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."

Comments

the desktop's not all that's been freed

[EyeSavedLatin]

Their server has been freed of the burden of loading pages. If only all pages functioned so, it should make your desktop truly free!

Grounds for a unified unix gui

[ModernGeek]

I think it is time we make a more userfriendly, windowmanager-specific GUI for Linux/FreeBSD/etc that will be accepted by the masses and seen as "Linux", maybe make it official, this is the perfect grounds to get it accepted by the masses, making a unified interface for linux and other derivatives, then see if it is accepted. Make it like windows where all you see the whole time is the user interface, to make it better for the desktop world, some say that choice is good, and the ability to run programs remotely is good, but now days for the average desktop user, this is not very practical, and choice is becoming randomness since there is no standard user interface guideline for Linux. Lets make someone like MacOS X for x86, but based on Linux: fast, easy, etc. I could help with UI development, etc if anyone is interested in starting a project, I'm not much for coding though. Linux needs somthing original. I know, I posted this in the past, but I am wanting to get the word out.