14 DAY TRIAL // Beryl was just released today, a few hours ago as I am writing this and it brings a lot of new improvements to existing plugins as well as new ones and the usual bug fixes: "During the last year, Beryl has gone through a number of incidents. Users have argued about Beryl and Compiz for a long time now. With this release, Beryl has taken a giant step apart from Compiz. While some things are similar, which is inevitable in a fork, many things are not. We at Beryl believe that starting with the 0.3 development phase, many more things will be come clearer in regards to Beryl. We are setting our focus on organization, improving user relations, making the software more bug free, and overall more fun for you!"
This release is the product of many hard laboring hours and it's filled with a lot of fun, more stable than ever before and it has a better user support. Let's have an in-depth look at what's new in the 0.2.0 release:
New Plugins:
￭ Thumbnail: Thumbnails on the taskbar (window list) which show a mini view of the actual window. ￭ Snap: Allows windows to "snap" to each other, or provide edge resistance. ￭ Opacify: Makes windows behind the active window transparent. ￭ Group: Allows windows to be grouped, to easily switch between a set of windows.
New system requirements check
￭ The improved check has much better accuracy. ￭ The check is a lot faster.
New Window Decorators
￭ Since 0.1, we have two new window decorators ￭ Heliodor: Uses metacity themes; ￭ Aquamarine: Uses Kwin themes.
Newly Rewritten Beryl-Settings
￭ Written in Python ￭ More user-friendly UI ￭ Better profile support
For those of you that don't know yet, Beryl is an OpenGL accelerated desktop that seeks to provide a free, open source desktop experience for every Linux user out there. Beryl tends to compete with Aero from Windows Vista and the classical effects on Mac OS X systems. Designed to be highly flexible, portable and extensible, Beryl is a combined window manager and composite manager written in C using OpenGL to provide acceleration, allowing for a more native and intuitive understanding of your workspace.
I've made a showcase of Beryl some time ago for those of you that want to see what Beryl's powers are, and you can enjoy it here.
You can download Beryl now from Softpedia.