Vista question

[Somenoob]

If the Vista 3D feature is compared to Beryl, is it better, the same/similar or worse?

[Sukarn]

I'd say its not even near Beryl, let alone comparable.

[getaceres]

They are about the same but Beryl requires a lot less resources. You cannot run Aero in a integrated Intel card while you can run Beryl perfectly on that.

[uNmentaLogic]

The aero interface really only does the "Glass" look and allows you to use Flip 3D. In the future there will probably be programs similar to Beryl/Compiz that will do the same things in Vista.

[zaratustra]

We speak about similar, so I won't open new thread... can we include metisse (Mandriva's 3D)n discussion?

I think Beryl is more configureable and less "heavy" when we come to resources. And it is in beta yet while Aero is in final. Beryl rox

[Trebuchet]

Does Microsoft ever write anything that uses less resources than the competition? (I really like Office 2007, but there's no denying it's got a much bigger footprint on my system than OpenOffice 2 does.) I know resources are less of a factor nowadays with huge hard drives, überfast CPUs, and mass quantities of RAM, than they used to be, but still...

It appears at times that MS only hires programmers who skipped all their classes on elegant and efficient coding.

- bloatware (blowt ware) noun - See Microsoft

[Somenoob]

Can it make a cube out of 4 workspaces?

[getaceres]

Can it make a cube out of 4 workspaces?

That *could* be done. Beryl is just a window manager over X11/AIGLX/XGL. Vista's window manager doesn't support workspaces but you could write a window manager on top of WPF that supports workspaces and places them in a cube/sphere/plane or whatever you want.
Vista's WPF is just like XGL (well, in fact more like Xegl) what you put on top is up to you.

[iam_foo]

Uhm..I seriously doubt many endusers are gonna write their own 3d cube workspace.

[Quillz]

It's all a matter of opinion. While Beryl is nice, a lot of it is just eye candy, and doesn't actually make you very productive. Whereas the features added to Vista all add a certain degree of productivity, especially Live Preview on the taskbar.

[Ob1]

When i first saw it's 3D capabilities my thought was "is this what all the hype was about?"

[sloggerkhan]

Beryl has many more features, plugins, and options than Vista, so it might be hard to go through them and determine what you like, what's useful, what's solely eye candy.

Beryl does have plugins to create live previews by either mousing over the taskbar or from when you alt-tab which flips through all active windows and gives a live preview, or when you super-tab, which makes a rotating circle of live windows. If you have the correct plugin enabled.

You can also make windows fold up, disapear in smoke, or have the corners of your screen function like Apple's Expose on Mac.

If you are careful, you can configure beryl to look nice AND be a boon to productivity, but if you are not careful you will wind up with flaming windows on a snowing desktop.

Overall, at this point beryl has much more depth, and if you choose wisely, more productivity-positive enhancements than Vista. But it is not quite as polished yet, and can feel overwhelming.

You can also use it to make an amazing but useless display of flashiness and eye candy.

[getaceres]

Uhm..I seriously doubt many endusers are gonna write their own 3d cube workspace.

It doesn't have to be endusers. Look at Stardock for example. They are candidates to take WPF to their limits.