I (Stylized Image Of Body Part) Beryl
I installed Beryl on a laptop yesterday, and I've been enjoying the experience overall. When I first heard of it, I turned my nose up at it as a favoring of style over substance. At PyCon, though, I saw some people using it and had the opportunity in the meantime to use a Mac and experience things like Exposé and the dashboard, and my interest was piqued.
Things I like:
- Scale/Window Picker may change the way I work.
- Thumbnails during Application/Window Switching make changing tasks much quicker.
- A few of the provided animations enhance the user experience.
Things I don't like:
- Some keyboard shortcuts I setup for Gnome/Metacity have continued to work, e.g., ctrl-n for the browser and ctrl-m for mail. Others, like ctrl-t for a terminal window, don't. I haven't figured out why this is, though I did add ctrl-t throught the Beryl Settings Manager. I haven't determined if I can hook the "windows" key (Super_L) back up to the Gnome panel menu; I particularly miss that setting.
- There's a dearth of documentation. It's hard to know what a particular setting is even for, unless it's self-explanatory, which many of them are, fortunately. Of course, this is a great opportunity to contribute to the project.
- Some features have no discernable effect. I followed the directions from the Beryl FAQ to apply transparency to menus, just to check it out, and nothing changed. I've seen this on a few features. For some, it could just be that I don't know what change I've actually made in some cases.
- Too many configurables!
As Chris and Jeff predicted, the biggest annoyances stem from moving from a mature desktop environment/window manager to something newer, with different commands and interactions, as well as niggling problems that might be bugs or might just be my lack of experience with the system, though some would say if don't grasp the workings of the system, that in itself is a bug.
Lest I sound down on it though, these are only initial impressions after a few hours of use, some of which were spent fiddling with the configuration and focusing on Beryl rather than just working within its environment. It's neat, bringing an underused piece of hardware, the 3D display card, into the workflow.
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