Questions- Beryl/compiz/fluxbox etc

[snobby500]

Hi, im new to ubuntu, and have wanted to change my windows theme from the brown/orange it is at the moment. I was wondering how hard beryl is to install, and how easy it is to get rid of incase I dont want it anymore. Also how much system resources will it take up, and can you disable it? Would it possibly be better to install compiz? as it is in the synaptic package manager. Or what about fluxbox, i heard it is much less resource demanding. I was also wondering how buggy is beryl and trhe others. If you thinks its not worth it then i might just scrap it alltogether. :)

thanks

[chewearn]

I can't speak for everyone, only for myself.

I find installing/uninstalling beryl was easy. It was slightly harder installing the required 3D video driver(nvidia in this case); yet that was still relatively easy.

With a good 3D video hardware, I find beryl fast (can't see the difference off or on). Disabling beryl is as simple as right-click on an the icon, and select metacity from the pop-up menu.

No recent experience on compiz; I tried it a year ago (before beryl forked from compiz).

So far, I have not experienced a single beryl crash. I could only remember three instances when beryl gave me grief (I eventually found the solutions to all of them):
1) for a while, I have to switch off beryl when watching fullscreen video (playback was choppy)
2) when upgrade to version 0.2, I lost the window decorations.
3) when upgrade to version 0.2, I lost the animations; eventually, found out that it was a problem with transparent cube

All in all, I wasted a couple of hours hunting for the solutions to these problems, plus a few more hours simply tinkering/playing with the settings.

But my opinion is, the usability I got out of beryl outweigh those hours. I simply love to be able to switch applications, and rotate to another desktop with simple mouse movements/clicks/roller.

[snobby500]

thx 4 the reply. Seems nice and unbiased :). much appreciated. I might give it a shot. how hard is it to uninstall if it goes wrong or 4 some other reason.

[lyceum]

Just use synaptic package manager. DO a search for Beryl and load eveything you want that has nothing to do with KDE (unless you are using KDE). Alsom, do not load the beryl Ubuntu. That should give you everything you need to customize. If you want to uninstall, go back to synaptic and do the search again and remove what you do not want. You need a good graphics card for it to work.

[jem7v]

Also, if you just want your desktop to be something other than Orange and Brown, go to these sites and download some themes!
- GTK2/Application themes affect buttons and scroll bars and colors, etc
- Metacity/Window Border themes affect the window borders
- To install either, just download the .tar.gz files, go to System>Preferences>Themes, and then drag the .tar.gz files onto the theme manager and it installs them for you! (You can switch themes here, too.)

http://www.gnome-look.org/
http://art.gnome.org/


- Beryl and Compiz are stable on some hardware, and very buggy on others. It varies from computer to computer. Compiz is generally considered less buggy. Originally, Beryl was a code fork away from Compiz, but apparently they may be merging back together in the near future, unless the rumors are/were mistaken.
- Fluxbox is much lighter weight than Gnome, and lots of people say it's more customizable, which is true in some ways... but I think it's much Easier to work with Gnome. If you're a Linux beginner, I think you should stick with Gnome for a couple months before you try Fluxbox because I've always found that there's a lot of nitty-gritty trying to get Fluxbox to be comfortable instead of awkward.

[RedSquirrel]

Hi, im new to ubuntu, and have wanted to change my windows theme from the brown/orange it is at the moment. I was wondering how hard beryl is to install, and how easy it is to get rid of incase I dont want it anymore. Also how much system resources will it take up, and can you disable it? Would it possibly be better to install compiz? as it is in the synaptic package manager. Or what about fluxbox, i heard it is much less resource demanding. I was also wondering how buggy is beryl and trhe others. If you thinks its not worth it then i might just scrap it alltogether. :)

thanks


Fluxbox definitely consumes less resources. It's one of the lightest window managers around. You have to keep that in mind though: Fluxbox is a window manager, not a desktop environment (like GNOME is).

I agree with jem7v's comments. Fluxbox does take some getting used to and it looks very basic when you first install it. However, there are lots of good guides around and lots of support on these forums. Just do a search for fluxbox and you'll see what I mean. :)

If you want to try Fluxbox, there's one in the repositories. Just open up Synaptic and search for fluxbox.

You can have both GNOME and Fluxbox on your system. At the gdm login screen, you can select which one you want to use each time you login.

And by the way: you'll be able to use your familiar applications in Fluxbox: gedit, nautilus, Open Office, etc.

[snobby500]

Thanks for all the help. I havent got beryl yet, i think i mite just w8 until fiesty so i dont mess up anything :) and i tried fluxbox, i liked it in a way, but im gonna have to try and customize it a bit more (havent used it much to be fair). One last question, how do you download the engines needed for the themes? GTK engines in GNOME art.
thanks 4 all the help