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Rasterman Responds To Seth And Havoc
An anonymous reader writes "Rasterman, of Enlightenment fame, has responded to Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington's blog entries, which were in reference to this previous article. about Next gen X rendering. Raster says: 'Well it seems the XDevConf has produced some interesting blogs and discussion. I'm a bit sad I was not able to attend (no funding at all), as there seems to have begin a lot of discussion and moves in directions we in Enlightenment land have been going for years, and are likely far ahead in. I guess this means we haven't been able to share our experience in this. Maybe next year. Anyway the point is that this has started up some musings from Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington related to this. This is great - finally people are beginning to take seriously what the Enlightenment crowd have been talking about for years.'" (Note: the previous post was about Nickell's post, not the other way around.)
Is this going to be the final straw? Is Gnome really going to tank like Enlightenment did?
The writeup had no link to Rasterman's response. Unless the writeup WAS Rasterman's response, but that seems a bit weak to me. I'd like to know more about what Rasterman felt on these topics. A blog entry with some meat on it, some details about WHAT is "the right direction" and "what we've been saying." If this is all there is, well, (yawn).
[
Seth's proposed improvements over the current X11/Xorg server sound very nice, but what about the core speed issue in X. X has come leaps and bounds over the past 5 years or so but still "feels" extremely sluggish compared to a similarly equipped Windows XP machine. I know it's comparing apples to oranges since X is network-based but still...
Anyone have any ideas if he plans to address performace as well?
- Cary
--Fairfax Underground: Where Fairfax County comes out to play
He's right. Enlightenment has been blazing new
trails as far as desktop graphics.
But..
what is this story about?
It is just a link to the previous blog entries,
then Rasterman saying "Wow, wish I could've
been there. All that stuff they are talking about,
Enlightenment is ahead in, but it is neat that
they are thinking in that direction."
I'm not one to usually whine about "this is news??", but.. um..
Well, I'll just assume somebody forgot to link
somewhere.
So, good luck to Havok and Seth, and good
work Rasterman. I look forward to
seeing a news story with information
and hopefully delicious screenshots.
Just because you write open code doesn't mean you have chosen poverty.
There are plenty of organizations that sponsor open source development as well as several large companies that hire and pay people exclusively to write open source code.
My employer is one of them. (Starts with 'Red', ends with 'Hat')
I can see where he is coming from, but for all the hype the E team generate over their amazing new libraries, how many apps actually use them? As far as I can tell, basically none. I don't know why that is though.
If you choose to write open source code, you are chosing to have no money.
Hello? Free software != software for no money. Free software == software without restrictions.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
Enlightenment is the poster child for losing your following due to simply not releasing often enough to be considered relevant. Enlightenment was huge back in the day and while I'm sure Rasterman and the rest of the E developers are happy to just hack away with no thought of being popular they shouldn't be surprised when other people don't consider them relevant on the scene anymore.
about letting other developers know that he and the project exists.
I mean to most people his next-gen enlightenment desktop shell is going to come out around the same time that Duke Nukem Forever game comes out.
Maybe, I don't know, be nice and try to get the attention of other developers. I understand that they are doing cool stuff, and tried it out myself a couple months ago.
but I get the impression that enlightenment just likes operating out of a vaccum.
If you choose to write open source code, you are chosing to have no money. That's your choice. But dont complain about it.
Open source is not an end itself. With some celebrity exceptions, open source exists because someone solved a problem--often a business problem--and released the solution to the public.
Why would they give it away? Because they have no interest in trying to sell it. Selling shrinkwrap software is a tough business, most people would rather focus on whatever it is they're better at. They stand to gain much more by open sourcing it than they would keeping it in a vault, or trying to sell it.
Frankly, I don't think there _is_ a speed issue with X11. There are performance issues on XFree86/XOrg with some (many) drivers, AFAIK mostly due to limited developer time and limited access to hardware. The fact that the current software RENDER implementation is not signficantly optimised, and few drivers implement RENDER hardware acceleration, does not help.
Working on my NVidia equpped box here (GeForce Ti, nvidia drivers, but for 2D 'nv' is almost as good) X is much snappier than I usually find WinXP to be. Turning on RENDER acceleration has helped a lot.
I'm sure folks will bring up the "because of the network" myth up here, so let's get this straight - any slowness in X is not because of network support. Go ask Keith Packard, I'm pretty sure he's been rather clear on the matter more than once. My personal, very much non-expert understanding is that most performance issues peope experience are due to limited hardware acceleration and inferior drivers.
If you don't believe me about how much difference the hardware and drivers make, go find an S3 based system, preferably S3 Trio32/S3 Trio64, and compare it to a PCI-based (to keep it fair) NVidia GeForce 4 MX on the same hardware. It's like they're two totally different computers - the change is jaw-dropping. I use thin clients a lot, so I care strongly about video performance and tend to notice these things.
It's also worth noting that hopefully many of these plans will lead indirectly to performance improvements, by making RENDER acceleration and RENDER optimisation pretty much mandatory.
Last Fall, I had a serious focus bug in Enlightenment (e16) that would lock my mouse to a particular region of the screen and require X server restarts. It would usually happen at the worst time, when I was working fast (busy!).
I worked with e-team member Kim Woelders on the problem and he produced a couple of patches after I sent him some good reproducible test cases. We exchanged a total of 39 email messages and it was finally fixed. I'd usually have a patch within 24 hours of sending him a test case.
All of that while they are busy trying to get e17 out. The work that the team does is amazing and I am very grateful.
To say that I am a fan is an understatement!
Ok, I know that the Enlightment project is more about creating a graphic toolkit that a complete environment for end user. But having the technology doesn't mean that you could use it.
For what I've seen the window manager "experience" is far away from something pleasable, after the Wow factor is over. I've never been a fan of wallpaper drop-down menus, in WM nor in other "1st generation" window managers (those that have been on Linux for a long, long time without major usability revisions). Just how many times does he open a two level menu just to check/uncheck the gadgets "edit" mode?
Also I remember that the E desktop had to be configured through hand-editing the text files. Although they promise that "It will provide nicely integrated GUI elements for managing your desktop elements, both files and windows", if this elements are as annoying to use as the dropdown menu then the environment will not have a good workflow.
It's great to have a wonderful platform to build upon. But until something that I can use is actually built, I'm not downloading this.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
As suggested in this previous comment...
What about starting from an API that's already got OpenGL bindings and acceleration, and using GNUstep instead of inventing a new library?
You don't make money by selling "free" software. You make money by providing services using free software.
Which is as it should be, instead of insisting that people give you money for something which can be copied for pennies.
When was the last time you paid someone for commercial software?
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
The difference is that there is a good chance that Gnome, KDE, and Xorg will actually deliver, whereas it is virtually guaranteed that Rasterman will not.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
This is great - finally people are beginning to take seriously what the Enlightenment crowd have been talking about for years.'
Talk is cheap, and it takes a lot more than a couple of guys with fancy nicknames to build a reliable modern GUI over Linux.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
First of all, did I just read a story that gave all the background to Rasterman's response, but left out the actual response itself? Nice.
I've always liked the Enlightenment project, and I try to keep up-to-date with what's going on (which is not easy), but it seems pretty clear to me that it will not be the future of the Linux desktop.
E is not really a valid option for the OSS world - I wouldn't be surprised if more people were using XFce or Rox than E at this point. Sure, Linux itself has proven that if something new and amazing comes around and blows everything away by a large margin it may have a *hope* of shifting the momentum, but as great as E is, I doubt it is that impressive.
The reason why the framework Seth+Havoc describe will win over the E stack is because it is integrative, whereas E is not. When the next-generation X rendering system is in place, it will be available to everyone who uses those extensions. Probably by the time Damage + Composite are enabled by default on X, the latest KDE + gnome desktops will have support for them. And all the applications in those respective desktops will quickly (if not instantly) gain those advantages. Remember when the same thing happened with anti-aliased fonts a few years ago?
Yes, you can get the E magic right now, but you have to go through E. As long as they remain the sole gatekeepers, you can expect them to have the same extremely limited influence they have now. At this point in the game, I seriously doubt they can beat the inertia from the other desktops. Honestly, if you're developing a new application, are you going to develop for the mature and distributed kde or gnome desktop environments, or will you use E, which is available now with some ephemeral advantages but some serious disadvantages?
It's also true that by using E you're not committed to using _only_ E, but then, what's the point? If you use E + some random GTK application, you're not going to get the consistent graphical features until GTK itself gets those features... but at that point all gnome applications will have them.
The example of the Cathedral and the Bazaar is a good metaphor for these differing stacks. It seems to me the E project has always been fiercly exclusive in the way it does things - the whole Enlightenment Foundation Libraries are the best example of reinventing the wheel with E technologies. But the cost they've paid is limited deployment, slower releases, less interest and a rather narrow development strategy. Certainly that may suite some people fine. However, with that in mind I don't know how reasonable it is for Raster to be calling sour grapes.
http://www.talknerdy.org
"It's really too bad nobody forked the project and took what was good from E as they went along to create something perminant."
That depends on were the value of E lies. Is it in the code, or is it in the E team and their vision? The former can be forked easily. the later is much harder.
That's pretty neat, Raster. Now all you need is a decent window manager to go with it. Commenting your code would be nice too. Or maybe you could have contributed some of the code to gtk+ instead of believing the whole world should rewrite every application to depend on your WINDOW MANAGER.
At least you don't talk like a script kiddie anymore, that's a plus.
If they were to be lest "artistic" and concentrate more on getting something working for the masses "out the door", E would still be an incredible and highly-advanced wm.
In my opinion, the reason the Linux desktop sucks in so many respects is that things are just "thrown out the door" rather than carefully cradled out the door in a basket. Granted, there's a midpoint between the two that's probably best, but I find GNOME and KDE to be unusable as desktops. That's just me. I know a lot of people love it, but coming from the pre-GNOME and pre-KDE days when a lot of us were thrilled when WindowMaker came out, it seems like a large portion of the userbase doesn't care for GNOME and KDE. To me, E looks as promising as the Mac desktop (which I love and use daily). Give Raster some time. He keeps doing it over because he wants to get it right, a desire that is somewhat lacking from most projects.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Enlightenment and Gtk has fundamentally different design philosophies. Enlightenment can throw out old ideas without worrying too much about breaking everything, because they don't have a large and diverse user base. Gtk has to be much more conservative. This means that Gtk will be a few years behind Enlightenment, but it'll be functional more of the time. Really, neither project should become more like the other, but Gtk should look at Enlightenment's solutions when it has problems to solve.
Yea and if I had a crystal ball I'd have bet a lot of money on New England to win the super bowl last year. Why are you faulting Red Hat or anyone for that matter for not buying into something that is still to this day putting the cart before the horse, ie eye candy before bugs and desktop fundementals?
"The GNOME/Redhat are just starting to think about problems that have already been coded, debugged, and optimized by another team."
Again, learn to walk before you run. If his code was in such great useable shape years ago someone would have picked up on it. Gnome just STARTED becoming solid/useable 2 years ago, no way should they have been screwing around with candy instead of fixing buggy Nautilus all of that time.
But I think the point that RasterMan was claiming is that innovation happens here. It is so fast, that it seems to be complete before it's even discovered.
Here's what Havoc et al are going to do. They are going to get a hold of RasterMan, or at least his code, and examine it thoroughly. Building upon his concepts, they will develop a better solution that will bring RasterMan's ideas into the mainstream world.
The E project may never be accessible to a large crowd. That's not the purpose of E, and you can see it in the tone of RasterMan's post. The E project is around to innovate and push the edge, and experiment. That's a very different goal from the Gnome, KDE, and FreeDesktop projects.
RasterMan should be very happy that his work is going to be used and spread around the entire community. I don't know what more he could've asked for.
This obliterates the concept that Open Source software is just copy-cat software. Yes, we have projects who copy-cat, because they are looking for stability and usability, not innovation. But we also have projects that are trend-setters and the research institutions of our community. While we won't use their software, we should still support them.
This is just like in the real world of science. There are research scientists (like RasterMan.) Nobody ends up using what they do directly. Then there are the engineers (like Havoc) that incorporate the best ideas into a working product that everyone uses. We build on each other's strengths.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
I was about to say the same thing. E17 has been coming for us mere mortals who can't compile for, what now, 5 years? Frankly I have better things to do then to download shit code from cvs that is not commented and programmed under a load caffiene and just TRY to get the damn thing compiled. EFM. E17, evas and all of that are damn cool, but shit...I don't wqant a redefinition of the desktop necessarily. I like the idea of e17, but I am waiting to get it in a deb or rpm that i can install.
Gorkman
Actually, we just believe the world should rewrite every application to depend on the EFL (the technology that e17 builds upon) not the window manager itself ;)
Before the advent of 3D acceleration and OpenGL, there was... 2D acceleration. X can, in fact provide 2D acceleration if there is a driver for your display adapter's chipset. Trust me, there is a HUGE difference between using a generic X driver one that is specific to your chipset and it has nothing to do with 3D. Stop being an idiot Mr. Troll.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
2. I write open source code, and I have money. Not wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, but more than most people I know.
It seems that you're focused on the value of a single commodity rather than on the whole web of economically significant interactions that includes that commodity. And if you think that you can predict whether proprietary or free software will maximize the value of that larger web of interactions, you are delusional. My own guess is that it won't make all that much difference either way to the overall value created, but that free software will shift the benefits more to the consumers and away from the biggest producers. But unless you're a lot better economic modeler than anyone else out there, the best you can do at this stage is to guess.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty