Beryl: Better than Compiz By Far 17 years, 6 months ago by Martey Dodoo

I have noticed that every couple of months, I need to reinstall in order for my computer to feel fresh and new. Since the only alternative solution I could think of was to buy a MacBook, I dumped all of my data to my external hard drive and did a fresh installation of Edgy Beta.

Before I could get fglrx working, much less XGL and compiz, a co-worker mentioned that the community at compiz.net had changed their name to Beryl. I had stopped using the community-developed version after it killed gnome-window-decorator (which causes titlebars to disappear, making it impossible to move or position windows), switching back to the stock version of compiz in the Edgy repositories. Still, looking at the user-friendly settings manager included in Beryl, I decided to give it a whirl.

I am glad that I did. The instructions to get XGL and Beryl working in Ubuntu Edgy were easy to follow. Beryl's Settings Manager is also far easier to use that trying to manipulate gconf-editor to change Compiz's settings. I generally do not like using third-party packages (inevitably, incompatibilities between them and the official repositories end up breaking my computer), but I am willing to make an exception for Beryl. The functionality it adds makes XGL much easier to use.