Does Compiz/Beryl really work that well?

Vidar

I've been away from gentoo and linux in general for the past year or so, and left right about when X.org 7.0 came out. At the time, I was somewhat on the bleeding edge using composite and xcompmgr, which in general was mostly stable with the nvidia drivers, but still a little buggy at times.

So I'm looking at getting back into Gentoo again, and imagine my surprise when I start poking around on gentoo-wiki, and reading the articles about how it's apparently possible to do all the real composite effects without all this xgl nonsense (I'd go with xegl if it was out) with the new beta nvidia drivers and compiz/beryl.

So my plan is to migrate back to gentoo, running gnome and compiz, and I hope to experience a nice eye-candy-filled usable desktop that's mostly stable. Only problem is all I've been able to find searching around the forums are various problems people have had. So I'm really curious, with the nvidia drivers, is compiz/beryl relatively stable? In general does it crash much? Is it generally usable?
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"Vidar, Odin's mighty son, he will come to slay the wolf
The sword runs into the heart of Hverdrungs son
So he avenges his father" -- Amon Amarth - Burning Creation

fatcat.00 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Aug 2002 Posts: 145

I have been using Compiz (now Beryl) for the last 2 months. Stability recently has become pretty good, but not as good as a standard desktop (I use Gnome) with a standard WM. I am now on Beryl 0.1.1 and it hasn't crashed on me yet, and neither had the few previous version. That said, there is still wierdness (Java apps don't render correctly for instance) that you would have to tolerate. I am on an Nvidia card, BTW.

Beryl is cool, but really I don't know if its worth the trouble unless you are really interested. If you have it setup right you can easily start your former WM in any case.
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micr0c0sm · Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2006 2:56 am Post subject:

I can only tell you about my personal experience, but since the new nvidia drivers were released I have been running compiz-quinnstorm and now beryl. It is extremely stable for daily use. It's like most other parts of gentoo - pain in the butt to set up, but once it is, it works great. http://gentoo-wiki.com/Beryl is pretty much all you should need though.

immudium · Guru Joined: 12 Oct 2004 Posts: 332 Location: Utah

cessman4life · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Apr 2005 Posts: 141

I learn something else about it everyday but as was previously stated, there are problems with some java apps. Azureus works well but limewire doesn't work at all.

darius_w · n00b Joined: 25 Oct 2005 Posts: 28 Location: Norway

After the switch from xgl to nvidia-drivers even the fullscreen in mplayer work very well. I'm in a KDE enviroment, using the computer for office, web, im, e-mail and as a multimedia-center - as home user, and this has been the status since may. Crash is a seldom affair, even if I use it heavily, compiling, watching TV and browsing at the same time, ther is a little lag, but that is my only complain.

Like some said; Gentoo is a hassle to set up, but once it is running, i love it, even with this bleeding edge technology. In my experience xgl/compiz, and now nvidia-driver/beryl is far more stable than I expected.

Smartass me is dual booting between ~arch and the stable branch in similar enviroments and the same kernel, but I hardly boot into the stable one after I installed the xgl/compiz half a year ago ...

And with Beryl-manager it takes a second to switch WM if I need to, for some reason that I have yet not experienced so far.

Havin_it · Posted: Tue Oct 31, 2006 7:42 pm Post subject:

I think AIGLX is the best thing out - I'm not normally one to jump on the latest eyecandy fad, but I think it has actually improved my laptop's resource usage. My CPU fan is resting a lot more since I started using it

Note that I haven't used any overlays whatsoever* - just current ~x86 packages from the Portage tree. There may not be quite as many plugins as for beryl, and many peeps dislike the idea of using GConf to configure compiz, but I have not had a crash since my first day of getting it set up. It seems solid as a rock now.

* Okay, tiny lie. I made my own overlay, but all it contains is a duplicate of compiz-0.2.0.ebuild renamed to 0.3.2 to get the latest release, which gives you translucency support on the window-decorations. This will probably be in portage within the week anyway (I filed a bug

)

Abraxa · Posted: Tue Oct 31, 2006 10:07 pm Post subject:

While the effects you can achieve are really nice I have to admit that I'm not very fond of Xgl/AIGLX/Beryl and what not - simply because there is no straightforward way to set it up and mixing that with the current driver madness I find myself unable to get it running on neither my desktop (ATI Radeon9550 which means I need to use the open source drivers) nor my laptop (nVidia GeForce440 mobile which the nVidia-driver is unable to handle).
With that and the countless hours I've invested in trying to get it to run I have to say that I'm flat out disappointed.

-Abraxa

Dan · Veteran Joined: 25 Oct 2005 Posts: 1302

Both beryl and compiz right out of portage work just fine now. I use both beryl's "Beryl Manager" enables you to switch between compiz/beryl with ease.

roderick · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:14 am Post subject:

emerge -av beryl

This will pull in relevant dependencies now. Then, simply run beryl-manager. This is the easiest, and allows you to test without messing things up. It also assumes you have a working X server configured for AIGLX (X 7.1).

No need to try Xgl, unless you want to. If you do, this some more work to be done. Goto thr xeffects wiki (http://wiki.gentoo-xeffects.org/Beryl) for complete details. The wiki will tell you how to get the latest *-9999 svn versions. If you don't want that, then just omit the "-*" from your /etc/port/package.keywords setup indicated and you should be fine.

Back in July, things were really hoaky, but not, most of the dependencies are in portage and you probably have them installed anyway (especially if you are running xorg 7.1 w/ Mesa 6.5.1).
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If God were a pickle, I'd still say "no pickle on my burger".
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jcat · Veteran Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 1337

I find it extremely usable, just follow the instructions at the xeffects wiki, I've been running compiz then beryl for 6 months no probs. And just because it's installed doesn't mean you have to use it, so install it and give it a go, see what you reckon for yourself...

Cheers,
jcat

Havin_it · Posted: Thu Nov 23, 2006 1:12 pm Post subject:

Since I last posted I've also given beryl a whirl, and it's very impressive but I went back to compiz quite quickly.

Beryl is just 'a bit too much' for my liking. It's nice having a dedicated configuration GUI, though in places I found it a bit counterintuitive. The sheer number of options is quite overwhelming, and not everything is well-enough documented as to what it actually does (though I expect this will come in time).

The first thing I found myself doing was turning off a lot of stuff. For example, having three corners and two edges of the screen responding to the cursor is just too much -- I was constantly doing inadvertent cube-spins and window-tiling. Also having ALL menus and tooltips doing silly wobbly things just gets annoying and is counter-usability in my book.

Inevitably, I also found that even with a reduced set of effects, I was still taking a noticeable performance hit on my humble 855GM card / Celeron cpu machine. With compiz, as previously mentioned, it's actually less overworked than without AIGLX.

Beryl is definitely a lot of fun for avid tweakers with buff GPUs, but for us mortals who just want the basic usability enhancements and moderate eyecandy, I'd recommend sticking with compiz.

roderick · Posted: Thu Nov 23, 2006 6:23 pm Post subject:

Perhaps a beryl wizard for configuring would be beneficial?

Anyone want to take a stab a writing a wizard to enable/disable certain effects? Or perhaps a eye-cany meter like in KDE to select how much gets turned on based on estimated GPU.

That would alleviate some of the afore-meantioned critique about beryl.
_________________
If God were a pickle, I'd still say "no pickle on my burger".
http://roderick-greening.blogspot.com/

jcat · Veteran Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 1337

Havin_it · Posted: Fri Nov 24, 2006 11:35 am Post subject:

I think any config app, given compiz/beryl's pluggable nature, should itself be pluggable. (NB. Maybe beryl-manager is already made this way, I dunno.)

b1f30 · Apprentice Joined: 16 Nov 2005 Posts: 262 Location: USA

sonicbhoc · Posted: Tue Nov 28, 2006 9:37 pm Post subject:

I agree with the above poster, Beryl owns compiz.

I've been running it for a while, and it crashes when I'm trying to compile 2 softwares at a time and do a lot of animations, in other words when the load is FAR above average. My computer is 2 years old, though, and when I get a new one it probably won't do that.

The fact that it runs on my computer is a miracle in itself - Beryl is awesome.

My system is a measly Pentium 3 1.0 GHz with 256MB of ram, the only redeeming quality of it is its 64MB ATI Radeon 7200 video card, that works perfectly with the open source DRI driver.