in my experience using it with Gnome.

Vogateer wrote:I had Compiz running on my Edgy desktop with a little nVidia card, and until that nVidia card crapped out on me, Compiz very rarely gave me problems. I'd leave it on for over a week at a time and never have anything other than the most minor of issues. I never tried Beryl, since I wanted stability and heard that Compiz was considered more stable, and it was pretty stable in my experience using it with Gnome.

This highlights one of my main arguments. On a typical hacker's desktop, which typically contains an Intel or NVIDIA graphics adapter, Compiz and Beryl works fine. But at some point, a user is gonna try using it on a weird setup, and then it's either not gonna work, or have some bugs that would never show up on the typical hacker's desktop.

I don't buy into the whole "but I don't have a problem" parade that Bryan of The Linux Action Show keeps blabbering about, time makes software stable, reliable and "secure", NOT "but I don't have a problem". That's what the core GNOME people sometimes say when BSD developers report bugs that they run into.

Patrick wrote:Wasn't the whole point of the beryl/compiz merger is that you get the stabililty of compiz along with the new cutting edge stuff from beryl? A sort of best of both worlds scenario.

If that's the point of the merger than why in the world would anyone be happy with Yet Another ALPHA State Demo?

hellonorman wrote:

Patrick wrote:Wasn't the whole point of the beryl/compiz merger is that you get the stabililty of compiz along with the new cutting edge stuff from beryl? A sort of best of both worlds scenario.

If that's the point of the merger than why in the world would anyone be happy with Yet Another ALPHA State Demo?

LOL, great point, there's a billion on YouTube by now.