Why beryl by default?

[Guest]

Reading the beryl roadmap - http://bugs.beryl-project.org/trac/wiki/Development%20Roadmap , It seems that ubuntu is going to include beryl by default when it has made a few improvements...

gconf support - Compiz has this already, I seem to remember beryl didn't want to use it. Wasn't this the biggest reason for the compiz/beryl split?

Heliodor will be default (I think), which is a compiz project. Would it not help to have the developer of the window decorator on the project?

"New frontends to configure and control Beryl while presenting the user with as few options as possible need to be designed and implemented."

Beryl has gnome-compiz-manager (exactly for this purpose) and then soon another configuration tool for advanced settings (http://zootreeves.googlepages.com/Screenshot.png - unfinished), all using gconf.

Stability improvements - Compiz is a lot more stable than beryl.

Obviously there are still things that compiz needs to do in order to meet ubuntu's requirements, but it seems to me there is much less than beryl needs? Has David R (or anyone else) talked to ubuntu about getting compiz installed by defailt?

[RYX]

I followed the "rumours" about beryl being included in Ubuntu and afaik it is either compiz or beryl - it isn't decided yet. And I think if the distributors look behind the "shiny bling", they may notice that compiz and beryl are still the same ... everyone knows where all the ideas come from. One problem could be that David is maybe not interested in including compiz in Ubuntu (why? because he is a Novell employee ...) ... but maybe it is true that compiz is no Novell-project anymore ... (can someone shed any light on this?)

Concerning the decorator and settings: I wanted to keep it as a surprise but I am working on a new decorator (as discussed in Ideas-forum) which offers a lot more flexibility than heliodor, g-w-d, emerald and whatever ... It is a plugin-based modification of gtk-window-decorator that includes a plugin-based user-definable menu, plugin-drawn decorations and other nice improvements. What I have in mind is to offer a configuration-system for compiz and the decorator - which is entirely "hidden" in the titlebar-menu (which is also shown on border-click with my version) ... I am no big fan of the gnome-idea to hide anything that a total noob might not understand within gconf-settings. In that certain case I prefer the OSX-way, where the window's right-click menu holds a lot more settings and options ... If we could user-define that menu and connect it to shell commands and simple gtk-dialogs, we have a complete settings-frontend - extensible to the extreme and included within the window (where those settings logically belong).

I think the compiz-roadmap is focusing more on fixing the real problems, beryl only tries to fix the results of the real problems (and the re-implementation of gconf is really ridiculous ... why did they move to their own system first?).

Just my thoughts on this ...

Edit: After reading the whole story on ubuntu.com, I want to add that I hope we can get both (compz/beryl) to be included by default. I would like to see a more or less peaceful co-existence. Competition is good, but a race to the goal "boecome-ubuntu-default" can cause bad side-effects and the end-user could be the real loser of the fight ...

[apokryphos]

Yeah, it hasn't been decided just yet. See the spec here:
https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/composite-by-default

[mikedee]

I think you are totally right, like RYX says though, it isn't decided yet which if any will be included by default.

As far as I can see the whole Beryl project has been based on pride right from the start, it was always their intention to try to become the default for every distro. Now everyone has produced their official roadmap, I am very happy that I supported Compiz.

They are free to take their project and do whatever to make it included by default. My opinion is that David (and us) should work towards providing the best software. His roadmap shows that he really is interested in third party plugins and that he is interested more in the features than the politics.

Beryl will suffer in my opinion because they have decided to freeze their development for Ubuntu, I think that most of Davids roadmap will be completed after they have frozen. Users unfortunatly suffer in the end which is what makes me unhappy.

[stalynx]

I wouldn't be too surprised if beryl is included by default into Ubuntu for political reasons. I don't use ubuntu so it doesn't mean much to me. In the long run tho compiz will be the better product mainly because DavidR is so much more experienced with X11/Xlib and programming in general. I can see Beryl becoming overwhelmed with silly bugs that could have been avoided if they had more experienced programmers. Not to say the beryl dev team are bad programmers but they are surely lacking in real X development. Plus anyone who has done any Xlib knows how obfuscated it is and how many of the new extensions lack any real documentation. Not only that it's real easy to make errors and adopt bad programming practices.

Currently the compiz community is lacking though. I hope more people get on board.

[Guest]

Sorry I thought that beryl had already been chosen as default, thats why i posted. I just find the whole thing so Ironic that the main modifications of beryl (beryl-settings and emerald) are going to be removed, it just makes the whole fork thing pointless.

I am working on a new decorator (as discussed in Ideas-forum) which offers a lot more flexibility than heliodor, g-w-d, emerald and whatever ... It is a plugin-based modification of gtk-window-decorator that includes a plugin-based user-definable menu, plugin-drawn decorations and other nice improvements. What I have in mind is to offer a configuration-system for compiz and the decorator

Sounds good, If you want something initial to built on I still have yawd (yet-another-window-decorator) floating round somewhere. It already has a small frontend and themeing support.

Edit: After reading the whole story on ubuntu.com, I want to add that I hope we can get both (compz/beryl) to be included by default. I would like to see a more or less peaceful co-existence.

I can't see that happening, I think it's pretty much got to be one or the other, but I agree it's a shame that they cannot work together.

Currently the compiz community is lacking though. I hope more people get on board.

Give it a chance, the forum hasn't been open for very long.

[amgeex]

Currently the compiz community is lacking though. I hope more people get on board.

Yeah, give it a while. And really, a lot of people will prefer using compiz instead of beryl, because beryl has too much useless stuff. I know its nice to see your windows burn, but its really not great from a usability standpoint. I prefer something that makes me more productive to something that eats up my performance. :roll:

[mikedee]

http://lists.beryl-project.org/pipermail/beryl-dev/2006-November/000023.html

This is what she said about gconf and we all know where that got us...

Also love the 'inherited' code bit. They are now off to 'inherit' some kwin and metacity code.

[profoX]

And really, a lot of people will prefer using compiz instead of beryl, because beryl has too much useless stuff. I know its nice to see your windows burn, but its really not great from a usability standpoint. I prefer something that makes me more productive to something that eats up my performance. :roll:

This is a dumb reason to choose compiz over beryl, because in a cleaned up release most effects will be disabled by default. And you can always enable/disable effects yourself and change the settings of those effects.

[iznogood]

Hi profoX,
its nice to see people from beryl posting here too...

However i would like to ask you (or any beryl developer) a simple question:

What is the difference of compiz over beryl??

Surely its not the configuration clients or the theme engines. I mean the internal diffs, to the core, that provide enhanced functionality and the ability to explore new areas of UI effects through plugins that the previous releases did not make that possible.
Now most plugins are ported to compiz thanks to the great job of mikedee and some others.I can not see much difference in any of these from a user perspective, maybe there are differences to the code but i haven't done any kind of search for that...
Also i am sure that enhancing an existing theme engine is better than fully rewriting it, unless ofcourse someone is doing it as a learning experience.

Anyway, since people from compiz are going to continue port plugins from beryl and people from beryl are still going to merge code from davidr and others, why keep up the current status???
I mean that obviously beryl devs would like to continue their work on the fork but maybe some communication channels could be found that all can benefit and reduce incompatibilities.If that is already in progress please say so, i may not be informed of it...

Finally i DO NOT want to start a new flame war.
If anyone wants to post anything that might provoke this please don't.
I just would like to know where people from beryl stand right now. There are people there that do a good job and it would be nice if they could cooperate with people from compiz.For me the actual reason of the fork was that people wanted many UI effects in a hury so that they could impress users,also some distros like ubuntu might be behind that which is actually a good thing.
However this has been accompliced in a great degree, so what are the actual reasons ???