Submitted by ggarron on Sat, 04/28/2007 - 14:59
I have installed beryl in my Feisty and also in my Fedora 6 following the same steps followed to have it installed on Feisty.
Looking at it work we all could see it is really nice, and if we have a regular video card, not a minimal negative effect is seen in overall performance.
But I started to think what is the real impact of this project in Linux, beside being nice it gives no other functionality, but wait, then I realized I was wrong the composite projects like Compiz and Beryl now together are really important for Linux.
Where?
In the battlefield of Linux Vs Vista, I can certainly affirm that some XP users converted to Linux after seeing Linux with beryl and all those YouTube videos helped a lot!
With composite projects Linux can do more that Vista and with less software, now with Gentoo, Knoppix, Fedora and Ubuntu among others distros which came with 3D desktop effects out of the box, they are really getting more users to Linux now a days than any other period of time in the past.
Of course we could not forget to mention multimedia support projects or office projects are helping to this cause of making Linux more and more popular.
In my personal opinion, I think that once the graphics acceleration and 3D Graphics management improve even more in Linux we will also have lots of the new generation games developed for Linux, and at that time we will have even more users switching to Linux.
By the way talking about who is helping Linux to gain more and more popularity Microsoft is doing its part :). By closing XP sales and with Vista being so hardware hungry some users specially here in Latin America where buying that "big" computers is not affordable for lots of users, more and more will be willing to convert to Linux.
We still have a lot of job to do, in getting more users for Linux, and why we need more users for Linux? that will be another post. :)
I have been using Linux as my sole operating system since 2001 and, while I do feel the work on these compsiting managers is important enough to be recognised, I feel that compositing is nothing more than a resource-wasting toy. What Linux actually needs is for people to stop wasting time and energy on useless projects and concentrate on the one thing in which Linux has always lagged behind: Games. Decent games are the one thing that would bring most dual-booters over to the Linux side once and for all.. and we would likely see beginning of Windows' demise.
You are right, maybe i should have add that point in my post When is Linux suitable for you, and there should be more gamers than architects out there willing to have a real good and stable Linux based game console. :)
Guillermo Garron