Welcome to the Beryl Project!

What is the Beryl Project?

Beryl is a fork of Compiz, we seek to provide a free, open source desktop experience to the community that reflects the wishes of the users. Above all else, we seek to listen to and respond to the requests of our user base.

Beryl is a combined window manager and composite manager written in C using OpenGL to provide acceleration. It is designed to be highly flexible, extensible, and portable, while all the while keeping in mind that the users knows how they want their desktops to act better than we do. With Beryl the rather esoteric concept of the computer desktop is brought down to a more human level, allowing for a more native and intuitive understanding of your workspace.

Beryl is not dependent on any single xserver architecture, running on top of Xgl, AIGLX, and the beta nvidia binary drivers, providing the user the option to select what is best for them.

What about Emerald?

Emerald is the sister project of beryl, and while they don't require each other to run, they are developed in parallel so they may work as close together as possible. Emerald is a window decorator that provides the borders to your windows normally provided by Metacity or KWin. Since these wont work right with beryl, we have provided our own.