Slashdot Mirror
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."
Looking at screenshot number 3, I think the fellow's got a few bugs to work out.
Bu-dum-chee!
Thank you! Thank you! I'll be here all week! Try the buffet!
That will be up to the compositing manager. It can choose to do it all in software or use OpenGL if available.
We will probably see a lot of window managers get composite managing built in, but there is also likely to be a few compositing only manager, which will work with your favorite window manager.
So in the end it is up to the manager to uo decide how to do the compositing.
For your viewing pleasure, I have obtained an ASCII-art mirror of the screen shots:
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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.
The article you cite is probably a case of a hardware fast path NOT being used, but being advertised by the API. Thus he was asking for hardware operation X, and getting a generic software operation X, which wasn't hand optimized for his particular options. In that case his hand optimized code might be faster by a lot. Such a case occurs fairly often in graphics.
:)
For a non-speculative example, OpenGL's glDrawPixels draws rasters from the lower left corner, whereas most UIs like to draw from the upper left. You can change it by calling glPixelZoom( 1.0, -1.0 ), but in many cases this knocked the gl driver from 1-1 pixel mapping into floating point transforms (basically it started using software to scale the image by some floating point value). A few phone calls to nvidia, 3dlabs, sgi, and intergraph later, and their drivers started special-casing for a -1.0 y pixel zoom, and our software sped up by a factor of about 1000.
In the far future of Moore's law we will not have GPUs at all, merely CPUs with power to burn. So in that sense I agree with you that hardware is/will-be not needed. Now I haven't done any graphics programming since machines hit 1ghz, so that far future may be now.
I'm wondering how long before we see this in XFree86.
:)
It probably won't go into XFree86. The freedesktop.org X server contains a rewritten core and relies on many X extensions that the XFree86 project is really not embracing. Despite the good work the XFree86 team has done over the years, they have a long history of hesitation and, even worse, conflict with those that would take XFree86 in a non-standardised direction.
I applaud the new efforts on freedesktop.org, especially by the evergreen Keith Packard, and this is what we need to see in the FLOSS world.
X11 is one of the few areas where there is no real competition between projects. Linux vs. BSDs (vs. each other) or KDE vs. GNOME. It's healthy; it pushes the projects to higher levels of progress. Once freedesktop.org's X server is ready for mass consumption (hopefully not too long) then this 'lack of competition' changes.
FLOSS will see a whole new world of graphical coolness as Window Managers and Desktop Environments add Compositing Managers to produce awesome effects using freedesktop.org's X server and the group of projects supporting it.
The freedesktop.org X server intermingles with things like Cairo and lots of other exntensions. Conversely, XFree86 seems to fight any hopeful extensions.
What will happen is that in a couple of years, many DEs and WMs will ship with a 'feature X requires freedesktop.org's X server and will not work with XFree86' and XFree86 will lose backing and momentum.
The only downside to freedesktop.org's X server is that it will no longer run well on a 20mhz 486.
Yeah, I don't care either.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
I, for one, welcome our new alpha-channel enabled translucent overlords.
It has translucency? I have yet to see that implemented. Everything I've seen so far is only varying levels of transparency. I'm only seeing alpha channel implemented, no options for a scatter channel which would define the degree of scattering of the image as it passes through a foreground image.
Ah, I can't fault you. The site itself regularly misuses the term "translucent". Free lesson: if you can make out details, particularly able to read text, it is not translucent, it is transparent. Transparency is a continuum from completely transparent to opaque. Translucency is not part of that continuum. It is different, like looking through a frosted shower door, where you can get the sense of color and motion, but where details cannot be determined. Photons get scattered by the medium resulting in a loss of perceptable detail.
I'd applaud a system that implemented a scatter channel for true translucency. Trying to read text while other text is showing through it is difficult. A moderate amount of translucent scatter applied would be less distracting.
Now think, what if you could apply a visual blurring to windows that aren't in the foreground/under the cursor? Surely that could help focus the user on a task. (There'd need be some control to allow multiple windows be in perfect focus on occasion.) Simulated depth perception to enhance the window stacking model.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Actually, KDrive runs better on a 20MHz 486 than XFree86. It's much smaller, and has things like a shadow frame buffer VESA mode that make it work well with pathetic graphics HW. I've used KDrive on an 8MB 386 to good effect.
Of course, you won't want to use the fancy compositing managers on such a box, but at least you can have some kind of window system on it instead of just being stuck with console mode.