Beryl is not my thing. Pointless cosmetics in an OS just don't interest me. I never even use desktop wallpapers so a 3D desktop with irritating effects would be very off putting. I've never even tried it and I really can't be bothered to.

The fglrx driver can be a pain, but once you get used to installing it, it's not so bad. It does work ok though and is pretty stable once it's up and running. I can understand any newbie facing installing that for the first time giving up pretty quickly though and coming to the conclusion that Linux is overly complex. For me it's a must to get it set up, and get xorg.conf configured to to my liking, quickly as I can't tolerate a 60Hz refresh rate on my CRT monitor for very long.