Miguel Delivers State of Gnome Address

Skeezix writes "Miguel de Icaza has delivered the State of Gnome Address in which he gives an excellent summary of the current state of Gnome, what is being worked on, what the future looks like, and how you can help."

Comments

Implementing a "fully transparent" system

[Skeezix]

The recent announcement of Apple included some very amazing
screenshots of what they could do with their technology. I was
impressed by it for the first two hours, until I realized how easy it
would be for us to actually pull a hack like that.


Although the fully-transparent system can be done with little
effort (as we have a very powerful infrastructure to achieve it: Raph
Levien's libart) a lot of work has to go *first* into making GNOME
easier to use, more intuitive and more easy for newcomers.


If you've seen the screenshot he is refering to that is a pretty impressive statement. Gnome is and is going to be an extremely advanced application framework. But as Miguel points out, there is much work that needs to be done now to make the Gnome Desktop ready to take the world by storm. And no matter who you are, there is something you can do to help.
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Re:Implementing a "fully transparent" system

[Foogle]

Don't be obtuse -- Aqua isn't about "eye candy", it's about ease-of-use, and that's not something you're going to be able to discern from a simple screenshot. Apple has consistently lead the pack in making their interfaces "inuitive". That word is thrown around, but they've put a lot of effort into making sure they, more than anyone else, know what it means.

Yeah, Enlightenment more than meets the needs of "eye candy". You can make E look like whatever you want. But it won't duplicate the consistant interface design that Aqua has. Apple has kept a strict set of design guides for this very purpose, so that users will not be confused by their applications. Some people call variety one of Linux's strength... I don't agree. And I'm not talking about customization either. I'm talking about making sure that all of my widgets look the same. That my windows have a consistant look-and-feel.

-----------

"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

Re:Implementing a "fully transparent" system

[Ravensign]

I was impressed by it for the first two hours, until I realized how easy it would be for us to actually pull a hack like that.

Sounds like some one with a severe case of "Simple Matter of Programming" disease.

Yes, maybe it would be easy for them to pull off the transparency in menu's etc, but the Quartz foundation of OS X enables transparency, anti-aliasing, seamless import/ export of PDF, and real time manipulation of screen graphics ala the "genie effect" and the realtime resizing w/ aa of the dock elements etc.

IMHO, his statements about the ease of matching Aqua and Quartz's feature set are pretty heavy in light of, well... have you seen GNOME? It's GTK based over X windows... comparing this imaging model to Quartz is ludicrous.

Re:Implementing a "fully transparent" system

[Skeezix]

I have to disagree. It is possible to begin with another's idea and work to "copy" it, but then enhance it. Would you categorize Linux as just a copy of Unix? I look at it this way: You see a good idea and think to yourself, "How could I implement this? Could I improve on it?" And as you implement it, new ideas come to you. It is very much an art form. And it is an art form that the Open Source community excels at.
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Nooo! Not VBA!

[tilly]

Scroll down to the bottom. Apparently under the guise of Excel compatibility this spawn of Microsoft (Bill Gates got started with BASIC, wants everyone to use it) will soon infest Linux!

Actually, shudder as I might over the thought, it rationally is a pretty good idea. If anyone is interested the authors are Jody Goldberg and Michael Meeks. The mailing list is gb@helixcode.com.

Cheers,
Ben

Mmmmm...little green men...

[yesthatguy]

Ideally, we want to make GNOME perfect, easy, small, intuitive,
resource friendly, portable, maintainable, funnier, entertaining,
productive, and the ultimate of the ultimates.

Ahh, if only all Software engineers shared this goal, and without getting paid serious money to boot!

I think, with this kind of dedication, Gnome could easily be the force bring Linux to the masses. Keep it up!
---------------

Re:First

[maan]

If you're referring to the problem of netscape crashing on any page with some java on it...look at http://help.netscape.com/kb/consumer/19990807-8.ht ml
It now works for me 100%

Ok, you found a typo

[raph]

2^n++ * 0.01 cents for you.

This should be "clients can drive the parsing process instead of the parser taking control." This is really cool when you're trying to parse XML and HTML streams from potentially blocking input streams, such as the network. Props to DV for doing this!

Re:First

[Zoltar]

While I have no reason to doubt what you say... I'm gonna stick with KDE for a while. I was totally disgusted with the quality of Gnome/E that shipped with my RH6.0 cd. I love the way it looks but it was not a release product.

One of the main reasons I choose Linux over everything else was because it WORKS. I don't care how *pretty* it is, it must WORK FIRST, everything else is secondary.

While KDE looks kinda klunky, it's as STABLE as a rock and I've grown to like it over the past 6 months.

I don't give a hoot what kind of new technology they are working on if it blows core all over the place and I'm never sure which mouse click will be my last.

That said...I will give it another try, but only after they release a *stable* version and I see many positive reviews stating that it works.

Ever tried porting a spreadsheet?

[tilly]

If the phrase "spaghetti code" bothers you, your typical spreadsheet is like pulling teeth. Gnumeric may support a million more sane languages, but if they want to ever get anyone to switch from Excel they need to provide Excel compatibility, and that means supporting VBA.

Cheers,
Ben

Re:Ever tried porting a spreadsheet?

[Nodatadj]

If you don't install GB
then Gnumeric doesn't support it.
Simple as that.
However I don't think the coders are stupid enough to merrily copy all the insecurities of VBA straight into Linux.

Re:GNOME, GNU/Linux, and Corporate Desktop Dominat

[Havoc Pennington]

An abstracted configuration repository for applications (ODBC style connectivity to a back-end, either decentralized or centralized, much like Microsoft's Registry, but w/o all the brain-damaged stupidity and a GOOD SET OF DOCUMENTED RULES to follow for developers)

The GConf library in GNOME 2.0 is exactly this. I think the hardware inventory and application installation stuff is outside the scope of GNOME though, distribution vendors need to work on those things.

If you hate the Registry and want this problem solved well, then open source is your friend. GConf is still in flux; you can make sure it's exactly what you're looking for as a sysadmin by reading the docs and sending comments and patches. Right now the latest GConf is in GNOME CVS as module 'gconf', but there will be a release eventually.

Re:I can't help but wonder...

[Kaufmann]

*pfffffft*

That was the sound of water being expelled from my mouth and onto my computer's monitor at a high velocity after reading the above post.

As someone who uses both Gnome, OpenWindows and CDE regularly (on Intel and Sun workstations), I have to say that, on all accounts, Gnome is by far superior. Much more so when it behaves differently from both OW and CDE than when it behaves like those.

Sure, there's Lesstif, and there's probably a few dozen Free CDE clones around. But a lot of excellent work has been done on Gnome, to the point where it can be considered far superior for worstation use than CDE. As for porting current apps to Gnome, Lesstif makes it perfectly possible.

There isn't even the usual excuse of "eliminating duplication of effort". As long as we're writing software on our own, let's try to go beyond what has already done. I mean, look at what happened the last time someone tried to write an Unix clone :)

I often find

[aheitner]

cases in GNOME where Win95 did things signifcantly differently -- an example is the configuration box with a series of tabs (Win95's Display Properties, GNOME's Control Center). Both GUIs have the same thing with the same intent, but GNOME's is a bit hard to figure out if you're used to Win95.

In Win95 the "Apply" button does things that can't be canceled by the "Cancel" button. If you change something, then hit "Apply", then "Cancel", your change takes effect. But in GNOME, each individual panel has its own "Try" and "Ok" buttons. It's much more consistent.

If you think about how it makes sense to work (how you'd want it to work if you were a new user who had been introduced to the WIMP paradigm but not the historical idiosyncracies of any particular implementation), GNOME is far more intuitive.

Perl replacing VBA?

[tilly]

I am not sure what you mean.

Certainly may places where VB variants are used, such as ASP, you can also use Perl.

Additionally with the appropriate modules Perl can drive things through OLE automation using the same APIs that VB uses.

But if what you want is a way to take a VB script and run it in Perl, I don't think so. Or to embed Perl inside of a VB application? That could also be hard. (ActiveState sells tools to make dlls and com servers out of Perl, allowing it to be called from within VB. Again I doubt that is what you want.) Sorry...

Ben

Re:Perl replacing VBA?

[Croaker]

I think what the person meant was "use Perl instead of VBA as a scripting language for an application." I.e. embed Perl instead of embedding a VBAish language.

I personally think this is a BAD idea. Don't get me wrong... I like Perl, and I use it a lot. But I use it because I already know the UNIXisms that are buried in Perl. Expecting a newbie who wants to automate a few things in a document or spreadsheet to master the quirks of Perl is asking a bit much.

A scripting language should be fairly easy for a novice to pick up. At least in theory, VBA is a good candidate for this. The syntax, compared to Perl, C, etc. is much simpler. Less of an overall learning curve.

The actual implementation of VBA is, however, really lame. The State of the GNOME address pointed out one of the major failings: no security. Hence we get Melissa and other worms. Having worked with VBA, I've come across many bugs and petty limitations that get in the way of what I want to do. The core language isn't that bad, but the interface to applications (such as Word) really sucks in places.

A previous author in this thread said that GNUmeric should be compatible with VBA. I'm not sure that this is the goal of GNOME's BASIC project... for one thing, you do not want VBA's (non-existent) security architecture anywhere near one of your applications. Another is that you don't want to re-create all of the laces that VBA falls flat. They may get a system that is somewhat compatible (and maybe could use macros in an Excel spreadsheet with some sort of translation mechanism) but trying to recreate VBA enough for macros is just a waste of time, compared to the amount of time you'd put into creating a robust and useful scripting language.

Perhaps the ideal way to handle this would be to make a plugin system for scripting languages, so you can bang out a macro in whatever language you like. Perl, Python, LISP, Tcl, and this VBA-ish language could all live happily within the GNOME desktop apps. If you know a scripting language already, you can just wade right in. If not, then the VBAish thing should be easy to pick up, and its development tools would be built right into the environment.

I also wonder how many people actually use scripting languages in applications, such as wordprocessors. I've done a fair amount of it, because I know what macros can do for you. Where I used to work, I found a bunch of cases where people were doing tedious, repetative things that a macro could handle... they just didn't think that there was a better way...

Apple Aqua NOT JUST Alpha transparency

[rcromwell2]

Come on, of course it's trivial to add transparency to the desktop if you have a rendering system that supports Alpha channel. Windows 2000 even supports this, and there are little utilities that let you turn transparent windows on and off. Miguel would be sadly mistaken if he thinks this is all he has to add to GNOME to compete with Apple, or even Java2. Enlightenment/imlib already provides transparency in themes, but they provide *zippo* support to apps that want to render say, a 300DPI illustration.


What Miguel is missing is that Aqua is not about transparency, it's about Quartz, the Display-PDF rendering system. The NeXT display postscript system and Sun's NeWS could also handle alpha easily, but does anyone think that the only useful feature of Display Postscript or Quartz is being able to render alpha?

Systems like Quartz, DPS, and Java2D are resolution independent, support anti-aliasing on everything, full affine transformations for everything, virtually all compositing modes you can think of, built in ability to stroke complex shapes, like lines using arbitrary thickness, fill, dash-pattern, and endcaps. For instance, with Java2D it's almost trivial to write a postscript/pdf/svg renderer because the base library is so powerful.

Miguel's solution might resemble Aqua's transparent windows, but without a real 2D rasterization engine, GNOME apps will never approach the flexibility of Quartz apps in rendering. In fact, he won't even approach the quality of Aqua's nice warping/scaling of images with aliasing artifacts.


What I really hate is this not-invented-here tendency to automatically superficially evaluate and dismiss other people's technology without even doing 10 minutes of research besides looking at screenshots, and then making public assertions about how trivial it is, and how much better your "solution" will be.

Clearly, Linux's GUI toolkits need a powerful comprehensive resolution independent 2D API to support powerful display and printing apps. The current mode of separating the display and printing APIs is a pain in the ass to develop for.

The best innovations are built on the shoulders of others, and if Miguel would spend more time learning and stealing technology from Apple, Microsoft, and even the KDE team, and less time dismissing everything and trying to reinvent it, maybe GNOME wouldn't be so buggy and unusable.

Re:Apple Aqua NOT JUST Alpha transparency

[Skeezix]

What Miguel is missing is that Aqua is not about transparency, it's about Quartz, the Display-PDF rendering system.
The NeXT display postscript system and Sun's NeWS could also handle alpha easily, but does anyone think that the
only useful feature of Display Postscript or Quartz is being able to render alpha?



Miguel is intelligent enought to know we're not just talking about alpha channeling. He was saying that libart provided the necessary tools. In case you are unaware, libart is a library for high-performance 2D graphics. It is the antialiased rendering engine for the Gnome Canvas. It supports a powerful imaging model which is basically the same as SVG or Java2D. It does Vector Paths, Bezier Paths, RGB and RGBA images, Sorted Vector Paths, MicroTile Arrays, and Affine transformations.


The best innovations are built on the shoulders of others, and if Miguel would spend more time learning and stealing
technology from Apple, Microsoft, and even the KDE team, and less time dismissing everything and trying to reinvent
it, maybe GNOME wouldn't be so buggy and unusable.


This exact approach has been what Miguel has sought after. He is frequently quoted as wanting to take the best ideas from companies like Microsoft, get rid of the bad parts, and integrate them into Gnome. I've personally conversed with him about this exact issue while waiting to watch Phantom Menace on opening night. He says that he doesn't like it when everyone goes around saying Microsoft sucks and that's the end of the story. Microsoft, Apple, and others, have made great strides with their Desktop technologies, and Miguel has been borrowing from them, believe me.
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Re:Apple Aqua NOT JUST Alpha transparency

[Darchmare]

Why was this labeled flamebait?

Mark it up as informative. It's perfectly valid.

- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)

Re:Apple Aqua NOT JUST Alpha transparency

[rcromwell2]

Miguel is intelligent enought to know we're not just talking about alpha channeling. He was saying that libart provided the necessary tools. In case you are unaware, libart is a library for high-performance 2D graphics. It is the antialiased rendering engine for the Gnome Canvas. It supports a powerful imaging model which is basically the same as SVG or Java2D. It does Vector Paths, Bezier Paths, RGB and RGBA images, Sorted Vector Paths, MicroTile Arrays, and Affine transformations.

That would be true, if libart really did match the functionality of DPS or Java2D, but unfortunately, a quick look at the API in the header files shows that not only is it insufficient, but it also looks like a very difficult API to use in the first place.

Consider the following task: Fetch the glyph for the letter 'S', convert it to a bezier path, shear it by 0.3, 0.4. Set this stroke as a clipping path. Next, render the word "Linux rulez", scaled by 2.0/2.0, applying a a gaussian blur kernel to the output (for dropshadow). Next, re render the text with a radial gradient fill overtop of the background. Finally, fetch a penguin icon and render it overtop of the 'I' of the text with 0.3 alpha.
Of course, all this must be antialiased and rendered pixel perfect. Next, render this in a variety of output formats including:

1. grayscale
2. monochrome (1-bit)
3. ARGB
4. BGR
5. palette mapped

Not only can't libart do this (it has ZERO support for font glyph operations), but libart has no provisions for handling a multiple of pixel formats, nor does it have integrated support for image ops like applying convolutions, and finally, the libart test code to render just a few vpath's is about 5 times longer than the equivalent code required in Objective-C/DPS or Java/Java2D.

But I'm not bashing libart or Raph Levien. I have respect for his work. I'm sure it will tremendously improve over the next year, when such functionality becomes a "must have", but right now, it's more like an experimental proof-of-concept library in the beginning stages. What I find absurd however, is how the GNOME team keeps putting forward *OBVIOUSLY INCOMPLETE* projects like they are 1.0 FCS versions ready to compete with mature implementations. Like it or not, the current GNOME Canvas can't hold a candle to a Postscript/PDF/Java2D rasterizer, no matter how many times alpha version libraries are asserted.

My post was marked flamebait, but I view Miguel's comments as the real flamebait. Why does he feel the need to bash Apple's work (I am not a Mac owner and never owned a Mac), like it's so trivial and he's such a master coder that he could just blow Apple and Adobe out of the water if he felt like making the effort?

Apple's work on imaging in Mac OS X is clearly more than just "skin"/"theme" hacks, and focusing on the cool transparency effects ignores the hard work that went in to actually designing the dockbar user interface. Maybe the GNOME/Enlightenment guys should spend a little more time themselves on UI design, and less on "looks".

Re:Apple Aqua NOT JUST Alpha transparency

[Skeezix]

Yes, the reason your post was marked flamebait was due to comments you made then and now bashing Miguel and the Gnome Project. I really think you underestimate Miguel's understanding. He wasn't just making a flippant remark about some "skin/theme" hack as you put it.

What I find absurd however, is how the GNOME team keeps putting forward *OBVIOUSLY INCOMPLETE* projects like they are 1.0 FCS versions ready to compete with mature implementations.

I think you misunderstood the spirit of the post Miguel made. Some of the newer Gnome technologies such as Bonobo and the Gnome Print Library were not being put forward as ready for prime time. The entire point was to say we're still working on them, they need some more hacking before we'll release them in a public manner.

Maybe the GNOME/Enlightenment guys should spend a little more time themselves on UI design, and less on "looks".

Work is being done to that effect with the Gnome User Interface Improvement Project. Some of the ideas they've come up with have already been implemented, others are still being hacked on. As for Enlightenment, I'm not sure. It's not part of Gnome proper.
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Re:First

[Daniel]

...and the only problem I have with Linux is sendmail...

Daniel

X Server Code for Rendering

[hattig]

No, don't put it in the X-Server. Why?

Remote display to low-power x-server. Hmmm, those people that use dedicated X-Servers or run their applications remotely (on the Quad Alpha, perhaps!) aren't going to like that.

Network Bandwidth: 10 mbits/s is still a reasonable amount, and that is the low-end of networks. There is little excuse for not equipping a home network with 100mbit ethernet - if you have multiple computers, you can afford a decent hub!

A 1024x768 24-bit pixmap is around 3 megs of data - 3-5 seconds to transmit over a low-end network - but Print previews will probably be much less than this in size, and could be implemented in greyscale as an option. On a reasonable network, you could update a 1024x768 image 10 times a second, ignoring latency and network usage...

So libart et al can send the 96dpi 24-bit colour image to the screen, and a 1200dpi b&w image to the printer (or PS rendering primitives). No need to include the X Server!

~~

Re:Yes, It's in CVS.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Alpha channel support is already in CVS as implemented as a part of GDK-pixbuf.

What exactly does this mean? Why aren't my
widgets translucent? Oh, you mean as part of
the canvas. Well, that's different. Cool, but
not quite the same.

Just because it's in CVS doesn't mean it's done,
or useful for what we're talking about.

> However, to achieve a fully hardware
accelerated alpha channel would require a extention to the X protocol, which the Xfree team is very intrested in,

Hmm. Some of the developers were asked about
that very thing, and they said: "that's what
opengl is for". In other words, they weren't
keen on the idea.

And that's only a part of the puzzle. There is
a whole lot more to Quartz than alpha blending
(generalized compositing, transformations, raster
based post-processing effects like the drop
shadow). Are you going to put all that on the
server?

> and might be eventually based on the current code, if the code is re-released under the X license. There are anti-aliasing widgets for gnome, ala Gnome-Canvas, but it is no where as low level as quartz.

Exactly. Quartz has a single rendering model
with compositing, affine transformations, etc,
for the entire system. No canvas/windowing
system/window manager/widget set boundaries.
Which is why they can do that, and gnome can't,
without a significant amount of work at this
point. And no, a quick hack to make translucent
menus doesn't count.

(that's a thinly veiled challenge, gnome folks!)

>However, to laugh at X is arrogant. Yes, it is ancient, but the protocol was well designed for networks, and it is very extensible.

Well, they call it their PDF rendering model
in Macosx, but that's basically an updated
version of Display Postscript. Which could be
easily serialized across a network. It might
be dog slow, but so would X with that kind of
eye candy, and with DPS you'd have a whole lot
more room to optimize lowlevel stuff on the
server side (like compositing), WITHOUT adding server extensions.


Sorry, X can probably be patched and patched and
patched to get it to do what people want, and it
will probably work pretty well, but it won't be
pretty. Better maybe to start over?


Peter

Re: libart

[spitzak]

"libart provided the necessary tools."

I'm going to be very blunt here. This stuff should be IN THE X SERVER!!!.

I don't want to link with a giant imaging library for all my programs, I don't want to send image maps to X for all my drawing, and I really want my advanced imaging model to be able to take advantage of advanced hardware!

If the code exists, lets put somewhere where a mortal programmer can actually figure out how to use it, and better programmers may have a slight chance of improving it! It is absolutely disgusting that we have a worse graphics interface that NT, or than NeWS (which was created in 1983!). And it is quite alarming that people are saying that gigantic shared libraries running in my program's memory space will save us. It is theroetically possible to draw everything using a library that calls XDrawPoint(), that does not mean it is a good idea!

PS: although there is a lot of push for it because "thats how MicroSoft did it", there is no need for X to do printing. What is needed is the ability to send *IDENTICAL* streams to two different things and get an image on the screen and on the printer. The screen thing can be a wrapper driver around the lower-level X interface.

Kool Desktop Environment

[solar]

Personally, as a former Windows 95b user, I prefer KDE over GNOME. However, I use tons of the GNOME apps that came with my RedHat 6.1 distro. I simply find the KDE interface more intuitive (or probably just closer to what I'm used to) and more stable. It's good to read things like:

The wm-spec team is almost ready with their new window manager specification which is unified across GNOME and KDE.

Anyways, I wish the GNOME team the best. If you're not a programmer, you can still help by sending in bug reports as you find the need to do so.

GNOME is cool

[lubricated]

I've been using October GNOME and sawmill for quite some time now. Anyone saying that its less stable than kde now is just plain wrong. I decided to give kde a try. I tried to force myself to use it. I gave up after a few days. Gnome's desktop is trully customizable. No two gnome-desktops after being customized to ones needs are alike. Gnome's panel has the best applets. If you like mini apps these kick ass. From a cpu monitor network monitor icq mini-commander pager deskguide. many diffrent clocks. Drawers are great too they let you consolidate your shortcuts. Oh well thats enough for now.

Conspiracy?

[Zog]

"*Bug fixing GNOME.

If you are interested in doing some detective work, and helping other people. This is also a great way of learning about the various GNOME framework libraries: it will expose you to real problems in real applications (boy, I sound like Microsoft hiring material)."

Conspiracy? Of course not... That would be just a little too logical... ;)

Re:First

[TandyMasterControl]

I absolutely understand your feeling about Gnome/E as shipped on RH6.0. It's a disaster. However, the latest stable gnome (1.0.53 which is 1.0.54 on my system somehow) is a far different critter, much more stable. I generally despise Enlightenment for it's obtrusiveness and grandiosity which has gone from bad to worse, so I replace E with IceWM 1.0.1 This is much nicer feeling than E, IMO, cause it does what you want a windowmanager to do and doesn't constantly call attention to itself. IceWM 1.0.1 and October gnome has made Gnome liveable for me, finally, although in the months since RH6.0 I have spent a lot of time in KDE, and more lately discovering lighter environments and windowmanager combinations. Now that I can stand gnome, I'm not sure I want or need a "desk environment". I rarely use the start menu thingy for either Gnome or KDE and the other panel apps aren't too compelling in either case, so I'm kind of pared down to IceWM+DFM (a good file manager that's attractive, unlike Gnu Midnight Commander, which I could never stand the sight of). Lighter combinations are faster and IceWM's Gnome compatibility and the fact that DFM itself is gtk based allow me to use "Gnome" gtk apps transparently with the file manager without having to run a Gnome-session desktop. It has also solved 95% of my angst about KDE's clunky look and heavy footprint. This at last is about all i want or could ask from a Linux desktop and I'd recommend it to anyone who's underwhelmed by overblown desktop environments and not afraid of doing a samll amount of text configuration.

Correct GNOME User Interface Project URL

[adraken]

Miguel mentioned the GNOME User Interface Improvement Project:
Currently GNOME lacks a bit of polishing when it comes to the end desktop because we do not ship a good set of presets for it. Shipping good presets and revamping the user interface (as suggested by our user interface team at http://www.gnome.org/gnome-ui) is a really important task.

The real URL is at http://developer.gnome.org/gnome-ui.

The great thing about developing interfaces with GNOME is the libglade architecture. Designing an usable interface is easier if you can rapidly design it in such a program and if you can tweak and revise it at runtime.

Re:First

[lubricated]

I have found kde to be less intuative and less stable than October GNOME. GNOME may have gotten itself a reputation of being unstable because of its release early release often strategy but the stable release of GNOME is in fact very stable. KDE however doesn't make releases very often. So people only get exposed to their stable stuff. While distributors like Redhat put GNOME on their cd while its in prerelease. (e.g Redhat put pre-October GNOME on their 6.1 cd) This prerealese is unstable. I have seen it freeze up. For anyone who thinks that GNOME is unstable download the latest October stuff and think again.

Ahh... Future looks bright.

[Turmio]

That was one informative message, I must say. From GNOME user's point of view it's nice to see the GNOME folks are doing such hard work and thus the project is advancing rapidly.

So GNOME 1.2 is coming (not that soon, though). And Linux 2.4, Debian GNU/Linux 2.2, FreeBSD 4.0, XFree 4.0, Mozilla and GCC 3.0 are on their way and probably they all are released before Q3/2000.

It's so great to be a Free Unix-like system user, don't you agree?

Re:FWIW

[jilles]

"And regarding Java 2d: I don't think that's
a solution. Doesn't it have the same problems
with the division between UI and graphical
canvas? Can you embed a button in a drawing
and rotate...drop shadow, all the while having
it update automatically?"

Java2D and Swing were developed in parallel, if I remeber correctly. Also swing components are 'light weight' which means that they were created using java2D.

In fact JComponent has a method which returns a Graphics object. This allows you to draw on the JComponent using the jav2D API. So, while I haven't done much graphics programming in Java, I think it's possible to do what you suggest.

We need Display Ghostscript and GNUStep to compete

[Xlib]

Consider the following task: Fetch the glyph for the letter 'S', convert it to a bezier path, shear it by 0.3, 0.4. Set this stroke as a clipping path. Next, render the word "Linux rulez", scaled by 2.0/2.0, applying a a gaussian blur kernel to the output (for dropshadow). Next, re render the text with a radial gradient fill overtop of the background. Finally, fetch a penguin icon and render it overtop of the 'I' of the text with 0.3 alpha. Of course, all this must be antialiased and rendered pixel perfect. Next, render this in a variety of output formats including:

1. grayscale
   
2. monochrome (1-bit)
   
3. ARGB
   
4. BGR
   
5. palette mapped
   

This is a very insightful post. And you're right, libart goes nowhere near this in functionality. Nor can the client-side anti-aliasing support in GNOME be really said to compete with NeXT's and Adobe's old display postscript, nor with their new Display PDF.

As others have pointed out, this stuff must be in the X server (display server) since to be effective it should be hardware accelerated. The only project which comes near this is GNUStep with Aladdin's Display Ghostscript project. If I remember correctly, the DGS will be an X server extension for the client side widget libraries, so for those X servers with DGS support GNUStep will have hardware accelerated Display Ghostscript -- just what you seem to require.

Of course, the GNUStep project has taken a long time to mature... but they seem to be nearing completion of their core libaries and DGS code, leaving application support left. Since their libraries are close enough to MacOS X and the old OpenStep specification it should be fairly easy to port between the two.

I like GNOME a bunch, but honestly I loved my old NeXT CUBE a whole bunch more. I'll happily buy a PowerMac G4 if MacOS X turns out as nicely as my old CUBE did...

Finally, RE: junking X altogether instead of extending the X prototcol... I'm in favor of keeping X and just extending the protocol. We have such a large application base locked up in X that to toss X would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater. X is crufty, and could use a core protocol update, but it's also still good enough for most every day work. We need to either update the protocol (yeah right, like the Open Group is going to bother), or extend it server side.

I'm under the impression that the XFree86 team is having some legal (patent) issues about including TrueType support directly in the newer XFree 4 X server, which is why they're going to only support TrueType font servers. If this is true, then that's another good argument for pursuing a Display Ghostscript model and dumping TrueType support altogether.

Cheers,
Xlib

GNOME: Where Does the Funding Come From?

[Anonymous Coward]

Friends, those of you who watch the wonderful Fox News Channel know that Bill O'Reilly has been doing an excellent series on the Linux operating system and the GNOME desktop environment. He's been doing some digging and has come up with some preliminary results that he's going to unveil on "The O'Reilly Factor." Well, I got an advance copy of his results from the web site, and so I thought I would share them with you and the rest of the community. It is important that we monitor these people and make sure we know what they're up to.

• The ACLU (Anti-Christian Litigation Unit) donated $10,000 directly to Miguel. There can be no doubt that this money is a reward for the development of software that is intended to promote communism. The ACLU will not stop until we are all ruled under their iron fist. It makes sense that they would donate money to a cause that has the destruction of capitalism and decent Christian society at the top of its list.
  
  
• The American Atheists also made a sizable donation to the FSF, with the express condition that the money go to the GNOME project. The check was signed by Madalyn Murray O'Hair herself .. before she was killed by some noble soul .. so this means that the atheists, as an organization, must have been prepared for this! They must have known years ago that somebody would invent some sort of technology that would work to attack capitalism at its roots, and they wanted to have the check signed in advance. If there was ever any doubt that atheists are pathetic socialists, that doubt can be dispelled.
  
  
• The Sierra Club donated $25K to the FSF as well, and while they did not specify that any of that money was to go to GNOME specifically, you can bet that the free software commies and environazis made some sort of slick deal behind the scene. Environmentalism translates directly to communism, and it should come as no surprise that these tree-hugging hippies are in bed with the GNOME socialists. What will their slogan be next year? "Plant a tree, erase a Windows partition, destroy capitalism?" Friends, that's probably not too much off the mark.
  
  
• Troop 317 of the Girl Scouts of America donated 50% of the proceeds from their cookie sales to the FSF. Friends, while it is heartwarming to see young women being prepared for the role of cookie-preparer (as is demanded by Scripture), it is sickening to see girls band together in a cheap imitation of the Boy Scouts. This smacks of feminism, and is probably the work of the damnable National Organization for Women. Patricia Ireland and the rest of NOW are most likely behind this socialist donation.

So there's the money trail, friends. We will have to watch this closely. But to any and all GNOME-friendly people reading this post, know this: We are on to you. Do you understand me? We're on to you. You'll have to be a little more careful in the future, my socialist compadres. We're one step ahead of you all.

Thank you for your time.