Why I Dumped Beryl for Metacity

Let me get this straight. People are switching to Linux because they think it is cool and Matt is upset that it's not because they think Windows sux.

Screwed up!

Matt wrote:

Quoting:At the end of the day, I suppose that nothing I say here is going to change anyone's mind.

While very realistic; we over here at LXer probably couldn't have said it any better; then why write the fooled up article in first place?

Because it pays his bills, it's the only reason I can find for most of his useless twaddle (TC's phrase, but I like it).

He's the journalistic version of Linspire.

Hmm, I heard the name Matt Hartley far too many times before in a negative context in our forums, and it makes me wonder why 'we' (LXer) still publish his work? I must admit I only read three (or so) of his stories, all of them were bad.

Comments and your experiences are welcome, please share.

He writes the rare good article, however most of his stuff when all the points are added up = >> /dev/null

Now now now, in all fairness, I must say I agree with him as to the usefulness of compiz whatever but that may be just me! As to the usefulness of the majority of his --- ahhh hmm -- is this still a family board -- well I'll leave it go at that!

(grouchy old man mode) I found the way that windowing is handled under compiz whatever is completely counter intuitive to the way I'm used to windowing. Irritated the heck out of me so I had to go back to the old way of NO cube. (/grouchy old man mode)

DEK

PS Had to edit out the angle brackets and use parenthesis.

I used to give him a hard time in my comments to his articles in my weekly roundup. I did start deleting his submissions and he e-mailed me asked me why and he subtly accused me of censoring him so and I told him. He makes himself a big target with some of his articles and our readers ask me why I waste newswire space on his articles all the time.

So I decided that instead of vilifying him in print and giving him much undue attention and/or deleting his submissions that I would just let his articles speak for themselves. I try not to comment on anything of his but I thought I would make an exception for Hans.

Why do his articles still make the newswire? Believe me, there are many articles of his that do not make it. But if he submits FOSS related articles, I post them, no matter what I think of them. If almost everyone who reads his articles thinks they are stupid, that's his problem, not mine.

The newswire's function is to help keep people informed of what is going on with Linux and Open Source. I personally think that the threads related to his articles are good for those who are new to FOSS. It helps them to see his stuff and what people think of it so they can learn to discern real news from banter.

Scott

Perhaps slightly OT, but regarding the whole 3D cube queston, I was quite impressed by beryl - I was getting fairly spectacular results from modest hardware, and it was a lot nicer than the compiz/xgl hack I'd tried before. Naturally I thought it interesting when compiz and beryl merged, but I have to say that after trying compiz fusion, I'm missing beryl.

The new compiz fusion isn't as easy to use, and I'm not getting good performance. beryl made the desktop seem faster, while compiz seemingly makes it more sluggish - not at all something that I'd like to keep.

I certainly hope this gets sorted out, and that compiz fusion can eventually offer everything that beryl did. Oh well, maybe kde4 will make this all a moot point. ;)

@herzeleid: I'm experiencing the exact opposite. I'm using Compiz-fusion on an embedded intel 950 GMA. It used to run okay on Beryl, with the occasional hiccup when doing full-screen transformations (the cube for instance) but on compiz-fusion it just flies. Much better than Beryl. I can't say anything about usability because I'm using Debian Etch. Etch ships with Gnome 2.14 and the CCSM doesn't work on it so I need to do everything through the gconf-editor.

@dek: The cube is also one of the first things I disable. I do like the "wall" desktop manager though. Instead of a 3D cube you get a 2D wall that you slide over. Usually I also disable wobbly windows on a lot of things, use simple fades as my animations and disable the wheel and deck-of-cards windows switcher. I only use the plain Window switcher with "bring to front" disabled. I just like my effects subtle :-)

I did forget to mention..

For some reason his articles (usually numbering between 3-5) always all come out on the same day and they are spread out over two or three different websites.

I almost lined them up one after the other today just for fun but I just couldn't bring myself to do it, maybe next time..:-)

Scott

I agree with Scott on linking to all sort of articles no matter how stupid they are and let the readers decide for themselves.

Compiz and such are nice Razzle-Dazzle for those who like it. I don't see a problem in having it as long as one can turn it on/off at will.

What I like the most is the isometric view done on MS Vista, the one with the iso-stacked windows to select one. Does Compiz have similar view?

> he subtly accused me of censoring him

If I wrote a blog post about every experience I had in the bathroom, it would hardly be worthy of the newswire. You can only censor content. It's called editorial judgement when you refuse to publish something that's garbage.

OTOH, I just look at the author, and if it's MH, I ignore the "article".

> ...why 'we' (LXer) still publish his work?

He writes Linux and OSS related opinion articles. One of the things I value about LXer is that it is largely non-judgmental about the news stories it prints. I wouldn't want them to start being so on Matt Hartley's account.

That said, I've made my opinion of Hartley's articles well known on several occasions, and I if I notice his name on the article, I no longer bother reading it.

Sometimes the headline catches my attention first, and I don't notice his name. I've always regretted those occasions. :(

Quoting: sander: I'm using Compiz-fusion on an embedded intel 950 GMA. It used to run okay on Beryl, with the occasional hiccup when doing full-screen transformations (the cube for instance) but on compiz-fusion it just flies.

Has anything else changed? Perhaps you were using the "i810" driver before, and now you're using the "intel" driver?

@herzeleid: Nope. Using the exact same i810 driver that comes with plain vanilla Debian/etch. All I did was drop the Beryl packages from debian.beryl-project.org and install the compiz-fustion packages from http://shame.tuxfamily.org/repo/?cat=11 and everything else stayed the same.

I'm guessing that compiz-fusion makes better use of some of the OpenGL extensions offered by my driver. The only downside is that the CCSM configuration tool doesn't work, but I could care less about that.

Okay, thanks for the feedback, and Scott, I agree: Free Software is about choice, and so should a Free Software news site be. I was just curious what others were thinking. Reading three MH articles one after another would be fun for a rainy sunday-afternoon maybe?

About the cube: While it looks like eye-candy, I thought of it in a different way: When using multiple desktops (and isn't that what we Linux users do everyday?) some people not used to it '"on't get it". However, when they see the cube, and can actually see the four different desktops, they _do_ get it, since they can see the differences between the four, and they can see what's going on.

Also, the 'feature' in which you can 'bend down' the top of a window to look what's beneath it came in quite handy, to copy and paste between Windows. Last good thing I remember, was the re-order feature, which reordered my Windows in a kind of a circle so I could view them all.

Therefore, I think we should ask this question to people who are new to Linux, since most of us probably are used to KDE/Gnome. I still use WindowMaker also because of its simplicity (a whole empty desktop is a good start of the day!) but I still think Beryl is not only eye-candy, but also usability (magnifier-glass was handy too).

> I still think Beryl is not only eye-candy, but also usability (magnifier-glass was handy too).

You make a good point -- and one we constantly throw at Windows users --

It's easy to become an old stuck-in-your-rut fogey with your computer use. New stuff will always be inconvenient at first. The question is whether it stays that way.

Well, the long and the short of it is, beryl/compiz are really cool hacks and neat toys, but the implementation is not yet perfect. Great for youtube videos, not so much fun in the office for day to day work, as time goes by.

So, I've removed compiz for now, and discovered that by just enabling the native kde effects, I get a lot of nice eye candy, what with shadows, fade-in/out, translucency etc, and with superkaramba, it's quite nice indeed.

Heck, I can live without the cube, since linux had virtual desktops long before anyone thought of a cube, and they still work nicely for me.

A 3D desktop takes the task of redrawing the desktop from the processor and unloads to the video card.

If you don't like the eye-candy, turn it off.

Indeed, almost forgotten that: You can also use Beryl without eye-candy, which happens if you run Sabayon on a computer without enough resources to use eye-candy. Even without eye-candy, Beryl still did its job.