I’ve previously posted about XFCE with Beryl and the fact that its fairly easy to get working in xubuntu. In my second post I stated that I did not like Beryl for various reasons. With all of the talk as of late about Beryl being installed by default in various distros I decided to give it another go.
From my last post and this beryl had somehow became corrupt. When I would login to the beryl session the xfce window manager would start and it would not allow me to start beryl’s. I decided that it would be easiest just to uninstall all of the components and start fresh. Reinstalling was fairly simple with synaptic, I did not have any problems here. After a the install a quick ctrl+alt+backspace to restart X and I was in XCFE and Beryl once again.
The first thing I noticed was the fact that Beryl had been updated and a few things have changed. I thought that some of my previous problems may have been fixed, sadly I was wrong. If you use keyboard shortcuts for almost everything like me you will quickly find out that Beryl takes over most keyboard shortcuts by default. One of my favorite shortcuts is the F6 key in firefox. This normally moves the cursor to the address bar so you can type something in. I press this key when running Beryl and all of the sudden all of the windows hide and I see my desktop. I for one do not have any items on my desktop and have absolutely no need to have this shortcut. I went into the horrible beryl manager to try to find the place to unset this. It probably took half an hour to find the right setting.
I have to say I like the whole cube aspect of the 4 desktops. It provides a quick and easy way to remember go through all of the screens. It was fun to hit ctrl+alt+left or right arrow and just hold them down. It would make me dizzy and it surprisingly didn’t kill the processor. The issue I had was the fact that only the left control and alt would toggle the movement of the screen. Normally either of the controls and alts will work to do this. This might just be a setting, but I didn’t have time to look into this as the last time I tired to fix something it took 30 minutes.
The water effects are neat at first, but quickly become tiresome when you are trying to get real work done. It is just an unnecessary feature than wastes valuable time when you are trying to do things very quickly. You can live with it, but it just wastes time more than it adds to the experience.
What finally made me switch back to the xfce window manager was when I was typing my post on Vista last night and X kept “crashing” for no reason. I would be typing and all of the sudden X would restart. It seemed to always restart when I would get to one part about Vista blue screening, of all topics. After a little investigating I found out that beryl has kindly bound the shift and backspace together to restart Xserver. I would be trying BSOD (for Blue Screen Of Death) and would type it as BSDO and have to hit the backspace key. By habit I still had my finger on the shift key — X restarts. It took me about 4 times doing this to figure out exactly what it was.
I can see no logical reason to bind shift and backspace to restart X, you’ve already got control+alt+backspace to do this. There does not need to be a simpler command for it. This just aggravated me and I immediately switched away from beryl and do not currently have any desire to switch back. Some people may enjoy the fuzzy GUIs like beryl, Vista, and OS X, but I am not one of those people. If it does not improve productivity or at least give a laugh I do not see the reason for it being on the computer.
But hey, thats why I run xfce in the first place. I don’t like all of the extra stuff added by gnome and kde. I might just be one of the select few who feel this way though, I can see how most people enjoy all of the extra “features”.
