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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."
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
And yet they would continue to release new versions years apart with only superficial differences, and all of their future initiatives would have high hopes, but those hopes would soon fall, as every goal would be axed one by one. And they would lose ground to rival projects which they at one point dismissed. However hope would not die, due to massive political clout, virtual monopoly power, and an increasingly large patent portfolio.
Anyone see where I'm going with this?
Good point, but it's actually a neat idea. It's weird having to check the title bar of a window to see if it's focused or not. His idea takes its inspiration from the way our eyes work, so you can't get much more intuitive.
It'd be sort of like how Photoshop darkens the areas around your selection when you crop an image. It emphasizes what you're working on.
That said, I'm not sure the idea would even work that well. It's nice being able to read unfocused windows (although they don't have to be blurred to the point of being unreadable, just enough to guide the eye). But the idea shows an interesting way of thinking and suggests the possibilities flashy effects like transparency (which, face it, most of us think is worthless and would turn off) have for increasing productivity.
The development at X.org is only at the protocol level; they've added extensions that make translucency and drop-shadows possible without evil, CPU/network intensive hacks.
If it doesn't look right, it's only because the WM/toolkit programmers didn't think about it enough. But the actual X.org extensions are very, very flexible. Don't worry; this is just a showcase of what can be done, but it's not all that can be done.
Remember, X.org is producing the X server, which is the lowest level of the X window system -- all it is is an implementation of the X11 protocol. Everything you actually see is drawn by other processes, like the Window manager, individual apps, etc, etc. The X server by itself isn't usable and provides no UI whatsoever.
Well, older computers probably will just disable the composite manager --- the overhead doesn't come into play until that is started.
There are quite a few legtimate reasons to do transparency:
1) It looks much nicer. In particular, non-square window edges can be nicely alpha-blended with the background, instead of standing out as they do now. Compositing allows for fully flicker-free redraw and resize, so you never have to bear ugly partially-drawn windows.
2) Transparent windows have their uses to allow increased information density. For example, sometimes when editing a photo, I quickly want to see or edit something underneath my toolbar, without moving it away then moving it back. A partially transparent toolbar could do just the trick.
3) It lays the ground-work for more advanced features, like an OpenGL-accelerated X server.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
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
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
This happened to the company that I used to work for. We went out of business, the employees were laid off, and the IP was sold.
Guess where the source code, the hardware design, and the existing prototype is now?
It's in a closet at the company that bought it. It was bought simply to keep competitors from using it.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched 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:
I always thought it would be a nice idea to have the mouse pointer as the light source.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
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
And modern CPU's have insane amounts of CPU-cycles at their disposal. Modern CPU's are so powerful that it's kinda ridiculous. How many CPU-cycles do you need to do your work? What do you do for living? I assume it requires massive amounts of CPU-cycles? 3D-rendering?
Most people don't do stuff like that. They run word-processors, browsers, email. you don't need uber-machine for that. Modern computer are ridiculously overpowered for those kinds of applications.
What "base functionality" are you talking about? It has been worked out long time ago as far as X is concerned. Now they are starting to work more on accessibility, features and eye-candy. Just because they work more on eye-candy does not mean that other areas are negletted. Good usability-hackers might not be good eye-candy-hackers, and vice-versa.
The work on eye-candy can and does improve the usability of the product. Right now everything is done by CPU. In the future, drawing of the UI is handled by the GPU, leaving the CPU to do your actual work. And that's the way it should be. And that means that you would have more eye-candy at your disposal. And eye-candy can make your work more pleasant. If it doesn't, feel free to turn that stuff off.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I'm looking forward to the next generation of window managers coming out on Freshmeat in the next year or so. Hopefully we'll see some real innovation that can be folded back into KDE and GNOME's next window managers for the mainstream users.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
The reason people don't do it boils down to - a) the documentation is poor, b) a deskband runs in the same address space as explorer.exe.
The problem of b) is that it is fine to put a light little control in there, but the bigger the functionality the more likely it is to crash and take the desktop with it. Deskbands are also harder to debug because they load up with the desktop so you're constantly killing and restarting the desktop when developing. Microsoft can probably get away with it because they have the QA (not to mention the Windows source) to ensure their deskband is stable, plus the fact that WMP is heavily modular using ActiveX so it would be easy to knock together a band that created a WMP control and connected it some buttons. WinAMP might not be modular in quite the same way requiring quite a bit of work to get it going. WMP is also available as an explorer bar in IE which is another variant on a deskband.
Anyway there is another reason that there are few deskbands - because c) users rarely bother with them anyway. Space is tight enough as it is. For that reason most media players usually shrink to a task icon which offers much the same thing anyway, but without the bother of ActiveX or running in the same address space as the desktop.
The first time I broke the network security rules, you wouldn't even know. I'm not suggesting cracking into servers or anything like that. I'm suggesting little things like tunneling over a protocol. Unless you block all traffic, I *can* get what I want. Considering how ineffective blocking all traffic can make my job (engineering - I need access to supplier data, datasheets, etc.) its unlikely that any job I ever work at will do so.
Just because I don't NEED to do something doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to, even in the workplace. What about on my lunchtime? Fuck that, I'm salary, there's no reason for my employer to care if I spend 20 minutes checking baseball scores, I still have to do the exact same amount of work. You're mired in an hourly world where you think you're God. You aren't, you're just another IT twit with a power trip.
A lawsuit? For what? Checking ESPN? I'm not saying people should go cracking their computers, but anyone who locks down their network so tightly I can't check sports scores/Slashdot is working in a counterproductive fashion. Employees WILL fuck around and waste time, its in their nature. I can do it online, I can do it with coworkers, and I'll be less anti-productive than if I go tie up someone else by bullshitting with them.
Of course common people do things that are inappropriate and against the rules. Your problem is you believe locking down screensavers and the Web will prevent them from doing this. It won't.
I work for a Fortune 50 company as an engineer, and my viewpoints are based on working there and on working IT for a 40,000 person University when I was still doing IT.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)