Beryl forked from Compiz over plugin architecture disagreements, then merged back to form Compiz Fusion — a rare full-circle fork-and-merge story.
Compiz was an OpenGL compositing window manager for X11 that used GPU acceleration for desktop effects. Beryl added the Emerald decorator, flat-file settings backend, and numerous visual plugins. The merged Compiz Fusion combined the stable core with the community plugin ecosystem.
In 2006, Linux desktop compositing was the hottest thing in open source. Novell's David Reveman had created Compiz, the first OpenGL compositing window manager for X11, bringing wobbly windows, spinning desktop cubes, and transparency effects to Linux. It was spectacular eye candy that made Linux desktops look more advanced than anything from Apple or Microsoft.
Quinn Storm and a group of community developers had been maintaining a branch of Compiz called 'quinnstorm' that added numerous plugins and features. When Reveman and the Novell team refused to merge these community-driven changes back into mainline Compiz, the quinnstorm branch formally forked on September 19, 2006, becoming Beryl.
Beryl introduced its own window decorator (Emerald), used flat-file configuration instead of gconf, removed GNOME dependencies, and developed a rich plugin ecosystem. The project attracted enormous community enthusiasm — Beryl's spinning cube demos became Linux's killer feature on YouTube, convincing countless users to try Linux.
But maintaining two competing compositing window managers was wasteful. The developers largely agreed on goals, just not on development methodology. On March 30, 2007 — less than seven months after the fork — the Beryl and Compiz communities agreed to reunite. The result was two packages: Compiz Core (the base compositing engine) and Compiz Fusion (the community plugins, decorators, and tools from both projects).
Compiz Fusion thrived briefly but was ultimately made obsolete by the desktop environment compositors built into GNOME Shell (Mutter) and KDE Plasma (KWin), which integrated compositing directly rather than treating it as a separate window manager. Ubuntu's switch from Compiz to Mutter in 2017 marked the practical end of the project.
Compiz released by Novell with stunning OpenGL desktop effects
Quinn Storm forks Compiz into Beryl after upstream refuses community patches
Beryl and Compiz announce reunion as Compiz Fusion
Ubuntu switches from Compiz to Mutter; Compiz Fusion era effectively ends
The Compiz/Beryl saga is one of open source's great full-circle stories: fork, compete, merge. The compositing effects pioneered by both projects raised the bar for Linux desktop polish and directly influenced the compositors built into modern desktop environments. The spinning cube demos convinced a generation of users to try Linux.