Today is Microsoft’s “big day.” After over 5 years they are releasing their new desktop operating system. Vista is much more of an evolutionary than revolutionary upgrade. I have been using the Business Edition of Vista since mid November, and aside from the Aero eycandy interface change and relocation of many settings I don’t really see too much that is new. In the meantime the Linux folk have continued to improve the eye candy offerings on that platform as well. This morning I installed Beryl on my Ubuntu desktop and it looks pretty good. I used compiz / xgl a while ago and it was pretty but buggy. Beryl, which is a fork of the compiz project, seems to be a much more tight and slick project.
Who wins this eyecandy war. I would have to give to the Beryl folk, as it seems like a much more natural fit. One should note that OS X has had fun visual effects for years.
