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Not Just Eye Candy At Freedesktop.org
Jim Gettys writes "While Keith Packard's eyecandy at freedesktop.org, including drop shadows, translucent menus and windows with alpha channels is nice to look at, and in some ways useful, *much* more important
is that the same facilities are useful for
thumbnailing, screen magnifiers, and arbitrary transforms of applications on their way to the screen, just to name a few of the potential
applications. So enjoy the eyecandy, but remember, too much candy can rot your brain. And if you want to
avoid fattening your brain, you can come help us
make this ready for prime-time, and work off
the candy you ate and pitch in at freedesktop.org."
For background, see this earlier Slashdot post about Freedesktop.org, and the brief description below.
An anonymous reader sums up this effort to revamp X: "The new X server features full support for transparency, and has window-level image compositing among other things. It allows applications to present alpha-blended content to the screen. A new X Visual was added to the server. At 32 bits deep, it provides 8 bits of red, green and blue along with 8 bits of alpha value. Applications can create windows using this visual and the compositing manager can take those contents and composite them right onto the screen. The X server project holds sources to build an X server separately from a full X distribution."
I don't get why the Xouvert folks didn't just pitch in on this effort. They're almost a month and a half behind their schedule.
/me thanks fdo
Oh well, I'm still getting what I want. Maybe soon they'll be able to add 3D support, as now it's just FB/VESA. Now I'm off to make some debs from the CVS.
Slashdotters are always complaining about that X is slow/bloated/outdated/old/must be replaced/etc/etc. Yet X is slowly improving. Nonetheless, that doesn't stop people from complaining.
Now that I've seen thousands of Slashdotters complain about X, and it seems alpha transparency is finally progressing, I can only conclude one thing:
Don't listen to the whiners!
Really, *all* those people do is whining and bashing, and *nothing else*. No constructive criticism, no suggestions - just whining and bashing. And while people are wasting times whining and bashing, real developers are making real progress.
This is it. Slashdot has lost my respect. I will never listen to the whiners and bashers again.
I mean, you have to use Mozilla or a Mozilla-derivative for web browsing (Konqueror is nice and all, but the last time I tried it extensively it still felt toy-like, and Mozilla is the cross-platform standard I am used to and want to use). But that forces you to use Gtk - so forget about KDE, you need to use GNOME. But now you have to use the awful mismatched GNOME apps. Then what about the OOo monstrosity? The toolkit, widgets, fonts, etc. don't seem to match anything else on the desktop. Why does this just never happen in Windows (even OOo doesn't exhibit these awful characteristics in Windows - yes, this is a rhetorical question, I understand the technical reasons and they all indicate major flaws in the X architecture to me)?
Keith P, you are doing the right thing. I wish I had more time, I'd pitch in and help out with this project, since it might allow me to actually use X without clawing my eyes out some day (or coping with atrocious performance when you hack in all the eye candy on top).
You really don't get it do you? Linux has no controlling body that could make such a "GUI" and that's a good thing. I want choice on my desktop - if we were forced to use KDE or GNOME I'd have switched to another OS years ago.
And dispite all he eyecandy and userfriendliness and stability, and even though most Mac zealots claim that Macs are cheaper than PCs, Apple *still* has less than 4% market share.
expose (application name display upon mouseover)
thumbnailed snapshot of applications on the dock
transparent terminal (though i prefer iTerm)
shadow intensity indicating the front most app
I've noticed the look of the screenshots at this site. It seems so many people want things that look and work like Mac OS X in the freeware world nowadays. Then why are so many more people going with Gnome and KDE? Why don't more people just support the GNUstep people instead? I think NeXT and now Apple has proven the world won't fall apart if you use Objective-C instead of C++. If you go to the http://www.w3.org/ site you'll even see that the first web browser was written in Objective-C. Also, OpenStep exists as a standard so it sure will make easier to port commercial applications written in Cocoa to the Unix world.
You seem to have everything planned out, you have a roadmap, why don't you start working on it right now?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
I haven't done much programming in Objective-C, but I have done a little and I've done quite a bit more in C++. I'm not sure what you mean by consistency, but nonetheless that doesn't change the fact that Objective-C has proven itself to be a practical language. And since I doubt anyone has pressed a gun to your head to make you use Objective-C, I can only assume the implication that you cannot be talking from any personal programming experience about Objective-C and its consistency or lack thereof.
And, of course, you can very well write a compositing manager to do this. That's the beauty of this extension set and architecture - the X server doesn't tell you how to render things. It just provides the means to let you do it. You could even swap composition managers on the fly, I'd imagine, or just tweak settings there-of, or whatever. Just like you can do with a window manager.
Then why are so many more people going with Gnome and KDE? Why don't more people just support the GNUstep people instead?
Easy: while a lot of people like the look of the Mac, they don't like the underlying technologies: DisplayPDF and Objective-C. Personally, I think those technologies are obsolete, inefficient, and cumbersome.
I think adding transparency to X11 is a technically much better solution. It is language neutral and transport agnostic. It also has the virtue of being backwards compatible. And it doesn't require people to throw away their existing X11 software--there is a lot more X11 software than OpenStep or Apple software.
X11 will also get server-side stored vector graphics based on SVG. Again, same functionality as DisplayPDF but more standards compliant and a better design.
Also, OpenStep exists as a standard so it sure will make easier to port commercial applications written in Cocoa to the Unix world.
In what sense do you believe OpenStep is a "standard"? Where are the standards documents? Where can you even get an implementation?
It seems that right now, we have GNUstep and Cocoa, two similar but incompatible implementations, together with some copyrighted API documents.
Note, incidentally, that few of the features that make the Macintosh API visually appealing (shadows, transparency, etc.) were pioneered by Apple, and historically were implemented without anything like Apple's software infrastructure.
There, I would like to point out why something like KDE exists to -reduce- bloat, paradoxical as you may think it.
First of all, a LOT of any given KDE app's functionality resides in the libs. Heck, you can write a simple Web browser in 10 lines of code... This means that to start that app you'll need to load all sorts of libs, which accounts for some of the ~25% more memory a full KDE desktop takes over WindowMaker, as the parent post points out.
Only, and there's the tasty part, once the lib is loaded, it's loaded for all the apps that will ever use it. Ergo: the more code is shared by apps, the less bloat you get down the road.
While this -does- mean you get a bit of an overhead at startup, any additional KDE app running takes up considerably less additional memory than a similar app re-coded from scratch.
I routinely have 10 to 20 browser windows (tabbed and not tabbed) open at a given time, with a mail client, newsreader, IM app, music app, a variety of applets, an IDE and countless terms, and the system doesn't even flinch. Try doing that with as many GUI apps all reinventing their own wheel.
Oh, and as for speed, turn off the eye candy and KDE runs all sweet on a simple Pentium (yes, I did try it).
Note, I name KDE here because that's what I use most, but the same can be said for Gnome (to a lesser extent maybe; last time examined the Gnome architecture it encouraged custom code somewhat more, which is not a bad thing either, mind).
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Troll, indeed, but, I'll bite.
RedHat hasn't said Linux is an impossibility on the desktop. They've said it isn't ready now. Of course, that's a judgement call, and presumably RedHat's judgement is strongly influenced by the fact that they haven't been making a profit selling shrink-wrapped RedHat in the consumer channels. (My totally insubstantiated guess is that no one, including Microsoft, makes money selling shrinkwrapped operating systems to consumers. Apple might clear a profit on their annual $129 OS X upgrade, but it's an exception because it is wedded to their hardware market.)
Lots of folks apparently believe RedHat owes something to the Linux community and that they've done a nasty by dropping consumer sales. Well, I suppose they do owe something -- they didn't write all that code themselves. But, that's in the nature of the GPL, which stipulates that RedHat gets to pay off its GPL debt with source code, not by stubbornly staying with a profit-less product.
RedHat is a business. Their obligation to make a profit and pay dividends to their stockholders takes precedence over any alleged loyalty to the Linux community.
What they do with Fedora bears watching. I've been using it since Fedora Core was released and it really is "not bad". If Fedora turns into a really innovative kind of Linux, rather than an easily installed Linux with legible fonts, Good Things may happen.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"