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X.org Making Fast Progress
prisonernumber7 writes "X.org is showing a lot of progress! The combination of the XFixes extension, Damage extension, Composite extension and XEvIE (X Event Interception Extension)
present in X11R6.8 present user interface designers with a wide range of
here-to-fore difficult to achieve possibilities. What does this mean for the enduser? That's window shadows and window shadows within windows as well as true translucency for the OSS community. Good samples of Gnome and KDE desktops with drop shadows, and so on can be found here, here,
here,
here,
here,
translucency here, here and here,
and its use on handhelds running Linux."
Wow, shiny.
...but I've been waiting for translucency under X forever. It hurts me to admit it because I always thought that I didn't care about "eye-candy" but this is really cool. Why did it take so long?
Oh well...off to look into downloading, though I suppose I'll have to wait for the next version of KDE to take advantage of the new features.
X.Org is proof of Open Source advantages. XFree86 was a failing project, floundering under incompetent leadership. Under normal, closed source projects, this would spell doom for the software.
However, because it is open source, the project could be forked under new, competent leadership. And also, because of its licensing terms, people could switch to that fork without any negative repercussions.
Look at the progress X.Org has made in such a short period of time! How can anyone say that Open Source software is not superior?
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
This is just another step to linux becoming as bloated as windows.
I had not realized anything was missing from my window manager experience. But now that I see the screenshots for myself, I cannot wait for the oppurtunity to turn the new eyecandy off in the next release of KDE or Gnome.
*cough* Sorry.
Really great work, guys. I'm pround to see progress. But aside from these uses, what good will it do?
And what's the implication of 'true' transparency? What kind of fake transparency have we all been using up until now?
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Now we can start to look as much like OSX as possible. Very pretty. Now we just need to wait for Adobe and Macromedia to endorse Linux and it'll steal the graphic design folks from Apple.
Am I the only one who doesn't care what their desktop looks like? Shadows are all well and good, but this only take up valuable cpu time which could be used for NetHack!
This year will be the year of Linux on the deskt...... !!! *yanked off stage by big hook*
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
What I'd like to know is when mainstream distribution makers will build and configure XOrg so that it performs well. My experience with Fedora 2 and 3Test1 was not good. My PowerBook G4 running at 1Ghz running Panther outperformed KDE 3.3 w/ XOrg 6.8.99 from fedora development on a Athlon XP 2400+ w/ 512MB of ram.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Pics are looking good (amazing what a subtle difference can makes in terms of feel) but I have to say what still stands out in all those pics--bad fonts!
I really wish the default font situation would be better in the world of X and nix/bsd distros. Switching back and forth between Macs and PC's (windows), it's amazing how much better the mac fonts look and feel than windows. Likewise, Windows looks as much again better than the typical gnome/kde setup I have seen.
Any ideas how to get a matrox dual head card (G400) working with x.org? :/ Worked fine with xfree86 and the matrox supplied drivers, but not since I upgraded to FC2, which includes x.org. Time to buy a new card?
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
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Drop shadows and translucency are the sort of thing I immediately disable in Windows (and in OS X if I could figure out how). Give me a fast, uncluttered display with well rendered, scalable fonts and no flickering and window doo doo and I'll be happy.
But is the cycle-tradeoff worth it? How will this affect slower environments like remote sessions? If the effect isn't too great, I say awesome. But if it is, I can think of a certain OS's UI that will require hardware acceleration.
To bad X is the slowest graphical sub-system ever. What is needed is hardware accelerated graphics where the window managers have direct access to video memory and not through some slow and useless network layer.
Come back when X is faster than windows GDI.
is that a high-resolution version of hello.jpg???
OK, this may be slightly offtopic, but since we are discussing UI, and I saw this in the screenshots, why does GNOME (and to a lesser extent) KDE sometimes try to pull of both the dock and taskbar interfaces. This is totally rediculous to me, and just leads the interface to feel cluttered and confusing.
OK, so that rant above is coming from someone who has mostly converted to using Mac OS X on the desktop. I still use Linux on servers. Anyway, I remember about a year ago when I made the transition, that the dock seemed rather confusing. However, after a couple weeks of usage, I was cursing every taskbar system I ever had to interact with (Windows and Linux). The dock is just so much more condusive to having many windows open. Add in Expose to the mix, and you are in desktop heaven.
So, my question is then, especially to the GNOME developers (GNOME is my preferred Linux DE), what are the plans with regard to application launchers such as start menus, taskbars, docks, etc. The progress has been remarkable, but, to me at least, this is the area most sorely needing standards and consistency.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Now that's a sexy desktop. I think I may be switching from Blackbox now.
Blatant self-promotion: Jerek.net
The other two desktop operating systems out there have had it for at least five years and are working on newer things. Am I really seeing a bunch of people getting excited over translucencies and shadows? These are things that have been commonplace for years.
:P
There are WAY more fundamental issues that need to be addressed for widespread Linux desktop adoption, from APIs to core architecture changes. But hey, at least our cramped KDE menu has translucency now.
who the hell has the balls to rip off **APPLE**'s icon set? Do these OSS monkeys not understand that for the first time in history, God will be on the sidelines taking notes on how to be "truly wrathful?"
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
It just keeps getting better: Vladimir Dergachev of the GATOS project (support for the tuner on ATI All-in-Wonder video cards) just announced that he now has write access to the X.org CVS - so he can finally merge GATOS into the mainline X code!
Just think: A day in which support for the tuner on ATI cards is simply in the X server, rather than taking a great deal of pain and suffering to get working!
(Of course, this only applies to cards supported by GATOS, the older cards. But perhaps, just perhaps, if enough people bring pressure to bear upon ATI, then ATI will use the GATOS code to support the newer cards as well.)
www.eFax.com are spammers
Will it be possible to make something like Winplosion for Linux .. without using massive CPU and being a resource hog that is .. Winplosion is similar to MacOs Expose.
http://www.winplosion.com
However, Orwell's Animal Farm is a bit more interesting.
Maybe the Martians stole Welles' text.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Objects seen at a distance have less contrast than objects close up. It would be a useful feature of windows if they lost contrast as they receeded to the desktop.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Chances are you were running your X server with unaccelerated drivers - which offloads all the hard work to the CPU. In Panther, Quartz Extreme allows the transform and lighting engine of your GPU do all the hard work, leaving the CPU for things that a CPU should be doing it.
Properly implemented and accelerated, eye candy does not have the take away from CPU power and can greatly enhance usability - as it does with OSX.
Or is that "don't drool on the pictures"?
So this is what FC3 will look like. Hmm...
A good triumph for the Open Source Model.
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
Those translucency screenshots are hosted on freedesktop.org and even has freedesktop in the screenshots. Isn't that Keith Packard Kdrive X11 implementation that's had that for almost a year now?
This looks absolutely great, I too have been waiting along time for true translucency. What this'll mean is that things behind a translucent window should keep moving.... open a translucent window over video and the video should keep moving underneath the window, or open it over a clock and the clock will still be able to be seen moving underneath. Great!
I've been running the latest versions to hit gentoo for a few days now, the 904 release improves stability a lot over 903.
Using the nvidia drivers with RenderAccel enabled with xcompmgr makes the desktop fly! Its amazing the psychological difference the redraw elimination makes. It certainly feels much lighter, and gives my iBook a run for its money. The transparency effects have no noticible speed hit whatsover. I've had multiple transparent videos playing, moving around, etc and its all smooth the way it should be.
This project really is an example of how re-opening the project from the XFree86 'cathedral' has increased development activity in leaps and bounds. Congratulations to all the X.org and freedesktop.org developers on a great job.
-theoddbot
The original poster meant well, but did not include the explanatory text with the screen shots...
What is the name of the dock running in a few of the screen shots? It looks a lot like OS X, is it just kicker reskinned or something?
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Every one of those shots are blatant rip offs of Apple. My god when will OSS developers grow a pair and go out on a limb to try something new?
Sure. From the User perspective, looking at screenshots, it probably looks that way.
You're giving Apple too much credit. The news here is not 'Oooh.. now we can look more like OS X', the news here is 'Now we have proper support for the things OS X supports'.
There is a difference here, because what 'the things OS X supports' are, by which I mean the 2D rendering API, is not a thing developed by Apple alone. Firstly, Apple's Quartz uses the PDF rendering model, which was created by Adobe, and PDF was in turn based on PostScript.
That this is a good way to do 2D graphics is a no-brainer. Postscript was invented in the early 80's. The Mac later supported it's own kind of device-independent images (QuickDraw, and PICT files). Windows had Metafiles, and GEM (if anyone here used the DOS or Atari version) had it too.
Given the success of Postscript and PDF, it's pretty natural to support the things they do. But Adobe (creators of PS and PDF), shouldn't get all credit either. They just implemented stuff developed by others, like Porter/Duff compositing.
(Another early 80's innovation)
So basically, none of this stuff is actually new. It has simply come of age. Apple has been in the forefront, and that is tribute to them. But if you think that this is all Apple's ideas.. You are wrong.
Sorry for my ignorance. This screenshot was awesome! Can someone tell me what was used to create a desktop with this OSX-like appearance?
4 09 500411796a9ba106_1.jpg
http://img3.exs.cx/img3/6458/screen_lynucs_1759
But tahts just me coming from the administration viewpoint.. I think things should just work, not so 'pretty' consitancy is more important to people in the business world.....
Same goes for other esoteric eye candy like 'shadows'...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"I'm still looking forward to create scriptable or messaging capable 3D icons"
Ummm... what would they do again?
I don't see how that's any different than a regular Icon being controlled by a process. Doing it your way seems like just moving a pile of pebbles from one place to another.
Under normal, closed source projects, this would spell doom for the software.
And their work would probably be lost, and any new project that wanted continue their type of work would have to write everything all over again just to reach the existing level of functionality - which is a waste of time and effort. Instead, the pre-existing project is forked. Open from closed source is an innovation in distribution equivalent to modular/OOP from procedural in development in allowing and encouraging reusability. Reusability then facilitates easier extension - like the sort of improvements we're seeing with X.org.
> That's window shadows and window shadows within
> windows as well as true translucency
How do you turn it off?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
...but not really viable for those of us that don't have a box that won't shudder and die if we tried to use it.
Poor nuvem is pushing 7 years old now, I don't think she could handle it. It doesn't even seem to be anything that really serves a practical purpose either. Just something you can point at so your friends will go 'ooooh'.
But if that's all you wanted to do anyway, there are other ways to do it without killing an older computer. So what practical use does something like this have?
"He does look a bit Oompa like, even if his Loompa is a bit off-kilter."
Needs work boys, needs lots of work. I had high hopes for X.org but they are basically shattered now after seeing those OSX rip off screenshots.
You're bitching at the wrong project. It is the window manager and desktop environment devs who most directly determine the look and feel of what you see on the screen. X.Org writes the bits that expose the functionality of video hardware to application developers and various layers of the OS.
All those screenshots are meant to do is advertise the availability of certain effects and capabilities that up till now could only be achieved with dubious hacks.
As what desktops look like, they can look like anything. Out of the box, they can look like Windows, OS X, or other things entirely. Everybody has the basic elements of windows, widgets, icons, and some sort of pager to work with. As it happens, my desktop doesn't particularly resemble either MacOS or Windows. Get off it already.
Given statements like "10 years behind" coupled with general ignorance and I have to come to the conclusion that your troll-fu is extremely lacking. The low userid only makes it worse. It implies you've been around long enough to know better.
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Instead Linux is getting bogged down by the unshiny dull graphics.
If this stuff is implemented properly, it will be done in videocard hardware and won't affect applications.
Every one of those shots are blatant rip offs of Apple.
Do you not see the irony in your statement? You tell OSS developers to try something new and yet it was Apple who have been using a BSD/Mach backend ever since OSX was first released. That is OSS code which is at the heart of OSX. Apple who is totally copying BSD/Unix. I'm not condemning Apple for this of course, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel.
Oh, and don't forget about Safari. Safari wouldn't exist in its current state if it weren't for OSS developers (KHTML).
So basically OSS developers have never done anything original... Except write the heart of the OSX OS runs and write the underlying code for Safari.
Just about everything is a derivation of something else. Rare is the truly original idea. "New" ideas are hard to come by, get used to it.
Now open office can implement Office:Mac 2004's transparent utility window!
The drop shadows are surrounding the windows equally on all sides, regardless of window position. This is not a terribly likely scenario. The light source would have to be directly over the center of ALL of the windows simultaneously. A drop shadow to the bottom right or top left would look much better.
Considering they've spent the last 8 years ripping off Windows, I think ripping off a UI that's actually good IS innovation!
You're looking at Gnome, a desktop environment that runs on top of an X server.
This news just means that x.org now has more capabilities that desktops can take advantage of.
As far as your comment about Linux being behind the times, I'd agree that Linux is playing 'catch up,' but I don't think that's a bad thing, just a necessary step.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
OK, here http://x.org/, start programming. Oh, what, you're not going to? Then stop ranting.
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
Quit pointing fingers and start innovating.
Excuse me, but who the f*** are you to give orders?
Do you think that just because you managed to install Linux that you somehow have a right to tell me, and thousands of other OSS developers what they should choose to spend their time on?
It's OPEN-SOURCE software we're talking about here. If you're not happy. Take that energy you spend bitching and go do something constructive instead.
Will x.org be included in official debian anytime soon? currently i think xfree4.3 is debian unstable.
for the new functions (probably not transparency in this case), are any of them going to be implemented using 3D dri/ gl instructions so that it'll take advantage of today's video cards?
my blog
Like what? Do you have any specific suggestions in mind?
It's no good to be different just for the sake of being different. The Gimp had an interface that seemed to come from another planet; it was heavily criticized for being different from Photoshop and has now been made somewhat more mainstream.
The Linux Naysayers already harp on how much retraining will add to TCO of Linux deployments. You're proposing that they should further increase that cost with far-out experiments.
Other than eye candy, the 2D GUI concept really hasn't changed all that much over the last 20 years. Maybe that's because there's just not that much more that can be done with it. There is huge room for improvement in the UI area, but a lot of those improvements would require fundamental breakthroughs in AI-related technologies. We'd all like a computer to work like the one on Star Trek, but nobody knows how to do it, including the hackers at X.org. In the mean time, they might as well continue to improve the quality of their current products.
What I've been waiting for in XFree86 for years has been support for using input event devices on Linux instead of seperate mouse and keyboard drivers. One should be able to plug in 2 USB mice and 2 USB keyboards, and have each set point to one of your 2 monitors, letting 2 people use the computer at once. Modern computers are so powerfull that in a lab situation where everyone is just doing word processing and web browsing, you ought to be able to have 6 users per machine like this.
This news just means that x.org now has more capabilities that desktops can take advantage of.
On a related note, not all of x.org's new capabilities translate well to screenshots. How exactly would one make a screenshot of the XDamage extension in use?
This may have to do with apple's patent(s) on font hinting. Here is freetype's take on the subject.
I was hoping that RedHat would create such a de-facto standard, but they chickened out with Fedora. Now I'm hoping IBM will do it. Please, IBM, don't let it be Microsoft Linux 1.0!
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Woah hang on a sec. X11 was controlled very tightly and development moved at a snails pace. The OSS community/users had been clamoring for just these types of features FOR YEARS but the X11 folks kept tight reigns on what things would be worked on, so none of these features got completed. Then X.Org forks the project and within a matter of months most of the big name vendors jump on board and already a slew of the features people had been demanding for so long but not getting are now in the code tree ready for testing. This is a VERY GOOD THING because now X is MOVING FORWARD at light speed instead of stagnating like it had been.
A radio maverick jumps to internet only. The Future of Rock n Roll
X has been around longer than Windows. And it JUST NOW has a feature that has been around for years on Windows. Why is it that OSS weenies jump up and down when a tiny feature like this finally arrives for X, when non-OSS has had this for years, and act like OSS just pulled a rabbit out of its hat?
Idiot. XFree86 has been a weak link in the chain of wonderful OSS for years, and for years we (as in the community) have been trying to get XFree86 to pick up the pace, clean up their act, and get to work. But no, XFree86 decided to linger in political pissing wars instead of actually building. It has been stagnant for a long time, and as we've celebrated all the wonderful things OSS brings us, we've all been accepting and acknowledging what XFree86 represented: a complete and utter failure that was independent of the development model. A project both unmanaged and micromanaged to the point where nothing could be done with it but barely keep pace with video cards (and even then not always managing that).
The win here is that XFree86 finally made a decision that made it necessary for the very people distributing it to stop doing so, and for a rival project to fork and fix all the mistakes.
So, yeah, you could focus only on the fact that X.org has new features that supposedly have been had for years in other parts of the industry and talk about how OSS sucks because of that. In the process you will be ignoring all the other wonderful things OSS has that proprietary software doesn't, and never will.
And you'll be ignoring the fact that the very development at which you scoff represents one of the biggest strong points of the OSS movement, and one of the strongest arguments RMS ever makes about Free Software.
So you can be ignorant, and there's still plenty of room for you.
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Eye candy isn't allowed in my shop.
We take things seriously, and don't let users screw up their machine with 'cute'...
They can have 'cute' at home, thus my prefacing this with from the 'administration viewpoint'..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Not "rediculous". Yeah I know this is a lame and off-topic thing to complain about. But this is the third time today I've seen this word misspelled.
And if the entire window was greyed out when inactive, rather than just the window manager border. That'd make it so much clearer.
Translucency means you can (for example) have an editor window open on top of a reference web site in Mozilla, and still read the reference information while working in the editor without having to repeatedly raise and lower the two windows. As a developer, anything that lets me focus more on what I'm actually doing and less on messing around with the interface is more than welcome.
Finally! I will be able to make use of the expose like features of skippy-xd http://thegraveyard.org/skippy.php. No more taskbars for me.
I mean, here I was thinking about features like "stable 3D hardware support" or "more support for video in and out hardware", or "the ability to type international characters the same way in both xterm and gaim"...
But we have DROP SHADOWS!
WOO!
That's a great way to use CPU cycles previously wasted on my actual work!
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Thank you. While I see a lot of people upset about the emulation of OS X, the one screenshot I submitted was intentionally sent to mimic OS X, in an effort to show how far X.org has gone in it's ability to create eye candy by comparing it directly with something that is well established to be of high quality. I hope I didn't offend any Apple zealots :) Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery after all.
I guess the minimum system requirements to just run KDE or Gnome with nothing else going is gonna be around 512M before long... 128M machines already swap while running KDE and 256M machines are pretty much required to be productive using it.
Translucency is an important factor in an area near and dear to me: air traffic control. Most existing solutions in use are deeply mired in non-standard proprietaritude.
stop complaining and start innovating if you feel so strongly.
No, arrogant developers who think a prety icon is good GUI has been the weak link in the chain of wonderfull OSS for years (if by OSS you mean a usable desktop Linux).
You could make Linux a Windows killer to day WITH the current XFree86 just by duplicating the Mac OS X folder structure and usability.
I've never understood this massive desire to try and copy Windows on the Linux desktop. Windows is not a *Nix OS. You're trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole.
Copy Apple for crying out loud. They've ALREADY made an incredibly usable GUI slapped on top of a *nix operating system.
OS X uses an openGL rendering engine, but you can reproduce 99% of the GUI functionality using XFree86 as it stands now and still be 3 years ahead of Windows.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
anyone know what themes are used on http://ruinaudio.com/Xorg-xcompmgr.png ?
OS X uses an openGL rendering engine, but you can reproduce 99% of the GUI functionality using XFree86 as it stands now and still be 3 years ahead of Windows.
Yeah, you could do that, if you wanted. The only problem is that then the desktop would be a third as responsive as it is now. There's a reason OS X uses an openGL rendering engine rather than dumping all that load on the CPU. "Arrogant" OSS developers are well familiar with that reason, are you?
Like what I said? You might like my music
And KHTML wouldn't exist in its current state were it not for Apple.
The whole point of open source is to be used and not have a million people reinventing the wheel two million different ways. That's why BSD is licensed how it is, and that's why the likes of TiVo, Apple, and Red Hat have taken open source and melded it into something refined and stunning.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
The simple fact of the matter is that *no-one* is innovating. No, not even Longhorn is innovative in the slightest. We're at a period in the computing industry where we're just rehashing ideas from the 1980's. There is no point in getting self-righteous over who rehashed a 20-year-old idea first.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
for expose stuff, check out http://thegraveyard.org/skippy.php
it's really easy to use from what i can tell. expose is just another program (like skippy) it just happens to install by default in os x. check out skippy xd, it's just as good.
I'm against picketing but I don't know how to show it.
You've been waiting in vain, my friend. Simply because XFree86 has been able to do this for years. Sorry to hear you've been so far out of the loops, but a simple google search will tell you what you need to know.
Like what I said? You might like my music
The parent post is not a troll (as it was mistakenly moderated), but it could use some elucidation. The open source movement champions selecting software that is technically more advanced. Thus, this strategy will sometimes result in choosing proprietary software over so-called "open source" software. If we look at these advances in X.org as merely technical improvements, it's logical to arrive at the conclusion which the parent poster expressed and note that other systems have had these advances for quite some time.
Another movement, older than the open source movement, frames the issue in another way. The free software movement pitches a message of freedom to share and modify programs. When measured by this criteria, X.org offers something these other systems don't: You get what this movement calls "free software", freedoms which give people the opportunity to develop the technical advances which implement the fancy look-and-feel.
Digital Citizen
XFixes? I've read the link and came away confused. Obviously this must be something outstanding or it wouldn't be in the story blurb. So someone explain to me what it is...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Nope, I just enforce the rules. I don't make them.
However I do happen to agree that in a business you get what you NEED to do your job, nothing more, nothing less.
All the cute stuff only causes support issues when you have more then a few pcs... ( we have around 10000 )
We have the pcs locked down to the point they wouldn't have much of a choice if we switched something on them. They get to use what we let them use.
They also realize we aren't doing it to be evil. They want working machines.. we do what we need to in order to maintain that level of function for them.. 24/7.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Be sure and change the redirect to a legitimate looking site so that the moderator gets M2'd unfair, too :).
Fast progress? Fast progress?! I was hearing promises about this years ago.
I hate to say it, but X is dying quicker than BSD, as they say around here. All we get recently is political squabbling and infighting among these "developers" who never seem to do any coding. I wouldnt be surprised if this transluceny announcement is just a publicity exercise.
and with remote desktop now even a breeze to use with XPSp2, even the network arguments for using X dont carry water.
Sorry, i've given up, the nails in this coffin are coming in thick and fast.
(sorry for the ac, but i dont want to risk my karma with this post)
Ok, accuser. List every innovative thing you've done and released under an open source license.
It's either put up or shut up, and real quick. Your criticism is hardly constructive, and while I'm willing to grant any random user the right to constructive criticism, I'm not willing to grant it to flaming criticism. So now you have to prove your credentials or shut the fuck up.
So let's have it. What have you done?
Like what I said? You might like my music
Ever seen hundreds of users try to run hi-color desktops on terminmal server? Or how about screen savers?
It's a great way to kill your server farm ( and bandwidth ) to let your users run free in a true enterprise environment..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's great to see X progressing in it's new home.
Now is the time to get the esthetics worked out before things get entrenched. The screenshots of the drop shadows show a shadow around all of the edges of the windows. This looks really funny since this implies that the light source is directly over the center of each window. Why is there a shadow on the top? If we're going to have a rendered-style look we should choose a decent place for the light so we can have some consistency.
I vote for the light source to be at offscreen at the top left.
As far as your comment about Linux being behind the times, I'd agree that Linux is playing 'catch up,' but I don't think that's a bad thing, just a necessary step.
Actually, we're not ten years behind. Microsoft just got a ten year head start, and UNIX even longer.
Let's not forget how young today's open source operating system is compared to these others. Sure, the BSDs can claim direct lineage to the original UNIX, but all the fragmenting of UNIX that happened in the 80s and the lawsuits of the 90s made sure BSD would fall behind. And Linux came to the table pretty late in the game, and before Linux there was no open source X implementation. XFree86 was given to us (iirc) when Linux finally had enough POSIX implemented to run it.
So, yeah, you could say we're ten years behind if you really wanted to. That means we've closed the gap considerably, when you get right down to it. ;)
(Side note: I don't think we're ten years behind anymore, I think we've closed the gap completely. In some areas we have some truly innovative stuff, while in others we lag behind, so the aggregate of all the OSS stuff you get with an average distribution puts us on par with Windows XP and Mac OS X. The thing is, nobody will notice until we actually surpass them, and then it'll be too late for them to catch up. Also, people focus on individual features as being behind, rather than looking at the whole forest to see how thick it has grown and how much true innovation is in it, and that's a great disservice to the OSS world as a whole)
Like what I said? You might like my music
the image fromt the article had this picture http://img3.exs.cx/img3/6458/screen_lynucs_1759409 500411796a9ba106_1.jpg
can you name the distro pictured?
Anyone can use and will love KDE or Gnome. Commercial software is so far behind there will be no recovery. It will take a year or two for people like her to tell her friends and widespread adoption to occur but there are plenty of people like me out there ready to help them all.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
OK. What part of 99% didn't you understand. I'll make it clearer. The 1% is the eye candy that requires massive GPU processing. Kill all the compositing stuff and just implement the other usability components.
There's a ton of OS X usability outside the graphic elements that Linux could incorporate right now with no change to the current windowing system. I'll give you the biggest one right now: A way to install software that doesn't require a computer science degree.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
In some of the screenshots, there are OSX-style launcher bars at the bottom. What are they using to do that? Is it a gdesklet launcher?
Quite frankly, until recently, nobody in the Unix Display camp has even tried to improve things (other than a handful of student projects).
When the XFree86 project lead declared X11 to be obsolete, he was not only being arrogant, but begging for someone to develop something better. Which nobody did.
Does this new X11R6.8 work over the network like previous Xfree86 ?
To be more specific:
Will I be able to run X11 application on SUN Solaris (HPUX,AIX..etc.) and see the results on my LINUX workstation ?
and, of course, the other way around. Runing the application remotely on LINUX box and see results on SUN Solaris (AIX, HPUX) workstation.
So, Is new X11 branch (aka X.org branch) backward compatible with the legacy systems ?
Any comment is more than welcome
Thanks
I have a hard time imagining a non free set up equivalent to my current one. I have one kicker from each computer on a different named workspace and individual named workspaces for each project I'm working on make a very productive work environment. Is it cluttered? No, I have plenty of screens for each task. Does it require great hardware? No, I run garbage. I run my Window Maker on an old laptop with all the "real" computers in another room. It's quiet, easy to read and leaves plenty of room on my nice looking desk actually read and write the paper that the world still forces on me.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ok, let's do this, then.
I'll give you the biggest one right now: A way to install software that doesn't require a computer science degree.
Mandrake has the Mandrake Control Center. Fedora/RedHat have Synaptic, and Debian's got it too.
What's next?
Like what I said? You might like my music
emerge mozilla-firefox
Um, didn't that happen right about a year ago or so? And then didn't X.org fork right after that? "nobody did" assumes that these sorts of things can just happen overnight. Many people have been working on it since then, it just takes time. Just like the whole WinAPI wasn't built overnight, neither will a new and better X implementation be.
Patience is a virtue.
Like what I said? You might like my music
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/05/1 943239&threshold=-1&tid=104&tid=8
Ah, I almost forgot what contrast was.
Tiger makes exactly these improvements to the OSX desktop experience via Dashboard. Dashboard allows any one who can code javascript to have access to a wide variety of created APIs to create desktop widgets.
However the current OSX dock is useful for a lot more than you give it credit for, try using it sometime.
--- I do not moderate.
You can do that. It requires a lot of setup, since you need to figure out how to map the right keyboard to each display, but people have done it.
It is not default, because dual monitor systems are common (and increase productivity) and some people do have more than one mouse (or keyboard) when there it accomplishes something.
Well, copying an OS with 90% marketshare kind of makes more sense than copying one with 3% of the same.
What window manager does the last link on translucency is using http://www-sigproc.eng.cam.ac.uk/~rjw57/yummy_scre en.jpg
taskbar ala macos??
OSX most definitely has hardware accelerated compositing - it's a terrific example of the GUI backend done right. It's also not available for anything but Apple hardware.
Windows does not have hardware accelerated compositing. Even it's alpha-channel support is quite flakey - have you ever seen a program with a partially transparent window? With some applications, you can set an entire window transparent, but this quite often leads to corruption of parts of the window - there's a reason Windows doesn't have built in, supported transparency settings in the display manager.
When Avalon becomes part of Windows in 2006 or 2007, it will finally meet (and possibly exceed) the features of X.Org. But I also don't expect the X developers to just sit around waiting for that to happen.
The X server features this is demonstrating aren't "a tiny feature". While hardware accelerated composition is currently being used for transparency and drop shadows, it can also be used to accelerate a 3D desktop a la looking glass - it depends on whatever the composition manager can do. It's revolutionary because this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Three distros, with three different installation methods. Would it be too fucking hard to just accept a fucking standard across all distros? Fuck choice. Sometimes choice is just fucking pointless.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
Why is it so important? OS X and Windows have two completely different methods of managing software. Hell, until recently Windows didn't even have a way to manage software, they dumped that onto the developers.
We have a "standard", if you insist. GNU gave us one already, and most/all packages implement it to a degree that makes it reliable. But if I mention that, then you'll start whining about having to use the commandline, because it's really too fucking hard to type "./configure && make && make install"
Offtopic, did you see on my website that I've got a way to dump hydrogen files for people to download? ;) I was wanting someone to actually test it...
Like what I said? You might like my music
Why do I have to reconfigure X to switch from my laptop's LCD to my external CRT? Why can't I use the nifty FN+F7 on my laptop or close the lid?
Why can't it detect when I'm docked and switch to dual head (LCD + CRT)?
The effects are cool, but alot of us would like to see these usability features too. I like using a graphical login, but I can't because I'm forced to have two X configurations. One for my LCD and one for my CRT.
All I want to know is "Will my X.org actually use my GRAPHICS CARD to render the desktop, not the CPU?" In other words, I don't want it to look prettier -- I want it to be faster. Pretty does not mean functional.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Depends upon your video card. If you have asked for help in such a vague way then I am sure you got less response than I am giving you. What video card, what driver are you using, etc.
Second, often features that are present in new software makes the application smarter and leaner so while nothing happens directly to the driver itself the applications using the X interface become leaner and meaner and therefore faster.
Please see this.
Never have so many screenshots made it to /. and, Never have so many failed...
If you create eye-candy people complain its CPU intensive or looks to much like OSX. If you don't people complain that Windows/OSX are cooler and on the cutting edge and OSS is some backwater unix code from the 80s.
I actually have some Xvidcaps of me using the new Xorg if anyone is interested. I'm showing off some nice shadowing and transparency.
http://www.diabloheat.com/xorg.tar.bz2
http://www.diabloheat.com/xorg2.tar.bz2
you need DivX to play them
> and before Linux there was no open source X implementation
u e= 2001-12&article=xfree86
WTF are you talking about? The reference X11 implementation has always been open source.
As for PC systems, X386 (which became XFree86) was released in 1989, BTW -- years before Linux. I don't think the XFree core ever wanted much if anything to do with Linux or GNU.
http://www.linux-mag.com/cgi-bin/printer.pl?iss
Sounds like you have never heard of Konfabulator? I feel that many of the widgets have much more polish than the ones that I have seen under KDE.
MacOS X will also come with Dashboard, so this functionality will be standard in the OS.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
note that my example is full of crap, since WMP and OSX now have the features.
Please mod on the final conclusions:
Maybe it is because no application is truly superior in everything.
Others...please post a better example. My hands are getting tired trying to stop a flamewar.
Thanks.
badness 10000
have you ever seen a program with a partially transparent window?
The fatal flaw with Windows' per-pixel transparency is that you then can't use child windows. But yes, WinAmp for one supports per-pixel alpha to get anti-aliased edges.
First, as long as you take the approach that Apple took with Aqua and Quartz in offloading the graphic work to the graphics card, then who cares? It barely affects CPU load and you get a better looking interface. It's just putting unused potential to work.
Second, why would you want to look at an ugly interface? Car makers put a lot of work into what you see when you're sitting in the driver's seat, right? Steering wheel, seats, dashboard... they've all been carefully designed for looks just like the outside of the car? Those of you complaining about UI eye-candy: do you also look for totally stripped down cars too? There is something to be said for aesthetics. Unless you're a robot, it affects you.
Third, some "eye-candy" can actually serve a purpose. For example: the "slurping" effect in OS X that so many people complain about actually acts as a visual cue, almost like a moving arrow, to show you exactly where your window is minimizing to. I never lose track of minimized windows in OS X, but I do it all the time on Windows. (Of course, it helps that OS X also has the added "eye-candy" of showing a minimized version of the window itself in the dock.)
Just a few things to consider. I don't think eye-candy is the Great Satan it's often made out to be and it's good to see X keeping pace.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Ladies and Geeks everywere. This is the tenth anniversary of this particular complaint and the correct answer. Let's all have a big round of applause and hope for ten more years of voicing the same complaint, and the same answer. Good Night everybody.
If that's Linux and Gnome where'd that OS X like Dock come from in some of the screens?
No sig for you!!
So I'm not that familiar with what is going on with the X.org so I'm hoping that someone who knows what is going on can tell me if this is really a good long term solution or just a poor hack to extend an architecture not extendable to the needs of a modern interface.
In particular I am concerned that things like transparency seem to be accomplished at the application level rather than the rendering level. In other words, at least on a quick read, it seemed that transparency was handled by the application wishing to display a transparent window asking that window to be rendered off screen, having that composited window returned and then rendering this to the X screen. It would seem a more robust solution would be to allow simple rendering of windows with an alpha component.
I know this might provoke a war over the sufficency of X but I'm hoping to get a few serious responses with technical knowledge about how reasonable it is to do these things without re-enginering X.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
With the new XFree86 policies and their general idiocy involving not accepting submitted patches/changes/extensions - what is happening with the major distros. I'm a Debian user, and a search for "x.org" or "xorg" packages yields no results (in both stable/unstable). I've heard rumor that the X.org packages are actually named as XFree86 in deb, but XFree86 -version still shows XFree86 4.3.
It seems that other users are asking similar questions.
seX.ORGy
I think when people start thinking of X11 as a cross-platform, networked protocol, people will see how superior it really is.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
I personally don't have a problem with it. I however hope it doesn't end up being like when a newbie gets a DTP or presentation program and starts going to town with the effects and fonts.
There's something to be said for being understated, and reserved.
With that logic, you could also say that using an OS with 90% marketshare (i.e. MS Windows) kind of makes more sense than using one with 3% of the same (i.e. Linux).
The number of users is not a always good indicator of software quality or technical merits.
Yeah, the guy who said it also was the main force in booting Keith Packard (the only man who thought X could be fixed).
I almost wonder if it was all part of some master plan to sacrifice himself and xfree for the greater good. (Without the massive jerk-attack, X11 would look pretty much the same as last year, which was the same as 5 years before, etc)
say, anybody know which Chinese input method editor is being used in this screenshot? http://jserv.sayya.org/misc/matchbox-gcin.png
Only on slashdot could a post start with "Idiot." and get modded +Insightful.
2b2b2b415448300d
Informative stuff.
Heh, I was trying to stay focused on GUI tools, since everytime we point out the wonderful set of commandline tools that predate all the GUI tools we've got now, people whine about having to type.
Of course, they did have to type their posts, so typing obviously isn't that hard.
And urpmi kicks emerge's ass, since it doesn't have to compile anything. ;)
Like what I said? You might like my music
Heh, I've thought the same thing myself. ;)
Like what I said? You might like my music
Wonders.
It would be great to be able to use this in the next piece of software I just started to tinker on. In fact, translucency is the reason I started with the Win32 version. I use DIBs on Win98 and UpdateLayeredWindow where it's available (2k/XP), this way I can have translucency on 2k/XP while the thing will still work on Win98/etc.
I heavily use layers internally, so I have to render everything by hand. After a buffer is rendered, all I have is to feed the 32bit (8r/8g/8b/8a) bitmap to UpdateLayeredWindow or dump it to the Win98 or (intended) ??? toolkit simply ignoring the remaining alpha channel.
So... What toolkit would you suggest to use for the Linux version? All I need is something that can blast those bitmaps to screen and feed me just the basic keyboard/mouse input. If I could keep translucency instead of rendering it against a black window or captured stale background, it would be great...
Read the guy's post. ORDINARY people don't know what the fuck "./configure && make && make install" is. And they sure as hell won't know what to do if something goes wrong. (And don't EVEN tell me nothing can go wrong. I've used UNIX for so long I'll never believe that bullshit.)
Who's being arrogant now? Someone who thinks that only elite UNIX weenies should be able to use computers? At least my mom can go out, buy a piece of software, and install it without being treated like she isn't WORTHY of using your precious fucking OS.
I tried what you suggested, & I love it.
It's too bad there is that thing beside the menus, but I'm actually quite impressed. I added a seperate bar just for the tasks. It's nice having a special bar devoted to just being a task bar.
I just love KDE. Even though I have really old hardware, I'm amazed @ what KDE can do for me.
Thanks again for your advice.
testing out my trending skills
Read my post again, and then fuck off.
Like what I said? You might like my music
I say X has until recently ahead of both MS and Apple in the single most important feature for a graphical server: having "x" in the name. :-D
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
porthole does gui for gentoo's emerges for those that really need the gui. You can use binary packages with lots of ebuilds but thats not really the point of gentoo :)
A radio maverick jumps to internet only. The Future of Rock n Roll
Hi, Bill.
Could you please stop all this fuzz about polish. Call me old fashioned, but in my PC I want nothing else than good, old english.
Ah, those arrogant immigrant geeks.
All I want to be able to do is kill my xserver and have my x applications continue to run and be able to reconnect to any other server. I would want this to be completely transparent to the x applications and work with everything.
This would be the one ultimate killer feature.
And reinstall freetype from source with the hinting patches. So you're violating an apple patent. WHO CARES? You've saved your eyes.
Instructions here
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Is there a good source of instructions on how to install some of these new features, or are they so experiemental that it is not recommended at this point?
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=20 4593 /opt/Xorg
It applies to CVS, But I think it can be used to build the stable release, Actually If you don't want to break your current XFree installation, You can install it in a different prefix by defining:
#define ProjectRoot
#define NothingOutsideProjectRoot YES
in your host.def
That's completely fair; Winamp and a few others do support the feature. I just meant to point out that Windows current support wasn't really fully featured, and isn't done in a comparable way to what the new X server does.
"makes it easier" don't you understand? Shadows add another visual cue which is IMHO a good thing.
It's good to see this. I don't think the cpu cycles will be an issue according to moore's law. But, the issue of going blind by default needs to be worked through.
Do we need to set up a fund to have an artist make these damn things? I hear it's like 200K and a few years of work to do proper font creation. Perhaps a touch up to freetype fonts might be a faster way.
I just don't want to break any laws while trying not to go blind(apple/MS patents). Anti-aliasing has helped a bit in some situations.. but fonts seem to still be a turd. Suse I think even made their own type for their distro- SuseSans, etc. In any case, I'm open to somebody smarter than me giving some recommendations on how the community at large can have kickass fonts without going to jail. It seems to be a thorne in the side of linux userland. Again, I'm open to suggestions.
If you want to speed up NetHack, I think the Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard :)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yet again, even more examples of why the OSS community sucks - because NOTHING innovative has ever come from it, almost all projects (especially Linux & X) are complete rip-offs of other platforms.
Windows XP and OSX and perhaps earlier versions of Mac have done this for a long time now.
Every new "innovative" feature going into X is a complete rip-off (mostly from XP), but the roots can be traced way back to the early days of Apple.
HAND.
All that snazzy window borders and task bars, fvwm or E could have done most of it (leaving aside drop shadows) back when ye olde screenshot was taken.
The real improvements, the stuff that matter, show when you start right-clicking or drag-and-dropping. Soon enough you'll notice that it's no longer a WM with some eye candy, it's a system.
From "look and feel", look matters 10%; feel matters 90%.
Thankyou. I hate X but i like your comment.
Like change screen resolution without having to reboot. And I don't mean changing the screen resolution and have the desktop size stay the same and having to pan around.
As far as I know, much of innovation done by technology companies these days is meant to be demonstrated by thickness of their software patent portfolios, mostly consisting of obvious ideas, or things that have existed for decades, or both. As far as being "behind," Microsoft looks to be about 2 decades behind in network transparency, multiple virtual desktops and just about every useful window manager feature in existence (and there are a lot).
So now we too can have a cheap rip-off of osx! Seriously with all this new modularisation is there any chance of having GLX on a Xinerama two screen setup?
For Christ sake, why can't you OSS crowd sometimes to innovate something? Copy this and copy that, it's so pathetic.
It is possible to "hunt" for free fonts. Lithuanian government is funding the creation of font that would render all Lithuanian charcters properly (Lithuanian characters: Latin 26 + 6 latin modified + characters with accents). This font should be free (?public domain?) and should appear by the end of this year or at the begining of 2005.
Right now experimental intermediate version is available at http://www.vlkk.lt/palemonas.html (in Lithuanian) direct link for font: http://www.vlkk.lt/files/palemonas.zip.
I did not find any legalese but the site says the font is original and intended for "general public and needs of litunistic studies".
No. Windows does *not* have this. This is targetted for Lonhorn, implemented in Avalon. Sure, windows can do some transparency. So does X, but Composite is NOT just about "transparency". Look at the technical details.
I'll give you the biggest one right now: A way to install software that doesn't require a computer science degree.
I installed Gentoo Linux...I followed the the simple instructions on how to install it, and it installed. First time. Got all my hardware right. Sound, video, printer...everything on my computer.
I don't have a computer science degree. But I'm not an idiot either and can follow simple directions. I'm SICK of people saying "well, you have to have the GUI idiot-proof so anyone can use it. I'm sorry, if you can't figure out something that's simple...and yes Gentoo was simple...then perhaps you shouldn't even be ON a computer. Go watch TV or something.
To me, Linux blows away Windows and OSX in terms of usability and on the Desktop. Yes, I use all three in my job...and I have a choice on what hardware and OS I use at home and I put Linux on it because in my opinion it's the best.
Linux for the desktop is here, it's now, it's happening. It's not some far off future thing that maybe one day will be here. It's here now.
Bottom line: to each their own in terms of the OS they wish to use. No one is wrong in whatever they want to use. If you wish to use Windows, then it's right for you, Linux is right for me. Choice man, choice.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Shaded windows are great, but how about working on important things instead of eye candy?
They should work on changing the clipboard so it'll be like the windows' clipboard, and not the obnoxious thing unices have now (copy by selection).
Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
Nave H. Weiss
That is cool stuff, but I never felt deprived by not having it.
I miss very few things from windows since I switched back to the KDE.
One of them is the ability to rename and create directories from a file dialog box. Yes, I know I can get if I use Konqueror as my web browser, but I am stuck on Mozilla.
Yes, I know this has nothing to do with x.org
I'm not remotely excited about `true' transparency and drop shadows - features which are no use beyond looking pretty for me. However I can see that in order to get support, which is what an OSS project thrives on, the screenshot-happy users need to be pleased. So in that regard I think such developments are a trade-off.
.o's, clocks in over 300MB) in order to get my graphics tablet to work. Thats an enormous download and compile job when a mere fraction of that code and the result is needed. Streamlining and simplifying this process would allow more people to experiment with x hacks and make our lives easier.
What significant X developments would impact me? Well, has anyone tried adding a 3rd-party driver to X? I have to download the entire x source (apt-get source xfree86) and stick a diff from aiptektablet into the debian patch directory and build the whole freakin` thing (which, with
I think hardware support for vector rendering will be a great benefit to how quickly window-manager and toolkit operations are performed - anyone profiled a GTK2 app recently, and seen the slice pango takes up?
Finally there is a lot of innovation going on outside of the x.org project which I think is equally as important as the framework - examples of next-generation window management such as ion and devil's pie show where I think things are moving for power-users.
This whole translucency thing is truly revolutionary because it makes it possible to watch pr0n videos in the root of your display, while you have semitransparent windows in front of them where you are doing real work. Then your boss will be somewhat happy that you're somewhat working, should he see pr0n on your screen.
Come on people, where is your sense of vision?
hi,
9 500411796a9ba106_1.jpg
I looked and looked, but no one seems to know what this is:
re: http://img3.exs.cx/img3/6458/screen_lynucs_175940
can you please tell me what is the app at the top right corner displaying the clock, battery, etc...
thanx a lot.
You all noticed it's a troll, you even say it's a bad troll, obviously with zero content, no point or no real criticism, just offensive bullshit.
Yet, you fall to it and feed the moron? Looks like a pretty good troll, or at least a flamebait, to me, they rarely manage to generate this big thread.
Stop responding to the idiot. Thanks.
From what I can tell (not so much, but enough, and I have been around a fairly long time), there has Always been an open X11 implementation. The X.org kit has always been the reference implementation that everybody built their versions of X11 from, and to that end has always been under some variation of the BSD license, or at least from the very early days of Linux/*BSD.
XFree86 was a fork of the X Consortium (which ultimately mutated into X.org) when the X Consortium was the stodgy old line, conservative organization, and (again, if I'm not mistaken) it inherited those qualities from the X Consortium (which, I underline, has become X.org). It became the defacto reference implementation because the economics of the workstation business and of graphics cards made XFree86 the only set of drivers that people cared about.
Both Croquet and LookingGlass are examples of innovation not found elsewhere, and are enabled by the new facilities.
Yes, it makes sense to represent window layering and/or focus also using color. For example, you may want to reduce the saturation of content that isn't in focus.
Another thing that has been done is to blur window content that is layered on top of one another differently: the current layer is sharp and other layers are increasingly blurred. Some video games already use that technique.
I believe this extension makes it easier to experiment with such visual cues, although eventually, it may be useful to add specific primitives to it (they would enable hardware acceleration).
"Copy Apple for crying out loud"
KDE screenshot 1
KDE screenshot 2
Synaptic is a usability disaster zone, it's basically screwed by design. Read any HCI text book to understand why low level apt frontends can never be as easy to use as we need/want.
Given that I don't see a relationship between your statements that could be resolved in a reading of an HCI book, why don't you explain exactly what your concerns with Synaptic are, and what you think would be a reasonable soltion.
Not a chance.
It has already happened - DRI is now a part of X.org.
That's one of the reasons Vlad getting write is great - now DRI and GATOS will be one, as well.
(Not a chance - it's a certainty. A play on words.)
www.eFax.com are spammers
Three distros, with three different installation methods.
Correct. And this is a problem, why?
Distributions are effectively OSes unto themselves. They cross-pollenate to some extent, but their independence is powerful.
Take a look at RPM. Red Hat did a great job coming up with a low-level packaging format that allowed them to encapsulate community projects as raw, unchanged source, add in distribution-specific patches and fixes in a controled, reproducable way and then build and install binary packages.
Debian, while having a slightly less functional package format (dpkg), built an amazingly powerful distribution and dependency management system called apt.
Different distributions, different goals, different solutions.
In the end, Red Hat's Fedora has ended up moving toward apt+rpm because both solution have strong merits that solve important problems, and now a new level of abstraction and functionality is being build on top of that base.
There's only one "mv" across Linux distributions because it's something that we've pretty much agreed upon. As things like desktops, installation systems, etc grow and mature, they too will sort themselves out, but prematurely selecting one solution and killing the others (ignoring the political and social impossibility of such a feat) would stunt the growth that we all claim to want.
it's alpha-channel support is quite flakey
"its".
Does this mean that we can, for example, get things like rdesktop and VNC to be able to accept the extended-ASCII (+number pad...) characters that Windows uses?
Some of those don't map to printable characters in iso-8859-1, so entering them I found to be practically impossible.
the transluency effect doesn't look quite right to me.
You can see from one of the screen shot the hour hand of the background xclock having exactly the same dark green color over the spots where two transluency windows overlapped and where only one transluency window is on top of it.
May be the calculations stopped at the first level?
Open Synaptic. What do you see? A *huge* list of packages. On top of that, Synaptic expects you to mark packages for upgrade/install/remove. It has toolbar buttons with names like "Dist Upgrade".
Synaptic feels too much like "just-an-apt-frontend". Whether it is one is not relevant: such a UI is simply too overwhelming for many users.
Same problems exists for both "remote X" and "Terminal server". ( I was using the term 'terminal server' generically.. )
Except that you turn the picture around backwards, its the same concept...
If you are letting users run everything locally, then of course it wont effect the network, but you don't really have an enterprise operation in that case.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have to admit, with the translucency and the nice shadows, that's the best looking desktop I've ever seen. And I'm writing this on OS X. Kudos to X.org, I'll have to give it a whirl....
The first time you tried to 'break the rules' with the network security, you would be escorted out the door, by armed guards.. Possibly followed by a lawsuit, depending on what you did.
Just because you WANT something doesn't mean you need it, in the work place. Its not a democracy there its a dictatorship.. And you have signed agreements to that effect when you were hired..
Freedom is for at home.. Not at work.
You apparently haven't been working for a large company before, or not for long.... Contrary to what you believe, common people do things that are not appropriate, and against the rules. Companies DO get sued for their employees actions.. In the REAL WORLD you have to prevent this, else open yourself up for liability and lost employee productivity from all the playing around.
In a small business you have more flexibility, but in a large entity, you don't... ( which was my original point, enterprise level. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
To be fair, dpkg and rpm are about equally functional, dpkg still has some stuff rpm does not (recommendations, for example would be quite nice to have), and vice versa.
I take it you have never had a user call up, 300 miles away " all my text is gone ".
When they have made their font color = their window background color..
Sorry, but eye candy can directly administration.
That was just a short example, there are hunderds more, ive been doing this for 30 years.. I do have a good idea of what users can do to hose things up.
Should never have left the 3270's behind.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I don't know the name for the effect used but what you get when you shade an object from all four sides results in the appearance that the object is pressed or inset into the surrounding surface. This is distinctly different from shading two adjacent sides in creating a drop shadow which causes the illusion of being raised from or floating above the surrounding surface.
The car analogy is not so good for your point:
The driver of a car is the one least concerned with what its functional interface looks like. That's left for the passengers to gawk at.
The same holds true for computers.
The aesthetics of a car are strictly marketing driven. If a dashboard is particularly attractive, it's only because a marketing goon did his job correctly. And it will, on average, make people more willing to buy the car.
[switch contexts]
Now that I've bought my new car, I'm way more concerned with how it all works in operation than what it looks like. I don't have time to see how pretty it all is when I'm charging down an ill-maintained Detroit highway at 95MPH, while surrounded by stupid Michigan drivers with the audacity to pass me on the right at more than 100. Nor do I have time to gaze at its multifaceted prismatic analog clock while avoiding kids at 25MPH in a quiet neighborhood. The efficiency hit of having too much to look at and process could kill someone, and it often does.
So, my attention is on driving. Even if I land at a red light and get a chance to gloat to myself over my wise new-car purchase, the light always turns green and horns start honking before I ever get a chance to really enjoy groping the carbon fiber gearshift knob.
I just don't have time to get into it, and I shouldn't have to make time, either. If I have to look, even for a second, to change radio stations or operate the windshield wipers or find the one of the two 1x2" horn buttons located strangely at the outside edge of the steering wheel, the functional interface is all fucked up. If it were done right, I'd never have to see it at all.
Thus, damning the marketers, automotive engineers try to keep their interfaces as simple and intuitive as possible. Concordantly, about the most I get out of the marketer's aesthetic influence on a car's interior while I'm driving it is a rough notion of the color of the dashboard.
The same holds true for computers.
Nobody dies from a computer accident caused by someone being distracted by the awe of transparent windows zooming into and out of focus with trilinear filtering (unless that awestruck individual is a police dispatcher), but it does take its toll on efficiency, just the same.
Every moment I spend watching repetitive UI eyecandy happen is a moment I waste. Every moment I spend waiting for the computer to process its eyecandy is a moment I waste. I don't have time for that shit. And besides, there's only so many times I can say "Wow, that's so cool" before that coolness wears off.
I use computers to Get Stuff Done, just like I use cars to get from A to B. The less time I spend interacting with the computer, the more time I can spend interacting with whatever that stuff it is that needs done.
Re: the slurping effect, why would you want to minimize anything, anyway? The taskbar is yet more eyecandy, as demonstrated by the fact that you need even more extra visual cues just to make use of the damned thing. When I'm done using a program for awhile, I leave it open. When I need to go back to it, I know it's going to be just where I left it. To use a term, try "spacial organization."
My view of the computer really does consist of a bunch of transparent aterms on one desktop and a multitabbed Mozilla window on another, using Blackbox. Small GUI apps get tossed into purposeful gaps on the terminal desktop, things that want to use most of the monitor go to their own desktop. If I need overlapping applications for some reason (which I sometimes do, but not more than once every few days) it just takes two clicks to make it happen.
And if I'm really done with a program, I exit it. When I need it again, I run it again. (Modern memory management algorithms virtually guarentee that the program will be swapped out in exchange for disk cache by the time I need it again hours or days later, negating the start-up time.) I don't minimize anything. Ever.
No needless bullshit here, thanks. I'm busy getting stuff done.
Kid-proof tablet..
I'm not making any apologies, because I have bnot and would not claim that X is better.
I think the X support has been lacking, and does just about everyone with any kind of insight into these matters. The fact that the development in this area exploded as soon as X.org forked only underlines that.
I think the Quartz API is far ahead of anything Linux or Windows has to offer in that area.
(There is a reason for this too.. Apple wants to keep their grasp on the advertising/publishing market. Good device-independent graphics is a must.)
With some applications, you can set an entire window transparent, but this quite often leads to corruption of parts of the window - there's a reason Windows doesn't have built in, supported transparency settings in the display manager.
The ATI "Hydravision" applet lets you turn on transparent windows and menus, and will even let you set the degree of transparency for a full-screen movie, for instance. I didn't find it all that useful, though.
I have seen it first hand, when you run ALL clients remotely, the bandwidth useage does go up on the network, and the 'clent server'will have increased load as you change your 'candy' from the basics..
While perhaps each individual change isnt alot, it does add up enough to see.. ( though screensavers are murder on their own )
Remember that the Xclient must push out the proper commands for the Xserver to draw the 'candy' and the more crap you have, the more that has to be done on both sides. ( + the network )
I do agree however that an RDP setup would be much worse since most things are moved across the wire ( though not all, it can cache items like bitmaps and icons ), but X does have similar issues that must be addressed..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Anyone know what firefox theme the guy has in the 5th screenshot? It's very nice!
I'm a student, again. Entergy was the last big company I worked for. In the last year or so, I've done independent consulting and worked tech/retail/wholesale. A month or so ago, I worked the chain gang of a Windoze XP upgrade at a bank and thought it was the biggest cluster fuck I'd ever seen. I've done programming for two university research labs and nuclear transport. I'm now a grad student in Health Physics and hope to get into medical imaging.
I got into free software because g77 worked better than a commercial package that set me back $200. While using it, I noticed that the programming tools were better all around. Networking was also better than most commercial software I was using. Since then, free GUIs have vastly overtaken the commercial ones and everything else seems to have held onto it's lead.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
But this year I decided that Linux had come far enough to satify my needs. Now I wouldn't trade Fedora for any number of copies of XP.
I even installed Mandrake on a friend's computer. They guy is the target market for AOL, but he does fine. All he needed was someone to set it up for him!
Open Source Sushi
Saw this on the last "here" link :
www-sigproc.eng.cam.ac.uk - web site unavailable
The machine which provides www-sigproc.eng.cam.ac.uk has suffered a hardware failure and it is currently being repaired and restored.
The new slashdot effect ?
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
Cruel people, who throw stones at those project managers - In hindsight, what we had was a groundswell for good-enough software, and greenlighting 'cowboys', over stability. A lets do it now approach, and fix up whoopsies later approach- something that very big software companies do, BSD Vs more fluid Linux line.
The outcome is good - progress and choice, but the truth is, quality is no longer lusted after like it was, as a fix is just a click away.
I'm too lazy to read all the papers looking for the answers. Can someone give a quick/short explanation:
Currently when a line is drawn by the client, the server has a composite clip for the destination, and it draws the line to the framebuffer using the clip. It shows up on the screen because the window occupies some part of the framebuffer that is displayed on the screen. (This is a little oversimplified but so what).
But now it sounds like a window resides somewhere else - main memory? Off screen framebuffer memory? And when the server renders a line, it renders to this other place. At some point in time, all the windows are composited to the part of the framebuffer that is displayed.
Do I have that right?
If so, how does the GPU get used for the client rendering? It seems like many windows will reside in main memory, because there is no guarantee that they can fit in off-screen framebuffer memory. If that's the case, rendering will be done in software on the CPU?
This can't be the case, so how does this work?
The server can't be swapping window contents back and forth between framebuffer and main memory, that would be slow. Where are the windows?
Also, if a window resides somewhere else, when the server renders on behalf of a client, there are no overlapping windows at that stage - so does the server render the primitive completely (wasteful) or does it somehow take into account the occlusion that is happening on the screen? With compositing happening, I don't see how the server could know what is going to be "hidden" anymore.
Can someone shed light on these 2 issues?
There are other issues as well ... it's such a low level tool that it lets you shoot yourself in the foot as easily as doing the right thing.
These problems are fixable but only by developing a lot of new infrastructure. It's on the todo list.
When will I be able to download a distro, like say, Fedora, SuSE, Slak, or the like, and have this preset as the X server with all the eye candy compiled in? Can I do that already?
Copy Apple for crying out loud. They've ALREADY made an incredibly usable GUI slapped on top of a *nix operating system.
Yeah, copy Cocoa(?) and collectively have the entire X.org effort shutdown by copyright lawyers.
No thanks.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I didn't know that.. I'll check that next time I boot knoppix. Thanks!
Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
Nave H. Weiss
Some of the things that RPM can do in terms of source-packaging and re-packaging are quite useful and not quite mapped fully into dpkg. That said, they're both great tools, and I'm glad they exist.