Notes on Beryl

[Thom May]

Hi,
due to an unfortunate accident with a kaasschaaf I changed window managers
from Ion3 to Ubuntu's gnome set up. As people have been talking about Beryl
I figured I'd give it a spin to balance out the OS X bling quotient in the
office. (And given the beryl-by-default feisty spec)
In this respect I succeeeded admirably. In the respect of having a working,
well integrated desktop environment, it was a horrible failure. Here's why:

1) Gnome keybindings no longer work - deskbar is unusable, I can't quick
launch terminal and so on without digging through a completely different
config system.

2) I have a whopping great jewel in my notification area. Why? Also, the
splash screen should be disappeared to ensure that we get a consistent
desktop startup.

3) Sensible defaults - turning all the bling on by default is potentially
sensible when developing, but for integration in the default desktop it
needs to be turned down a lot - I suspect the expose-esque stuff and the
workspace cube flipping are a "sane" start, but wobbly windows and
whatever the shivery effect on window creation is have to go! IMO the effect
at the moment is far too distracting to actually get a comfortable desktop.

4) Integration into the rest of the desktop - respect pre-existing settings
of number of workspaces, ensure that the workspace manager continues to work
correctly, get rid of a lot of the "this window manager goes to 11!" options
in the Settings Manager and make that a System/Preferences applet, etc.
Also, the themes need to be manageable from the Themes applet (and ideally
be the same as metacity themes).

This is just off-the-top-of-my-head stuff, but hopefully it's not been said
before and should give some discussion points for Feisty.
Cheers,
-Thom