Next-Gen X Window Rendering For Linux

Bytal writes "Seth Nickel, a GNOME hacker, has an extensive treatment of the next generation Linux graphics technologies being worked on by Red Hat and others. For all those complaining about the current X-Windows/X.org server capabilities, things like 'Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly animated clouds of smoke when you click on them,' 'Workspace switching effects so lavish they make Keynote jealous' and even the mundane 'Hardware accelerated PDF viewers' may be interesting."

Comments

I think their efforts would be better spent on...

[TrollBridge]

...negotiating with graphics card manufacturers to get some solid, open drivers for Linux.

That would make this endevour much easier in the long run, would it not?

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[AJWM]

Um, if it's hardware accelerated, it will be eating fewer of your CPU cycles.

Evas?

[ZennouRyuu]

Seems to be working toward the same goal as the E folks with their DR17 and associates libraries.

Inevitable comment about bloat

[NanoGator]

"Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly animated clouds of smoke when you click on them"

This is kinda cool. I know it seems gimmicky and all, but I have to say there's something to be said for having a UI that subtley lets you know what you just clicked on.

I know a few people aren't keen on eye candy. They worry about slowing things down etc. But I have to say, in my own experience, the more visual feedback I get from my computer, the more attuned I get to using it. A lot of my actions become reflex instead of having to decipher what I should do next. For example, I use Opera. When a page is loading, a red X lights up. (Click on it and it stops the page from loading.) It's subtle, but I actually do react to that red icon there when it's on. Somewhere deep down, I have a sense of "This page is ready for you to browse". I find that sort of thing useful.

Of course, it can be done badly or absurdly, but eye candy like this can actually be really useful.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[bonch]

What you're describing are called visual cues.

There's a difference between eye candy and visual cues. The genie effect on OS X looks cool and is fast because of the hardware compositing going on. But more importantly, it's a quick visual cue to show you that you have just minimized a window, and it travelled down to the second spot on the right of your dock, so you know where it is. You also get a scaled version of your window down there. When an icon bounces for your attention, it's a cute little effect, but it's also a visual cue to let you know the app is wanting your attention.

It goes beyond animation effects, too. People have commented on OS X's "gumdrop" window controls, which look cute and friendly, but few seem to notice they're arranged like a traffic light, which is intuitive for most people. Red, yellow, and green circles--red closes the window, yellow minimizes, and green zooms.

Note that I use OS X as an example simple because I think it's the undisputed king of GUI visual cues. I think Linux needs more creative taste and aesthetic in its interfaces. I'm willing to contribute.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[hey!]

"Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly animated clouds of smoke when you click on them"

Well, if experience is any guide, I think this can be boiled down to these two points:

1. It is good that this kind of thing can be done.

2. In 99% of cases where it will be done, it will be a bad idea.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[schon]

People have commented on OS X's "gumdrop" window controls, which look cute and friendly, but few seem to notice they're arranged like a traffic light, which is intuitive for most people. Red, yellow, and green circles--red closes the window, yellow minimizes, and green zooms.

How is that intuitive? They are completely *UNINTUITIVE* because colors don't actually translate into physical cues.

Or are you suggesting that when I see a yellow light, it means I should minimize my car?

Traffic lights typically mean "go, prepare to stop, stop" - telling you what to do, rather than you telling them what to do. If people were to use them like traffic lights, they would only use the window when the green button was bright, then quickly prepare to stop (say, by saving their work) when the yellow button was bright, and not using the app when the red button was bright.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[SoulOfMyShoe]

I believe you are missing the point. It's not that the buttons function exactly like traffic lights, but that it uses a paradigm that people are already somewhat familar with to help people know what to do. True, it is not a 1 to 1 correlation, but the user could at least get the idea that red indicates that you will stop using the program, yellow, that you will put the program on hold (by moving it out of the way), and green, that you will proceed with the program. It may not be a perfect system, but I do agree with the grandparent that it is at least a clever way to help convey visual clues to users who may not be familiar with the interface. Are traffic light colors universal? I know that those colors have that connotation here in the U.S., and I think I remember them being that way in Europe too (but I didn't drive there, so I didn't pay a lot of attention to them). I suppose that even if the connotation is not present in other countries, the colors shouldn't be detrimental to people's understanding.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[Tim Browse]

Can you give me an example of something that is eye candy without serving as a visual cue?

That's easy - any pointlessly skinned application that doesn't conform to the host OS's look and feel for window furniture. So, on MS Windows, that would be iTunes, Windows Media Player, Quicktime Player, RealPlayer One, ephPod, ZipMagic, etc.

These offer no visual clues other than "We're different!", when in fact the only difference in this respect is the way they usually fail to replicate all the Windows UI conventions (e.g. iTunes used to refuse to maximise when you double clicked the title bar, and so on).

About the only things I can see an argument for with kewl skinz is apps that are trying to be small/compact - e.g. Winamp etc., where the standard controls don't work well that small.

Graphic Card Dependencies

[lxt]

Particularly true with Tiger (what with the new CoreImage technology), OS X really can push eye candy more than Windows (and Linux) for one main reason - the mac development team have a limited number of graphics cards to develop for, and the drivers are pretty much rock solid.

I just don't see that happening in Linux / Windows - developers must write for as wide a range of hardware as possible. One would therefore imagine that such eye candy being talked about in Linux would be optional, and you'd only get the full benefit with the highest powered and most compatible graphics card - whereas in OS X, most users can get the eye candy without any problems. Of course, there are certain graphics cards on macs that don't support Core Image, Quartz Extreme etc, particularly on the older macs people are upgrading, but I'm willing to bet the majority of macs will be able to run Core Image etc. Whereas here, the minority of PCs will be able to run the Linux eye candy.

Re:I think their efforts would be better spent on.

[Lisandro]

Seriously. Otherwise all the effort being put into X.Org's newest extensions is basically tied to the good will of card manufacturers when it comes to modern videocards.

Anyway, there's a lot of terrific work being done on X.Org - Cairo, XComposite and Damage specially. When these extensions become supported by the GUI toolkits, we'll be in for a treat. It's a shame it took guys like Keith Packard so long detach themselves from XFree86.

Re:So basically

[Lussarn]

OS X and quartz is no standard, it runs on one architecture and one OS only. This is meant for all the other OS:es who needs good visuals. Apple puts their mony on qartz, all other unix companies on this. Lets se who wins, whall we.

Re:All this, and yet....

[NanoGator]

"Don't make it snazzy, make it *functional*, snazzy can come later."

I was under the impression that most of the UIs for Linux already are functional.

With that said: Visual feedback is part of being functional. Imagine if ythe cursor you used in the field you typed this into didn't blink. You could adjust to it, but admittedly this 'snazzy' feature is helping you.

'Snazzy' is more benefical than most realize. Remember that we, as a species, are interactive creatures. Visual snazziness really isn't all that different from body language.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[bonch]

Hardware-accelerated PDF viewers, huh? Aqua beat already does that. The entire OpenGL-composited interface is described using PDF, which also makes it awesome for publishing because what you see on screen is how it's going to look on paper (and you get a free "Save to PDF" in your print dialogs).

Not that it isn't cool to see the OSS desktop community finally looking ahead like this. It's something people have definitely been crying out for. But when I see the section titled "What It Might Look Like," I look over at my Mac and see what it already looks like. :)

Then again, I am quite happy to have people follow Apple's lead rather than Microsoft's. Please, no more taskbars, "start menus," integrated filesystem/net browsers, and whatever else is coming over from the Windows world and polluting desktop Linux. Though KDE is still cool, at least Gnome is willing to try some different directions in the name of usability (rather than familiarity...because from a usability standpoint, the Windows GUI sucks the most of all, and we should not be cloning it).

Re:Some issues...

[NanoGator]

"2) alpha blending is expensive on almost all GPUs."

Well, to be fair, compare the task of running Doom 3 to the task of being a pretty desktop UI. Cards will always get better. If the idea takes off, new cards will be tweaked to make the experience more interesting. (For this reason, it's a good thing for all of us that Microsoft is heading in this direction, too.)

OSX Trolls

[SalsaDoom]

You know what? I'm really sick of seeing OSX trolls posting all over slashdot.

Everytime ANY topic comes up, some OSX troll pipes in "So its just like OSX!" well, OSX isn't fully (or even mostly) open source, Quartz Extreme isn't an open standard, etc. Ok? Do you understand that? Even if it was, we like our software to be GPL'd so that we don't just shift ourselves from being slaves to Bill Gates and Microsoft, to being slaves of Steve Jobs and Apple. Mabye you don't care if you really 'own' your PC or not but we linux users do. So STFU with your OSX this and OSX stuff that.

Its even getting absurd. Someone mentions making a Linux network for sharing sound -- some OSX Troll pops in "Just spend thousand of dollars on mac parts and there you go! You don't have to use an inexpensive solution!"

Pretty soon I'm gonna start seeing "If those idiots voted in OSX instead of Bush everything would be perfect now".

The Gentoo-Emerge trolls never came close to the kind of witless trolling that you OSX fuckers are reaching!

I don't like your cheesy OS! I think the widgets are ugly! I think that stupid bar on the bottom of the screen looks like CDE back from the grave! I like my Athlon64 instead of your goddam PPC! I like my beige case instead of your tiny little silver box! I want to be able to open my case and see what shits inside it, and I don't want to have to use a fucking laptop harddrive in a non-portable computer!

Every-fucking-topic some OSX troll shoes his stupid platform in, its worse then the Liberal-Conservative crap from the Americans.

Look you obnoxious pricks -- not everyone digs your fucking Macs.

--SD

Re:OSX Trolls

[bonch]

You know, using something that's not GPL'd doesn't make you a "slave" to anything. Your emotive rants against people who (gasp!) enjoy their operating systems drown out any rational points you tried to make about open standards.

There are plenty of "just like Linux!" posts on Slashdot all the time too. Plus, someone could argue you're a slave if you use the GPL, since you're not 100% free like you are with a BSD license. See how easy it is to paint people with a broad brush.

Re:OSX Trolls

[Blakey Rat]

Kind of off-topic but:

I want to be able to open my case and see what shits inside it, and I don't want to have to use a fucking laptop harddrive in a non-portable computer!

When the "non-portable" computer is 6.5"x6.5"x2", it's not unreasonable to expect it to have a laptop harddrive... especially when it comes with a CD-ROM also. I mean, there's only so much physical space that they're working with, here.

If you want a normal-sized HD, you can buy the regular iMac or the G5.

Re:OSX Trolls

[wootest]

"Every-fucking-topic some OSX troll shoes his stupid platform in"

You know, there's a reason that "but does it run Linux?" is a running gag around here. If you can't tolerate multiple OSes, you may find you're on the wrong site.

"Look you obnoxious pricks -- not everyone digs your fucking Macs."
Not everyone digs your fucking hatred either. Claiming friendship with the GPL and then leashing out against one of the companies that are starting to build more and more of their software based on open source technologies? Obnoxious indeed.

What these "trolls" are trying to do is inform you that "hey, our OS does this too" or "hey, here's another solution to this problem". This is different -how- from what people running any other variant of *NIX do all day on Slashdot, over-zealously or not?

No

[Chuck Chunder]

Such "negotiation" would be largely a waste of time. You need to give graphics card manufacturers a market to care about and demand for their cards. Currently usage of 3d on Linux is very limited, a few games, visualisers and niche apps.

If 3d is used more widely used on the desktop then more card makers will see linux as a market for their cards and more people will be using 3d and pressuring for better, more open drivers.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[Sark666]

...because from a usability standpoint, the Windows GUI sucks the most of all, and we should not be cloning it

Hmm, I can't really agree there. There's lots of things wrong with windows, but there is a lot of things they have done right in the gui.

It's seems too many linux devs detest windows to the point where they don't allow themselves to see what they have done right. We should be thinking embrace and expand whenever it's appropriate. We should look at what they have done right and benefit from it.

Here are some examples I find of things that just should not exist at this point. In these examples I'm talking about gnome.

1) Remembering windows size/positions. This drives me nuts. I've read that the reasoning behind this is for the most efficient use of the desktop (e.g. you launch a 2nd term and it positions itself beside the 1st term instead of overlapping). Sounds good, but in practice it makes me a less efficient user. Back in my windows days, I liked that whenever I launched the file browser it was always in the same position where I left it. I could rely on this and be ready to click whereever I needed. Same with the file dialog, calculator or whereever. I EXPECTED them to be in a certain position and thus I could work faster/more efficiently. I think maybe a compromise on this would be the default should be that gnome remembers size/position for all apps unless the developer of an app explicitly coded an app not to follow this behaviour. So the wm is the default unless the app says otherwise. I can see the benefit of autopositioning maybe with terms, but for most other apps it just makes me slower and gets in the way. As it stands I feel like I never know where an app will be when it launches.

2). Hot keys. For the love of god can someone fix hotkeys in gnome! Ok again this is coming from a windows background but bare with me. I was used to the alt key toggling the menu of whatever is the active app. Toggles are good, they are efficient and I believe intuitive. Just like play/pause on almost every player that exists. Ok so when I first used gnome, no alt hotkey toggle. Ok fair enough, I have to actually press alt f, but then I try alt f again to get out of the menu and nothing. I have to press escape to get out of the menu. Ok ignoring that, once I'm in the menu the other hot keys are rendered useless. Go ahead try it, press alt f, and then press alt e to get to say edit. Nothing. This is clunky. Once you are in the menu only the arrow keys navigate the menu's.

I work for a company testing applications and a key thing we look at is the hotkey placement of apps as when employees are using apps everyday all day, you want those hotkeys to be laid out efficiently as possible. So sometimes once in a menu it's quicker to just left arrow over once but sometimes it's less keystrokes to use the hotkey while in the menu.

I was going to go on about the menu functionality with gnome but I'm going on too much. You might say it sounds like I want kde but there are many more things about kde I don't like over gnome, and I appreciate the streamlined environment of gnome over kde.

Now you might say I was conditioned to the windows way of things. But really look at what I said above about say the hot keys. Which system is the more efficient. I'm talking number of keystrokes here and navigation.

It erks me when people say just flat out say the windows gui suck most of the time. On my thought of embrace and expand. I think there should be a document really analysing what windows has done right, and if they have done it right, why would we or would we NOT implement it.

Re:Finally?

[qurk]

I'll beg to differ a bit. When I was at college, the opportunity to spend a couple minutes at a Mac usually ended up with me leaving, in less than a minute, due to a headache. Seriously the thing seemed sluggish, the refresh was hyptonizing me, and two parts - everything seemed counter-intuitive and 1 mouse button?

I wouldn't call it a paragon of usability. It may just be me, but I always seeked out the sparcs where I could just log onto the unix system. Could do almost as well logging on at home over the console with modem on an 8088 with 640k ram and a CGA screen, console hasn't changed too much since then.

But don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing Macs. I honestly don't have enough experience with them to bash them. I just question the term "paragon of usability". OS X seems good, I played with it at CompUSA for like 2 or 3 minutes and thought, "cool" with no headache :)

Re:Yet more eye-candy...

[Mr. Cancelled]

"...is that really all that the future holds? More special effects, without any substantial improvements in usability?"

Improvements such as.... (?)

Don't think I'm singling you out, as I'm not, but why is it whenever someone posts articles regarding improvements to X, and really to Linux in general, that everyone comes out of the woodwork to complain, without offering any positive comments, or conclusions?

Your post goes into detail about how you don't want these effects, and run Blackbox still, but WTF do you want then? And I ask this to everyone when they complain about what developers are working on in Linux... Everyone can complain, but few are able to offer good input, let alone suggest how we get from point "a" to point "b".

Let's face it... Eye candy sells pc's (No... Not to you Blackbox users... You guys are probably happy running on a PII still). You want to know why the Amiga still gets the nod a lot of the time? Because it did things with graphics (aka 'Eye Candy'), which no one, on any platform, was doing at the time!

Yes, they had a multi-tasking environment, and a lot of other unique things about them (as a former Amiga owner, I can tell you that the pro's and con's were pretty equal in some ways... Lemme tell you that I don't miss the "black screen of death", with tis esoteric guru errors!), but the fact remains that the Amiga stood out from the pack due to its eye candy capabilities.

You know why a lot of people (again... Not us typical Slashdotters, but the average Joe Computerguy) are drawn to the Mac? It's clean, well thought out, and it looks good on screen! You laugh at the puffs of Indiana Jones smoke comment, but one of the things which many people notice first about my Mac is the "puff of smoke" that appears when you drag an icon off the dock. Yeah, it's cheezy, and won't entertain anyone for too long, but it grabs the eye and sticks with you!

A lot of people in this thread, and elsewhere, point out how much they hate Windows, and its GUI, but look at one of the faster growing segements of consumer software: GUI Mods, and eye candy! People want a cool looking computer, and have shown that theyr'e willing to pay for this.

So when everyone's here knocking these guys for adding new and accelerated features to X, I applaud them! Will it win over new users? Very possibly, and even if it does not, it will show that Linux is capable of the same kind of cpu-waste than Windows and OSX is, which is important to a very large demographic of people.

And I hope that this also indicates that more hadrware vendors will be jumping on board soon too! I still find it very frustrating that if I want accelerated graphics in Linux, I have to either run it on older hardware (My old ATI Pro Wonder, and a CompUSA branded S3-Virge, for instance, will run in accelerated modes), or purchase an Nvidia card. I personally like ATI card, and have them in both my X86 boxes, as well as my Mac, and they perform great! Until you add Linux into the mix...

Under X, my 9600 card still will not run in accelerated mode when driving dual monitors. My OSX box and Windows however will handle this just fine.

My point is rather than berating people for developing something that you're not interested in (all the while alluding to the fact that they should be focused on something else, without quite saying what that something else is), why not focus on the potential increase in users of OSS software (Linux), and think about the hardware support and technology which will follow such an increase in usage. Or better yet, start learning how to code, and prove to the world that you're right. All's you're doing otherwise is whining IMHO, and potentially driving developers over to other platforms.

Think about it... You're an OSS developer trying your best to ignore the financial gains of developing for Windows or OSX, in favor of developing something the whole world can enjoy for free, and all's your target audience do

Dear Angry Antagonistic Guy...

[Nailer]

Because its the technology being described in the article

Because your post is about different rendering systems and whether they use OpenGL. The thing I linked to is about X and OpenGL.

For some definition fo solid

[bluGill]

Perhaps the drivers are solid, but only if you are running the right Linux (not *BSD, reactos, or any of the other open source operating systems that would like good support for these cards) on 80386 (not PPC, sparc, MIPS, or any of the other systems linux and the others run on - though admitidly not all of them have the right hardware to connect the card - but some do. I'm not sure about x86-64 either, though I suspect not)

In short, your stable drivers are useless to me because I'm an old BSD guy (complete with beard) and I'm convinced that the sysV style init that most of linux uses is evil and all that. I'm looking for drivers that are stable on my systems, not theoretically stable if I'm willing to run something I don't otherwise like.