Slashdot Mirror
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."
Um, if it's hardware accelerated, it will be eating fewer of your CPU cycles.
-- Alastair
"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.
"Derp de derp."
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).
...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.
"...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