Beryl and Compiz to Merge

I'll be honest - I didn't see this one happening anytime soon, but alas, it is going to happen (and I suppose sooner is better than later.)

A while after Compiz and XGL's initial release as the enabler of crazy wobbly windows on Linux, some developers from the community didn't like David Reeveman's/Novell's slightly restricted (yet open source) development process that was occuring with Compiz. Personally, I thought Compiz's "I'll work on it for 9 months, not bother with releases, and end up with something amazing" development process worked pretty darn well - Before XGL, there were endless discussions about how to make OS X-like graphics a reality on Linux, none of which materialized into anything really usable. Instead of bickering about it (*cough* design by committee) for years, David decided to just do it. And he did it. And for a 0.1 release, Compiz was pretty damn good.

Can't argue with results.

However, some developers from the community who were getting involved with Compiz didn't like the way development looked like it was going to proceed, so they forked, giving us Beryl. Those developers worked on adding more crazy effects and in the short term took the focus away from stability, but within the last few months it seems like the developers efforts to stabilize Beryl have been successful. In the meantime, the Compiz team has also been plugging away and adding new features to Compiz as well.

This brings us to March 23, 2007, when QuinnStorm announced that Beryl will remerge with Compiz. It won't be easy for the teams to merge, but I think they both realize now that the long-term benefits of cooperation far outway the short-term setbacks that each team will incur.

Now that's progress.

Random News (Beryl release and video, Edgy Beta)

Here's some interesting recent happenings:

• MacSlow's got a video of Edgy running Beryl, showing off blurred transparent windows.
  
• On that note, the first version of Beryl (0.1.0) was released (yeah, it's still lacking a website). If you've already got the QuinnStorm repositories enabled in Ubuntu, a "sudo apt-get install beryl emerald emerald-themes" should do it for you. (Launch it with beryl-manager.) If you don't have XGL or anything set up yet, I suggest waiting until Ubuntu 6.10 comes out at the end of this month, as it'll be much easier to set up then. Beryl does feel a bit snappier than the old QuinnStorm compiz though and things seem less buggy so far. (The nice thing about Beryl is that Quinn's team can now make their own releases and stabilize them beforehand. No more buggy development compiz.)
• Ok, last bit of Beryl news for today, I promise! Linux.com has an interview with QuinnStorm on the new release and the divergence from Compiz. It doesn't contain a whole lot of new information, but there is one gem tucked away at the end:
  

  "I would tell a layperson to look forward to a desktop that can really outshine what both other major players in the field offer, especially once X gets its input redirection code in, but even before that we'll be able to really catch some attention."
  

  
  The article doesn't explain what X's "input redirection code" is, but it rang a bell with me. I've read that in Compiz (and now Beryl), when you click on a wobbling window, your click won't "land" on the right spot. It turns out this is actually a limitation in the X server, so I'm pretty sure Quinn was referring to the solution to this problem. I'm sure this'll open up some interesting ways to interact with windows though. (Also, my memory is terrible, so someone correct me if I'm wrong on this one...)
  
• The beta of Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft has been released. The official Ubuntu release notes details the big noticeable changes and includes some screenshots as well.
  

Compiz gets forked real good: Beryl

It was time. QuinnStorm (who maintained her own tree of compiz and provides awesome Ubuntu packages) has forked off Compiz into a new project, Beryl.

It's been clear for a while that QuinnStorm's version of Compiz has diverged from the simplicity present in the first release of Compiz. Quinn's tree has included all sorts of community developed plugins, most of which add shameless bling with little contribution to enhancing usability.

That's the difference as I see it: Novell's Compiz will continue to be a stable compromise between bling and usability, and Quinn's Beryl will become the community-driven bling-machine. And that's not to say that Beryl won't be stable, it's just that Novell puts more effort (and justifiably at that) into creating a top-notch user experience - Something that comes across as being an afterthought in Quinn's tree of Compiz.

At the very least, the next six months are going to bring us the answers to two important questions this fork has posed:
1. Will Beryl plugins remain compatible with Compiz? (mikedee from the Compiz forums asked this one)
2. When other distributions like Ubuntu add some sort of standard AIGLX/XGL support, will they offer Compiz or Beryl as the window manager of choice?

I honestly don't know the answers to either of these questions, but as development progresses, it'll certainly be interesting to find out. (In the meantime, follow this thread.)