Beryl
More info
- Creator
- Quinn Storm and others
- Released
- Type
- Compositing window manager
- Predecessor
- Compiz
The Compiz fork that, for six months in 2006–2007, was the wobbliest Linux desktop around, before the two merged again.
Compiz was developed at Novell and accepted contributions slowly. Quinn Storm maintained a branch, compiz-quinnstorm, where the community's plugins and fixes piled up, and when the distance to the main line had grown too large the branch was renamed Beryl in September 2006. It came with its own window decorator, Emerald, with themes and a theme editor, the settings program beryl-settings and the tray tool beryl-manager for switching window managers without logging out. That was handy when the whole thing crashed, which it did.
Beryl 0.1 arrived in autumn 2006 and 0.2 in March 2007, with more plugins than anyone had time to test: the desktop cube, snowfall, windows that burned up when closed and 3D windows poking out of the cube. By then Compiz had opened up to contributions, and in spring 2007 the projects agreed to merge. The result, Compiz Fusion, became what Ubuntu turned on by default in 7.10 that autumn. Emerald survived as a standalone decorator. The Beryl name did not.