My outlook on linux is changing as time goes on.  It might be that I’m playing with Linux this time, rather than racing to get a server running.  I had a pretty pleasant experience tonight with Ubuntu.  Apparently I originally installed the Dapper release (v6.06) yesterday… A click or two with the Synaptic Package Manager and around 20 minutes later, I’m now running Ubuntu Edgy (v6.10).  That amazes me… no compiling the kernel manually, no lengthy command-line statements just to install/upgrade certain parts of the OS.  It is how it should be.  Nice and easy…

After updating the OS to the latest version, I wanted to see if Linux could actually outperform Vista.  A couple clicks later (I had to add the specific Beryl repository information to Synaptic) and after following some good instructions I’m running Beryl on top of Gnome…

Beryl is a desktop/window manager based on OpenGL.  So it provides cool window movements, transitions, themes, etc.  It puts Vista’s Aero desktop to shame…

There are no hardware ratings here.  Nope… Everything just works…  Opacities, transitions, effects… and the theme choices available for Beryl are amazing.  You can modify anything and everything related to windows.  One minor thing to note is that I’m using AIGLX rather than XGL.. it seems like the KDE/Gnome war all over again to me, but whatever… I’m just using the one that worked the easiest on my laptop.

As far as performance goes, I’m not noticing any degraded performance… granted I’m not playing games on the laptop, I’m just using it for surfing and development type activities.  It’s easy enough to turn off Beryl if I do find that I need to run a graphics intensive app.

Perhaps I’ll install the Kiba dock or gnome-dock at some point in the future… I haven’t fully decided yet, though.