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

Why...

[racecarj]

not just get a mac already? Hardware accelerated PDF, puffs of smoke.... If these guys want OS X so much, just buy it.

Re:overview of modern display systems

[twistedcubic]

Wow, you're an asshole. I wonder if you have the balls to have the same attitude with you're boss when he/she's wrong. Yeah, I thought not. Grow up.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[koh]

Once again, good points :)

But then I ask the question, why not?

Windows is able to map your Alt key to a "real" key instead of a modifier because it uses key scan codes and traps keyboard events in a very low-level way (port 0x60 IIRC, x86-specific).

Traditionally, *NIX systems like Linux, which can run on very different hardware, use a software layer to communicate with devices and cannot use those tricks. As of now, of course. This may change in the future. But it would probably require installing and configuring a keyboard driver.

Just imagine, right now you still have to choose a keymap if not using a US keyboard. Do you really want to have to choose a keyboard type as well, like "SUN Workstation XXX", "MS Natural keyboard v2" or "ACER laptop keyboard series 1350" ? There are *many* keyboard types out there :)

For ex. another windows thing I'm used to is windows key. I tried setting up the same thing in gnome but it won't let you use the windows key as a modifier.

You can configure your X server (nontrivial, I know) to map the Windows key to e.g. the "Super" modifier. You can then tell Gnome about this in its configuration panel (just tried on my wife's machine and the key sequence appears as <Mod4>E for <Windows>E. And it works fine :)

Regarding launching something and leave it. Hmm I do some system intensive things like vid capture/encoding and gasp! some gaming in linux like enemy territory and doom3. So I'm not going to leave a bunch of apps when these apps need all the resources you can give them.

No, of course not. As for video capture, just lay the window out the way that suits you best and leave it here. When you're not using the capture/encoding feature, the application should consume almost no resources (if not, this may be a bug in the application itself) so you can leave it open.

As of games like ET and D3, you usually run these fullscreen. So just close them and it won't change a thing, right ? ;)

That said, don't think I'm trying to explain to you how to make without the features you need. On the contrary, I do think it is only a matter of using the computer in a different way... actually thinking about the computer in a different way, when switching from a Windows system to a *NIX one.

And your point about the Alt key is valid, it's just technical limitations there :)

Cheers

ko