What is the Beryl Project?

Beryl is an OpenGL accelerated desktop that seeks to provide a free, open source desktop experience to the community that reflects the wishes of the users. Above all else, the project seeks to listen to and respond to the requests of the 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, all the while keeping in mind that the users know 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. To learn more about Beryl and its features visit our Feature Spotlight.

Beryl is a fork of the Compiz project, started by David Reveman of Novell. We continue to port new changes from compiz, and consider them essentially our upstream. Beryl could not have existed were it not for the heavy lifting done both server side by David and in creating compiz, which is the base on which all of our code is built, and which still comprises a large portion of our code, though this is likely to change as the 0.3.0/0.4.0 release cycle gets started.