So, you salivating over Vista because it’s pretty? I don’t blame you one bit. Just before I finally became fed up with Microsoft (again), I was salivating over Vista too! I was totally willing to overlook the poorly thought out security enhancements. I will still admit they are on the right track with the whole running at the user level thing. But, seriously, with all the great examples of how it’s done in Linux and BSD, you’d think they could have stolen that code and made something a bit worthwhile. Mac OSX implements this perfectly — it is a BSD OS, but still.

Anyway, then I came to my senses after hearing about Windows 7, the little stealth update stunt that Microsoft pulled, and of course their desire to move toward subscription based revenue for Windows products.

I was a bit distraught. Happy to be back on Linux of course, but sad that XOrg hadn’t really made any leaps and bounds since I last saw it. No alpha transparency still!? Come on! Or so I thought. A friend of mine turned me on to the Beryl Project. Last night after a bit of fiddling I got it installed. It looks to be a gtk app, and thus built for Gnome, but it does work fine in KDE, and no real annoying inconsistencies.

If you are running Linux as your main desktop and you haven’t checked out Beryl, you must! It brings the pretty GUI to the Open Source community! So far no problems with it crashing, or getting along with KDE! Just had to give them a plug and a thanks!