percent of people with sufficient knowledge and a few hours free to set up vista? ~80%

percent of people with sufficient knowledge and hundreds of hours of free time needed to edit obscure etc/fstab files and trawl through myriad man pages, usenet posts and incomprehensible command line codes needed to set up a linux distro with beryl? .0000000000001%

pish. it isn't that hard to set up. its 3 lines of command line stuff and 1 file to change, heck you can download a program that does it for you. after that, the prettyest eye candy money(err...) can buy(download for free)

if there were a live version i'd try it

The only real hinderence to using a composit manager like Compiz or Beryl on Linux is the lack of supported drivers for Linux. Getting proper drivers installed is 90% of the battle, and from there it's not too difficult to install the rest. And also consider that both Compiz and Beryl are still in beta, and yet they run quite nicely despite that. Compare that to Vista, which requires about 4 gigs of ram if you want it to run as well as XP did.

Linux is dead in the water for me because of it's driver support woes.

Can we stop it with these bullshit beryl videos now? Theres millions of these purporting the same visual ecstasy over and over again. I get the point, its free and it looks nice.

This is the last beryl video I will upvote.

at least i got a vote

Linux is dead in the water for me because of it's driver support woes.

the ONLY reason i haven't gone 100% linux so far is because i game pretty hardcore on a regular basis. cedega is nice if you don't mind spending a little money for specific support, and seeing as the OS is free... wine works for windows-only apps (well, most of them). beryl is friggin sweet, and if they can get things working right, looking glass should blow beryl out of the water. it's still a little wonky at the moment, but it's coming along.

oh, and with very very minimal knowledge of linux at the time i did the install, from burning the live disc ISO to completing the install of beryl...? about 2 hours.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

All very pretty but mostly just window dressing- I'll call it now and say that Leopard will leave jaws on the floor - AND be more intuitive/useful

How useful are these wiggly windows and 3D views? I run Windows 2000 with a 4mb graphics card and it works just fine, certainly well enough to get all my work done and watch stuff on Videosift.

I am definitely interested in Ubuntu but this eye-candy stuff just distracts from what you can actually do.

thats just a gimmick

it adds nothing towards functionality or usability

fluff

Eye candy: the most useless waste of memory/cpu usage since bonzai buddy

" percent of people with sufficient knowledge and a few hours free to set up vista? ~80%

percent of people with sufficient knowledge and hundreds of hours of free time needed to edit obscure etc/fstab files and trawl through myriad man pages, usenet posts and incomprehensible command line codes needed to set up a linux distro with beryl? .0000000000001%"

This simply isn't the case anymore, PLEASE use Ubuntu and see how things have changed. 90% of things that users need to do on Ubuntu is done via gui's and it's improving.

Also wiki's (such as Ubuntu's) have now replaced the need for end users to consult man's.

But in the end it's your choice, do you want to pay a lot of money for an OS or choose a free one?

Also of note, this may all be eye candy, but so are Aero and OSXs interface. This is merely an addition to Linux so people don't complain that Linux has no eye candy. As nifty as I think it is, I probably won't use it myself. But where Linux beats out all the other competition is the sheer configurability of just about everything.

The only thing missing is major gaming support. However, I expect this to change in the near future. DirectSound is slowly being replaced by OpenAL, Direct3D can expect some major competition from OpenGL by the end of this summer (when it's updated to have all the Direct3D 10 features), and SDL does everything that the rest of DirectX does equally well.

In the end, I don't care if the world converts to Linux. Let them stick with Windows and OSX. All I want is to be able to do all the things I want to do on Linux and not have to rely on the other two myself.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

OS X looks great - but none of it's eye candy. The genie effect might be misconstrued as such, but it's really just an intuitive way to let you know where your window's gone when you minimize.

Aero however, is just pure glitz - very little in the way of UI improvement - in fact I would say they've made it worse in some ways. Control Panel is incredibly dense and confusing now.

dag, keep in mind that you can open the CP in "Classic View" which is almost exactly like XP, except the fact that "Add/Remove Programs" is now "Programs and Features"

you can also go so far as to revert to the original XP start menu, for that matter.

Aero is virtually 100% eye candy. the taskbar thumbnails come in handy every once in a while, as does Win-Tab, but otherwise it's just for a pretty interface. Beryl IS 100% eye candy other than the fact that it makes exploring your multiple desktops easier. but sylvester is right.... beryl is just to make linux pretty... the GUI, especially in Ubu, already makes linux just as easy as windows, if not easier in some cases.

I wouldn't say that none of OSX is eye-candy, Dag. Really, most of the pretty effects in it aren't necessary. (In all honesty, I never found that genie effect to be actually USEFUL. The one effect it has that is useful is . . . Expose, I think. The one that shows all the windows scaled down.)

Beryl and Compiz, though mostly eye candy, also have their uses as well. They have a similar feature to Expose, which is useful for obvious reasons, as well as a zoom feature for the visually impared. That fancy rotating cube is actually to visualize the multiple desktops (a feature Linux window managers have had for a long time anyway) and can make it easier to find the desktop you want. And, of course, for those who really do just want fire and exploding windows, they get catered to as well. (And, of course, each plugin can be disabled depending on personal preference.)

The point is that when utilized appropriately, eye candy can be more than just pretty shininess. OSX and Compiz/Beryl do it right. Aero . . . well, it's getting there.

As for me, I'll stick with the terminal for my work, as it's the most efficient way do do work in any case.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

I find Genie genuinely useful on my crowded dock. I think that the problem with Aero, (and probably Beryl too though I've only seen videos) is that the shininess comes before the usefulness.

It's as if a designer said "hey we've got this neat effect, what can we do with it?" With OS X it feels like the reverse. It's "Hey we need to be able to do X, how can we do it in an elegant intuitive way?".

Okay, I just gave Beryl's recent release a try, and I'm quite impressed. Dag, contrary to what these videos show off, they seem to be going more in the direction of making these plugins visual effects more useful, as opposed to simple eye candy. The main thing I find to be nifty is the way you can group windows, but there are other usability improvements as well. It's not perfect, of course, but it's getting very close.

I think in the end, OSX and Beryl/Compiz have the right aim in mind here. The OSX interface is designed by those who have a very strict set of Human Interface Guidelines, so you can count on them to make their visual improvements useful. And Beryl/Compiz are being developed by the Linux community, who are comprised of people who are more interested in usefulness than eye-candy in any case. (Else why would they be using Linux.) Meanwhile, Aero is shooting off in the "OMG CHECK OUT OUR L33T GRAFFIX!!!LOL" direction.

So yeah, anything that will pull people away from Windows, eh? ;-)