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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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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).- 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.
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.
Like what I said? You might like my music
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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."
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.)
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.
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.
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