I have been running beryl for a few days now and I have to admit, I don’t like it. I have ran it in both AIGLX and XGL modes and they both put a huge load on my CPU. My main system is my laptop which is a AMD 1800+ with 512mb RAM. I run XFCE not because my system will not handle KDE or Gnome, but because I prefer its speed and in my opinion ease of use.
My main problem with beryl is the fact that is eats away at my CPU.
For example, I am away from my computer all night and I get back on
with a 1.75 load. Without this software the load would be in the 0.01
to 0.05 range. I am not sure if I do not have a setting right or what,
but I followed the wiki’s on the project’s site.
Everything
with beryl looks very glassy in all of the themes, it looks a lot like
Vista. There are probably quite a few people who like this, I am not
one of them. I guess that I am someone who prefers function over
beauty. I found the program to be more limiting than helpful. By
default when you right click on a link in your browser it will wiggle
for what feels like an eternity. Its easy to turn this off in the
manager, but by the time you get everything running quick you are just
about back to your default window manager settings.
One really
neat feature was when a window was not active it would go slightly
transparent. This makes it very easy to find out what has focus.
For
me, the cons highly outweigh the pros for Beryl and its glossy windows.
At this point I would not recommend it to anyone unless they are
looking for the beauty in the system and not functionality. I think
this will be great for the OS X or Vista converts, but for us who have
been using Linux happily for years its just annoying.
You can find my previous post with screen shots here.
