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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.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...
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.
You're kinda missing the point. The essential technology in Composite is the ability to rediriect window hierarchies arbitrary targets. The composition manager can then do with these windows whatever it want's, without affecting the underlying technology. This is quite a step forward from what Apple has, where the composition mechanism is tied with the composition policy.
The current xcompmgr program is just a demo --- who cares what the drop-shadows look like? It can and will be replaced as window managers subsume the composite manager functionality.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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)
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...
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're a controlling freak, then.
Eye-candy that has no effect on the OS (I'm not saying let the users go out and install Stardock or whatever utility of the month) has no effect on administration, and as a result should be allowed.
Case in point - desktop backgrounds. There is no reason not to let users set their own, and many reasons to let them do so, like the fact that if you let them do the things they want that don't affect things, they're more likely to listen to you when you say "You must use Firefox for security reasons."
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
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
Primarily because with Apple, its user base is mostly designers and the like, who put a great deal of value on how the system looks and less on its technical merits.
Lately, with Linux's growing popularity, we've had a lot of converts that don't know how to use the system without GNOME or KDE, and they think much more like Windows and Mac users do. They are always pushing for more of these sorts of "eye candy" features. Not that we don't have more experienced users who appreciate it too or anything.
But there are still a large number of Linux enthusiasts that got on board back when Linux wasn't pretty, and they didn't care then and they don't care now. Most of them are probably neutral when it comes to the addition of these sorts of eye-candy features, but some of them remember using Linux on a P90 and getting just as much work done then as they do now, and wonder what the point of all the additional bloat is.
I personally think most of these people are hysterical raisins, if only because it is still relatively easy to run Linux on a P90 if you're willing to be picky about what you install.
But, I'm glad they're around, because they keep us honest. The anti-bloat folks make a fuss when devs go overboard; they ensure that we can continue to run Linux on old hardware, which is important -- even if it means forgoing the latest GNOME/KDE thing and running a lite window manager instead (I use PWM, for example).
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...
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
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...
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.
Er.
You're talking to the guy who wrote an article called "Drowning in Aqua".
I think my dislike of user interface CPU-wasters is pretty generic.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
See here.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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
Freetype is an excellent font-renderer. You need a goot set of fonts. The only decent free ones are the Bitstream Vera set --- if you can afford it, I recommend springing for some quality Adobe or Monotype fonts. Of course, you can always just use Ariel and Tahoma from your XP install!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Quite frankly, what I *need* to do my job includes things like admin rights on my PC. What a secretary *needs* to do her job doesn't, and she shouldn't get them, but neither should admin have the right to tell her "You can't change your desktop background. You can't turn drop shadows on or off. You can't change your screen font. You can't make a window translucent" or any of the other things that fall under 'eye candy'. If leaving something unlocked (and again, I'm not saying let them install Weatherbug and crap like that out the wazoo) will not *negatively* affect the computer's stability, then it should by default be allowed. Allowing your users freedom should always be preferable to not doing so, unless there is a good reason not to. You may think your users don't dislike you for locking their machines down, but in my experience, you're wrong.
Installing programs unchecked? Not usually a necessary freedom.
Modifying inherent eye candy properties? Not a necessary freedom, but one unlikely to affect the stability of a machine, and as such a freedom that should be allowed.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
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.
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
How about
OpenGL,
SDL and OpenAL?
OpenAL for one is something few people seem to know about. I've developed sound systems using both DirectSound/DirectMusic directly as well as OpenAL - and there are worlds of difference between MS's obfuscated crAPI and OpenAL - It's actually a pleasure to write a capable 3D sound system on top of OpenAL.
We have the open standards. What I think we really need is more information for developers starting Linux development. More tutorials, more books, and more publically available (read: web) articles on how to get certain things to work under Linux, to make it easier for software engineers to make the transition and/or port of their software to Linux.
Finding good, clear sources of information on how to get certain things done is what I've found to be the biggest hurdle to start developing software for Linux. Maybe I just didn't know where and how to look, but I imagine I'm not the only one involved in programming, who has had that problem.
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."
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.
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:
It's possible for a 'user' to have a mousepad with offensive artwork on it. It's possible for them to have flowers in a vase on their desk that someone else in the office will be allergic to.
That doesn't mean that drab grey mousepads should be cemented to the desktop. It doesn't mean that flower vases should be prohibited.
I mean, let's not go overboard justifying Admin-From-Hell power trips, okay?
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
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
Why should an admin have that right? For a fact, if ours did I would be finding ways to break their rules on a constant basis, just because they'd be ridiculous rules. Similarly, if our firewall were locked down too tightly, you can bet I'd be finding ways around it. Reasonable lockdown won't upset a user; unreasonable will, and will likely lead to far more trouble than letting the users use the harmless stuff. I've been on both sides of the fence, working as IT and working with IT, and I've observed enough environments to know that people will use less workarounds when they don't need to work around things to get what they want.
Given that many secretaries (in fact, *all* of ours - we have a security guard at our reception desk, and he doesn't get a computer) are not in the public view, and that of those who are in public view their machines are often not at all visible, why shouldn't they set hunk of the month as their background? What does it matter? If someone is offended by a bit of onscreen beefcake, too bad. As long as the company standards aren't being broken (which would prevent, e.g., nudie pics as backgrounds on engineer's machines in most cases), where's the harm? It's entirely possible that my wearing of a Star of David offends Muslims in my workplace, or that my visible facial piercing offends the strait-laced. However, neither of these interfere with *my* work and with the work of reasonably tolerant people. Similarly, beefcake on the desktop interferes with no ones' work except the overly sensitive.
Admins need to learn that users are probably more sensible in many areas (read: what is and is not an acceptable desktop background) than they are, and that the areas they should be locking are those where the admin actually does know more (read: lockdown installation privileges, lockdown inappropriate network use, enforce virus protection, etc.)
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
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.
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.
There is no X11R6.8 as yet .. X.org Release Status
I think they've already missed 3-4 planned release dates(See Deadlines)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, that's not a good comparison, because when X runs locally it does not use the network, but instead uses shared memory. This is really fast, so the assertion that network transparency slows down X is a total myth.
What really makes X on linux slow is that there is almost no hardware acceleration (even with accelerated drivers). The RENDER framework, used for a lot of the gee-whiz graphical effects, is almost entirely non-accelerated. This is due to incompatibility between the X driver design and the RENDER framework which makes it incredibly difficult to write an accelerated implementation of it. This will get fixed when X.Org moves onto the kdrive driver framework.
What also hasn't helped historically is the fact that X runs in a separate process, and so you have to wait until the kernel wakes up the process before you see drawing occur. Older kernels were poor at recognizing when X needed to draw stuff, and so there was a noticeable delay between user action and the corresponding on-screen result. Ofcourse, if X ran in-kernel, any X crash would take down your entire system. I personally would rather have a small speed hit than have an unstable system.
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.
But theres no reason it can't be some flowers she like or a picture of her family. Things such as that don't look unproffesional, but rather it looks like the employees there are actually human.
Douglas P. Price
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.)