As is usual in these circumstances, someone piped up with a sarcastic comment about how "that's going to increase productivity". This is a standard way of saying that visually appealing features have no value because they don't increase "productivity". Normally I don't think too much of these comments either way, but for once I thought, hang on a minute... Why does "productivity" have to be the ultimate measure of a computer's feature? Are we all trying to do nothing but be productive? I agree that if it reduces productivity, that's a bad thing, but if all it does is maintain the same level of productivity and at the same time is a little easier on the eyes, why not? After all, most of us (myself definitely included) will be spending a significant portion of their lives in front of a computer, one way or another. I'd like to enjoy that if at all possible...

Now I happen to think many of the desktop effects actually increase productivity, but that's a different discussion. I guess my point is that computing (and life) should be about more than just productivity. Kthxbye.

The main things for me were performance (Beryl was showing a lag the last time I tried it on my laptop, whereas Compiz was slick and smooth), and coping adequately with Suspend to RAM. Both of these boxes are checked in the new version, and it's nice to have a barrel of new features as well, including a better Control Center, the burn animation (love it for closing windows), minimized window thumbnails and transparent cube!

For consistency, with previous postings, I'm now getting this from glxgears -info

With Beryl 0.20RC2: 

6356 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1271.111 FPS
7285 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1456.884 FPS
7227 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1444.934 FPS
7181 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1436.071 FPS
6785 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1356.899 FPS

With Metacity: 

8291 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1658.111 FPS
9031 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1806.146 FPS
6931 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1386.142 FPS
9061 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1812.010 FPS
9049 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1809.699 FPS

So really not too bad... 

Well, it seems the first thing is that I'm going to have to rename this category - I'm no longer using XGL, but instead am using AIGLX baked into the BETA Nvidia drivers I'm running. This means there's no need for XGL or anything - just set up my xorg.conf to use AIGLX, and then I just install either Beryl or Compiz. Or in my case, both. I'm currently using Compiz because frankly it's giving me better performance than Beryl (the output below is from "glxgears -info" while running amarok and firefox):

Metacity:
6121 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1224.149 FPS
7660 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1531.864 FPS
7499 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1499.699 FPS
7548 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1509.501 FPS
6609 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1321.765 FPS
7334 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1466.784 FPS

Compiz:
4952 frames in 5.0 seconds = 990.399 FPS
5044 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1008.489 FPS
5776 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1155.102 FPS
5830 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1165.975 FPS
3637 frames in 5.0 seconds = 727.383 FPS
3230 frames in 5.0 seconds = 643.875 FPS
5300 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1059.970 FPS
5739 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1147.271 FPS

Beryl:
3153 frames in 5.0 seconds = 630.463 FPS
3167 frames in 5.0 seconds = 633.395 FPS
2874 frames in 5.0 seconds = 573.958 FPS
2985 frames in 5.0 seconds = 596.847 FPS
3104 frames in 5.0 seconds = 620.749 FPS

I have to say, that I'm secretly quite happy about using Compiz because I'm not sure I agree with the Beryl fork, and my gut reaction is that the Compiz code is going to be done better and cleaner, and that Beryl may win out in the end because it has better plugins and features and more community support, but it's not necessarily the best technically.

Anyway, we'll see.

As a footnote, I've got kiba-dock running on my machine at work, and I have to say it's a joy! Completely useless, but a joy. Being able to manipulate objects that interact in ways we implicitly expect from our knowledge of the real world is something we've all trained ourselves to forget when we use computers, because computers don't work that way. Well kiba-dock does...

It seems like the usability features of XGL (no, really) and the eye candy have brought me back to it.

And so far I'm more than happy. Video playback seems to be better than it was before, and I think it might stick. We'll see... 

I'd been having some ongoing problems with Ubuntu since upgrading to Dapper Drake, but the main one was that my wireless no longer seemed to work.

After trawling the forums and filing a number of bugs (one for ndiswrapper and one for bcm43xx, neither of which was working for me), I discovered that I just had to press the "wireless button" on my laptop for it to work. Dammit. I didn't even know it was a button.

 I've also reverted back to vanilla X from XGL because my video/DVD playback was slower, and there were some things I didn't go wild about with XGL:

• I didn't like some of the features of XGL that I couldn't figure out how to turn off. Specifically the way all non-selected windows fade to grey.
  
• Could never get Gkrellm to show in all virtual desktops consistently and in the same place