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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."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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!
afaik they use `layers' to draw the screen now. So a foreground window doesn't actually draw over a window in the background. This means you can drag windows over other windows without the background app having to redraw itself.
Ever notice how if you have a transparent menu open with a xterm/etc under it and, say, you're compiling something, that the text in the transparent menu doesn't update? `Fake' transparency refers to what we've been using now, which is basically taking a screenshot of the app and then pretending that your window is transparent by using the screenshot in the background of the window/menu. This real transparency means that it's not handled by the application, it's handled by X, and since the contents under your window weren't overdrawn, it can just.. you know... render it properly.
That's what I got from it, anyway.
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
*What kind of fake transparency have we all been using up until now?*
the kinda where you don't see what's right under the transparent window, rather you just see transparency against the background image.
this is supposed to be true support for it, without any goofy hacking from within the program, i think.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
They just gave CVS write access to Vladimir of the Gatos project according to the mailing list, so in an upcoming release (not the next one due out in a couple days) we should see support for ATI All In Wonder video cards out of the box. Congrats to the Gatos project, and to Xorg! This should have been done years ago. Good riddance to XFree86.
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.)
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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.
Check out Expocity if you're a Gnome user and Kompose if you're a KDE user. Granted, it'd be nicer to see this built into X but for the time being they're not so bad.
The original poster meant well, but did not include the explanatory text with the screen shots...
Giving window managers direct access to video memory is rather stupid, considering that one of X's primary features is network transparency.
I know you're trolling, but it's rather important to recognize that X is a protocol, nothing more, and nothing less. How fast or slow it is depends on the implementation; some are clearly better than others.
Comparing X to direct video access is rather like comparing ssh to the linux console. The latter will always be faster because there is no network bottleneck, but you can't use it to connect to your machine remotely.
Furthermore, there are extensions which practically do give an application direct access to the hardware, or at least, as direct as one can safely manage. But what's the point, if all you're doing is drawing widgets? I could understand it for games or playing DVDs, where speed is important and you'd be stupid to play it over the network anyway, but for a window manager?
If you want to use a single user, non-network aware system, then by all means, use Windows*. In the meantime, we should keep working on improving our X implementation in areas like optimizing for local connections. There are lots of shortcuts that haven't been implemented and I'm sure there are lots that haven't even been thought of yet.
Anyone that has had to administer machines remotely appreciates the network transparency of X. It's the only window system that has this feature. Let's not throw it out because some trolls don't understand its value.
*Yes, I know Windows is now multi-user. But it wasn't designed that way, and it shows.
The whole idea of the composite extension (which this fancy shadow and transparency is based upon) is to make the desktop flicker free.
It does this by diverting the X apps to draw to an offscreen buffer, and then compositing it to the screen in one feel swoop. This makes windows really solid. There is no need to wait for the X client to redraw the window contents when you move another window over it for example.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
> Has Windows really had Translucencies and shadows since 1999?)
Yes. Win2000, which went gold in Nov 99, IIRC.
This is a mere configuration setting that most of the distributions choose to set. Fontconfig is perfectly capable of turning off AA for a given range of sizes.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
The shadows/transparency are only going to be rendered when changes occur to the windows they show anyway. Unfortunately there's often a lot of other things going on at the same time (expose events etc.). With the window manager I use I set the moves and resizes to only show outlines until the window is place where it is going to go.
Since it's part of the X server the effects are all going to be done locally anyway. If you only have a monochrome display on the remote box you can still run most X applications correctly anyway, this will be no different, and you'll probably never see the effects. However, if you have a program that specificly requires an extension which your local X server doesn't support (eg. like we currently have with OpenGL), then it won't work.If you have some VNC type thing that takes bitmaps then you'll probably want to turn the effects off in the X server that feeds it.
It makes a difference, switching between the VESA driver and the Nvidia driver for a card makes a large difference. X has had hardware acceleration for a very long time (pre-linux I suspect).Technically multiuser. In practice, it's rather less than multiuser, but I didn't want to just say "it's not multiuser" without a caveat because otherwise I'd just get 20 responses from Windows fans telling me how wrong I am etc etc. Since I don't use Windows (and in fact never have, at least not on my home/work machines), I don't know to what extent it is or isn't multi-user. I know it has profile support and that you can login/logoff as other people. I used to use VMS and that was definitely multiuser, and I've heard rumors that NT is a dumbed down VMS. But essentially in my gut I agree with you, I was just covering my ass.
-
X with dropshadows (from the article)
- Old X which shipped with Red Hat 5.0
- Windows 95
- Windows XP
- Mac OS X
The situation has gotten orders of magnitude better than it was years ago. We're now at least on par with Windows (and our default themes are cooler), and thanks to the work of the X.org team as well as the KDE and GNOME developers, I'm sure we will have OS X quality fonts before OS X has reached the next quality level. We're catching up.Where the Linux desktop really shines, however, is when it comes to customization. I prefer to operate in a very Windows-like manner, with maximized windows and taskbar. KDE allows me to do that (and gives me a nice launcher command bar with autocompletion - I haven't used the "start" menu in ages). Some want a nice file manger - KDE gives you Konqueror, GNOME gives you Nautilus. Others prefer doing everything in the shell, where you can use Midnight Commander and feel like you're back in the old DOS days.
Some want virtual desktops or virtual screens (larger than the physical screen size). Any decent window manager provides that. Some want a very efficient, slim system - they use something like Windowmaker or XFCE. Others want all the bells and whistles and install KDE or GNOME with lots of applets. Some like to experiment with innovative new UIs and try out window managers like ion. Others are happy just using a cloned Windows or Mac interface.
If you're willing to experiment, no system offers you as many possibilities as Linux. If you just want a clean, working desktop, all the major distro makers provide that by now.
There's room to improvement, and the devil is in the details: clipboard interoperability is still buggy and incomplete, performance in some areas can be improved (try resizing your window very fast with content visible), the driver situation is unsatisfactory etc. But none of the problems before us is unsolvable. It's just a matter of time.
- X.org should be in the next Debian X-strike force update, although I don't know how long that'd take.
- The eventual goal is to implement the X server on top of OpenGL, so transparency and 2D operations can be hardware accelerated.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
If you have a license to use Apple's patents on anti-aliased fonts, then you can rebuild FreeType's Font Engine to support pretty fonts. They switched it off due to legal uncertanities, but it is still included with the source code. You have to edit an header file, determine where your Linux desktop distribution stores FreeType's libraries, remake, and install it (as root) to enable it. That sounds complicated, but it is actually really easy to do. Just follow the instructions; you don't have to be a hacker to do it!
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- Jerome Klapka Jerome
Short answer: no.
Long answer: Kdrive and much of the Xorg work are hosted on freedesktop.org. Kdrive is on the back burner which Xorg kicks up. Much of the work in Kdrive is informing the implementation in Xorg (like the Composite extension, and the driver extensions for hardware Render acceleration)
I'll take you at your word; I don't use Windows and never have, so I wouldn't know.
However, I just went and looked at the screenshots and I noticed that the large fonts are large for exactly the reasons I mentioned: because there are chinese characters on most of those desktops. Chinese characters, if displayed too small, become illegible.
Speaking of Chinese Characters, I will agree that some of the fonts on there are ugly -- this is a problem with freely available CJK fonts in general. Many of them look ok, but provide too few characters and so pango ends up mixing and matching fonts, which always looks like crap.
On my system, I tend to use the fonts that come with Windows/Mac, depending on where I am (for example, in my office, all the other machines are Windows, so I use their fonts). I agree that we need better free CJK fonts. But it's a big, relatively difficult job.
Why are they so hard to implement, and why does WMP have to implement a horrendous hack to get into the taskbar.
Nitpick: WMP on the taskbar is implemented as a deskband, which has a fully exposed and public interface. This means that other people could write their own deskbands if they wanted, which I don't consider a hack. MSDN has an article with some details.
Drop shadows can improve usability by making it easier to determine which window has focus.
Translucency is beneficial for notification, non-critical alerts can be shown without completely hiding the workspace under them.
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.
Start a quicktime movie. Minimize it to the dock. See the movie continue playing.
Start a print job. Depending on the print driver you're using, note the printed pages count update in the dock icon.
Launch Adium. Set the preferences to display buddy status in the Adium icon.
Drag and drop onto dock icons. Watch applications launch or files get saved, etc.
What exactly do you mean by not interactive?
A better question. Why are you even commenting on GUI features without even seeing what the new versions of OS X provide. No one would take you seriously if you criticized the Windows GUI using examples from Win 3.1 why should anyone take you seriously here?
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
No, another company that was successful would buy out the floundering company and its source code because of the promising potential.
Closed source gets forked all the time. In the real world it's called a business transaction as the source is sold to another company.
What the private sector does that OSS does NOT is prune the deadwood. In OSS the crappy product gets forked, but still dangles out there like a noxious weed. In the private sector, the weed gets pulled and burned.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Windows Terminal Server is a multi-user operating system. Windows XP's Terminal Server-based "remote desktop" is hardcoded to enforce workstation licensing (1 user logged on at a time). But yeah, Windows Terminal Server can support as many simultaneous users as you can license.
True transparency means that it's truly based on alpha values and computed as the window is drawn; current ways of "faking" transparency - in Konsole or XChat, for example - essentially take a capture of the background wallpaper and use that as the background of the window. If you move the window, you can see that it takes a moment for the background to adjust; with apps that are aware of and use the new X server features, this would be done as the window moved, and would also show windows and icons behind the currently focused window.
As long as the composition manager has good hardware acceleration (something which is already the case with NVidia, but not so much with ATI), this combined with a double or triple buffered desktop could well provide a Linux/Unix desktop on par with OSX, at least technically.
Of course, it's up to the window manager to really take advantage of these added features; metacity can already support window borders with alpha values, for true transparency.
In KDE:
Right click your desktop, -> Configure Desktop
Behavior -> Menu Bar at Top of Screen -> Current application's menu bar (Mac OS-style)
For more fun, add a small Kicker child panel at the top of the screen, then right-click it and pick Add -> Applet -> Menu.
Then you can have your clock, systray, or whatever else in the menubar. At the top of the screen, but managed by the application.
I know exactly what you mean but this "tearing" effect is fixed in the latest x.org CVS. Double buffering is on by default which means an end to this problem.
There isn't an official time-table, just the information I've gleaned from lurking on mailing lists and whatnot. If you look at the xserver mailing lists from around this winter, you can piece together the basic plan.
Of course, the key piece here is Cairo/Glitz, which is already quite usable.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
See here.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
If you're willing to experiment, no system offers you as many possibilities as Linux.
I'm going to have to call your bluff. Consider FreeBSD as one example. Same desktop. Same graphics subsystem, including DRI. And if you're into proprietary graphics drivers, NVidia's is even available.
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Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of 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
1) The Windows 95 plus pack did not have actual anti-aliasing. It was a font-smoothing hack that was turned off by default. Back then, the best font rendering was from aliased, well-hinted Truetype fonts, which Freetype (with bytecode interpreter) could render identically to Win9x.
2) Microsoft's anti-aliasing in Windows 2000 is also a hack. It's not based on a compositing model and doesn't provide windows with a complete alpha channel, just a single alpha attribute. The latter, in particular, makes it mostly useless, because you can't have solid text in an otherwise transparent window (eg: like MacOS X's terminal). It's really just a well-implemented version of the "transparent window" tricks GNOME and KDE use now.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Some of those appear to be Engage which will be a part of Enlightenment DR17. You can get it from their CVS server, check this out for more info.
I am quite interested in the quicktime one. How long has that been around, and how is that implemented. Is it actually a swallowed app? If yes I stand corrected.
The doc icons are not swallowed apps, that is correct.
But they are another canvas that the app can write on.
rather than just displaying images the app can treat them just like a 128x128 pixel window and draw anything it wants, the OSX doc will then display it scaled to the correct viewl.
advantages over a swallowed app, you can reuse the icon space that was used to launch the app and you can use the standard context menus.
disadvantage, they are not directly interactive it is not possible to have forwards and back buttons directly in the icon space only in the sub-menu.
there are other elements to it, but that is the basic context.
**** lying is wrong even for sleeping dogs
The core OS was done by a lot of the same people (IIRC, DEC shafted the VMS team, so MS poached them quicksmart and thanked the $DEITY), but they share no code.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Funny enough, I think it was the BMW Z4 that had a system of pipes and diaphragms specifically designed to route engine noise into the cockpit.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
Well you can always run linux on apple hardware you know
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There is no X11R6.8 as yet .. X.org Release Status
I think they've already missed 3-4 planned release dates(See Deadlines)
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.
Here is the announcement BTW.
Not quite. There is now a 'compositing manager', just like the window manager that handles the actual rendering of windows. The change is that instead of all being rendered into the frame buffer, the compositing manager can point to a branch of the rendering tree and say 'whoa there! break this off into an offscreen pixmap'. It can then get these pixmaps and composite the windows as it sees fit. None of the bitmapped data for the windows need go accross the wire since all the off-screen pixmaps are held server side. This is actually a cunning separation of policy and mechanism. The compositing manger dictates the logical grouping of the rendering tree and the precise details fo compositing whereby the X server concentrates on what it is good at which is knowing about the bitmapped window contents and (with Render) the compositing of server-side pixmaps.
Rich
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.
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.
Actually this new system is exactly what you want. The windows have an alpha channel (they are 4-channel off-screen images). These images are handed to the compositing manager, not back to your program, which puts them on the screen.
The only difference from what you want is that the compositing manager can be replaced and can interpret the alpha in other ways besides just stacking the windows. This means that the drop shadows can be added at the compositing step, rather than just making the window bigger with a partially-transparent gray edge. Also means things like fading out the background windows can be done (OS/X obviously redraws the windows to fade the inactive ones).