Beryl is a fork of the Compiz code. It's just a desktop manager that allows more 3D effects. Windows decorations, window animations, and so on. However, it seems that whenever anyone talks about it they always talk about how cool the cube it. All it does is switch between desktops, but the desktops all appear in a cube you spin around to get to the next one. I have just never understood why that was necessary. Check out beryl-project.org and look at the features for more info.
Hey subtle_turtle in regard to performance, I hear you. I was able to make my Ubuntu run quite well by manually adjusting the heap size and dropping the DirectX level from 9.0 to 8.1. If you're interested, here's a how-to I wrote on another forum. Specifically, look at section 7 (Check your options):
http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=151354
Hey subtle_turtle in regard to performance, I hear you. I was able to make my Ubuntu run quite well by manually adjusting the heap size and dropping the DirectX level from 9.0 to 8.1. If you're interested, here's a how-to I wrote on another forum. Specifically, look at section 7 (Check your options):
http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=151354














