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Following the previous post, I decided to write the following review on the current state of the desktop technologies provided by the major OS providers.

Everything in the tech world revolves around trends. The latest one is “Accelerated Desktops”. Apple was the first company to understand the importance users gave to the way their Desktop’s looked. To satisfy the desktop beauty enthusiasts, they introduced the dock from which the users control their applications and also many other effects such as the genie effect (seen when a window is minimized).
Following the trend set by Apple, Microsoft also started working on it’s Aero engine which now powers Windows Vista and all it’s bells and whistles. XP’s sucessor is filled up with transparencies, shiny menus, blur effects and glass-like icons.

But the greatest surprise didn’t come from any of the two above mentioned companies. The biggest “boom” in desktop acceleration came from the OpenSource world. I’m talking about the new Linux Accelerated Desktops. A year ago, a man named Davied Reveman who works for Novell presented the OpenSource community with two new major technologies: Xgl and Compiz. Xgl provided a layer on top of which Compiz could run and Compiz provided all the effects you could wish for, and many more. I owe Compiz the final motivation that made me look at Linux seriously. In one year, impressive work has been done on this new technology and, at this point, there is no rival for Compiz or Beryl (compiz’s fork).
My personal choice in the last couple of months has been Beryl. Beryl is a derivation of Compiz code which focus on fast development rather than stable development. It fits me better; I like to be on the bleeding edge. All this development has only been possible because of the increasing commitment from companies such as Nvidia who now provide support through their drivers for these new kind of applications.
Beryl provides the user with all kinds of effects but, most importantly, it actively makes work more productive. In my opinion, this is the decisive difference between Windows Vista Aero and Beryl. While most of Windows’s effects do nothing to enhance the way the user works, beryl achieves that with plugins such as “wpicker”/”scale”, “transparent windows” and “cube”. If you want to take a loot at a few examples, click here.

As you can see, competition in this area is fierce. Hopefully that’ll mean the user will see improvements much faster and that the overall desktop experience will rapidly become a lot more productive and pleasant.

– Luís Costa