Beryl is a compositing window manager for the X Windows System which utilises OpenGL for accelerated rendering. Beryl is a recent fork of Compiz, another compositing window manager developed with the support of Novell.  Both Beryl and Compiz represent a remarkable leap forward in desktop visualization and usability.

Desktop workspaces are arranged as faces on a virtual cube that can be rotated to access applications.  Application windows are animated in response to user actions giving an unprecedented feeling of interaction with the GUI. Windows can bounce or wobble when moved or resized and a variety of visual effects can be associated with actions such as create, destroy, maximise and minimise.  As new effects are developed, they can be downloaded and plugged in, making Beryl an up-to-the-minute user interface.

Alt-tab switching between applications presents the user with a scrolling list of icons that display live representations of the active applications, including video thumbnails playing in real time.  Control-alt-tab allows the same switching for all applications on all desktops: selecting an application on another face of the cube causes the cube to rotate to the correct face.

As with most X Windows managers, the look and feel is extremely configurable and allows the user to easily personalise their desktop: Windows can have a glassy appearance and there is a choice of themes for things like buttons and titlebars.  By modern standards, Beryl is not particularly resource intensive: according to the Beryl FAQ, "Beryl runs acceptably well on a GeForce 3/i855/Radeon 7500, 256MB of RAM, and a 1.2 GHz processor. It also works best with Xorg 7.1 and requires a recent version of Mesa".

To get a proper experience of Beryl's capabilities, we have produced a 5 minute video  showing a selection, by no means exhaustive, of its features.

Further links 

A search on youtube should turn up a broad selection of videos demonstrating the capabilities of Beryl and Compiz.

Find out about OpenSuSE

Many Linux distributions are offered in "Live CD" format where one can download an iso9660 image, burn to CD, and simply run Linux from the CD. Probably the most popular of these is knoppix, the latest version of which comes with Beryl and Xgl. 

News 

15 March 2007: Beryl version 0.2 is released with new features, and a more intuitive configuration manager.

April 2007: Compiz and Beryl are in the process of re-uniting.