Beryl, a new look at window management
Kristian Lyngstøl, Beryl Developer
Beryl is the new generation of window managers that utilizes hardware that the game-industry has helped push forward for well over a decade. I will both demonstrate the actual eye-candy and usability-enhancing functionality Beryl possess, while mentioning both the brief history of Beryl and our future plans.
Beryl has recently gone through a phase of getting the first stable release branch out of the door, and at the same time established some organizational structure. This process has introduced new developers to the project, new features and new ideas.
At the moment, there are several plans to rip apart the core of beryl only to put it back together again, without having to rewrite everything. The goal is to make Beryl a long-lasting piece of software that will appeal both to new, young users and the older and possibly more controversial user-base that wouldn't be fooled by pretty eye-candy if it didn't have a practical usage. With a project like Beryl, it's very easy to get lost in visual effects, and forget that it's really about managing windows. The most vocal members of the community really put their imagination to work when they make suggestions, anything from origami folding windows, to four-dimensional desktop cubes. While it's very easy to dismiss these suggestions, many of the features that currently exist in Beryl now are the result of such suggestions. This is why the Beryl project tries to be as open as possibly with the community.
With the freeze of Beryl 0.2.0 gone, both users and developers look forward to significant new work to stabilise and improve the existing functionality, while also allowing some long-awaited new features to slip in.
Kristian_Lyngstøl is
born in 1983, Kristian started computer twiddling at about 8 years of age. He
fiddled with basic-languages like basica, qbasic and visual basic
until I started using GNU/Linux in 1999, and quickly picked up some
basic perl coding and learned C.
Composite window managers first caught his interest somewhere in the beginning of 2006, though he didn't try it until august 2006 and his first impression was that there was definitly room for improvement. He still remembers his Xgl-based compiz installation as a nightmare. No proper build files, no proper packages of anything, it was either a choice between using CVS-versions or alien'ed rpm packages. After he got compiz up and running, he felt that he was running half a SuSE and half a Debian....
I have worked mostly on obscure bug-fixes and a couple of simple plugins. I'm the author of Opacify, and I've rewritten the trailfocus plugin, and the less talked about debug plugin. The debug plugin was written as a mean to get detailed debug output from users when there were problems no developer could reproduce.