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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.)
I read rasterman's post expecting to find whining about how enlightenment isn't getting enough attention, blah, blah, blah....
Instead I want to go install it when I get home. Weird. I suppose I could try something new... :-)
philcrissman.com.
So take the Pepsi challenge -- check out E17 for yourself and see if he's full of shit.
That's part of the problem. While Raster's done a magnificent job -- and frankly, it's pretty mind-blowing -- he's completely not concerned about backwards compatibility regarding toolsets. Again, what he's done is amazing but it's basically a canvas, not a traditional toolkit.
The OSS GUI world is so deeply rooted in Qt/KDE and GTK+/Gnome that there's no chance at *all* that people will adopt his APIs for the next gen display system.
Red Hat's people are concerned with achieving this kind of stuff without too deeply breaking source compatibility. If they can pull that off, my hat's off to them.
That said, red hat's people can learn a *lot* by working with Raster. Clearly, his code is fast, and his technical design's good. But the model is likely inapplicable to traditional widget toolkits.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
E17 is a window manager. Can it replace metacity and run in the Gnome Desktop Environment?
More like infamy - at least to anyone that's followed E's development for any significant period of time.
Get something working, then throw it out and start over. Repeat constantly until any semblance to the original working copy is destroyed and all their dedicated beta (alpha/cvs) users are alienated to the point of not even using the "stable" (beta) E release.
That said, the Enlightenment team has turned out some amazing work (imlib2, etc.), and it's a shame to see the recycling destruction that takes place. 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. We'd likely also have a slew of 3rd party apps built with imlib2 (et al), all on top of technology which would blow away gtk and qt. It's really too bad nobody forked the project and took what was good from E as they went along to create something perminant.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
No offense to Rasterman, and I'm sure there are plenty of different ways to go about implementing features such as these, but my experience with enlightenment's "enhanced" features has been less then impressive. The effects usually look professional, but they run slow and inefficiently (my video card does suck though... but renders most 3d games like Enemy Territory fine). Enlightenment is all good and well until you try to use it for long periods of time. Seth and Havoc's architecture seems more scalable and consolidated from a programmers point of view. The one thing is though, enlightenment is already out there, exisits,and works. However, enlightenment is way too layered and has a million different little components... I just personally think it could all be implemented better. So lets hope that they all work together and come out with something absolutely amazing.
Regards,
Steve
Well, a lot of e16 libraries are widely used on *NIX. ImLib2 is the top example. If the e17 core libraries are half as good as promised, you can bet you'll see them used a lot aswell.
;)
Yesterday, just for the sake of it, i emerged (installed on Gentoo) Evidence, e17's to-be file manager. I was hoping to get a glimpse of the e's login manager (Entrance), but for some reason i typed Evidence. It looks great, and even silly things like clicking on an icon and see it zooming transparently in the background makes you see what these guys can do with e's core libraries. Rasterman is right, what the X team is talking about as "next gen rendering", they can do now. He's well entitled to want to make it public.
And yes, one has to give kudos to Rasterman and the whole e17 team for that matter. They are putting a lot of work into e17, and it shows. I just hope they just finish it someday
About --> Enlightenment...
...and a dialog box pops up that says "version 0.16.999.001". I've never used E, so maybe the version number isn't funny in Rasterman's world...but it's funny in mine.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
but this is why i switched to mac os x. one, i had the cash to drop on a powerbook. and two, i love the beautification that apple decided to do to the desktop.
when i use linux i use enlightenment because of the same reason. when it comes down to it, i surf, read email, listen to music, and use terminals to connect to the boxes i work on. so any OS will do.
that given, i want my sh!t to look good. i want my apps to work happily together like the brady bunch. and they should look better than than the skanks off of OC or whatever wo/men float your boat.
and as for raster saying he has no funding, i took that to mean he didn't go not out of spite or not wanting to take part, but that he didn't have the cash to spare on that.
Rasterman left Redhat because he felt noone there really followed his vision of an X desktop. Here we are years later and we've come full circle. Now, many (if not most) users in the community are looking for highly customizable desktop eyecandy and Gnome, KDE, and Xorg are all out there trying to deliver on what Rasterman was doing 3 years ago.
I, too, have an Athlon64 with accelerated NVidia drivers and I can certainly drag and resize windows with no problems whatsoever. X hasn't sucked performance-wise in years.
"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."
The total number that needs to eat, outnumber the total number in the last catagory.
I' reading these posts, and I'm confused, probably because they're addressing different issues than I'm focused on when I think of X. And because I don't know enough about X.
I think the problem with X is not features, and libraries on top of it, but rather that the basic core concept in an X display is a bitmap.
The problems with this are: slow communications, and lack of scalability on different displays. The classic cure for this was display Postscript, which had problems of A. Copyright, B. Bloat, C. Large blocks files of code to do small things, D. Arcane syntax.
There has to be a better way. But what I'm seeing here is all applications and libraries for use by applications on top of the bitmap based rendering. There are some things mentioned which I recall being replacements for this engine, but certainly Enlightentment DR17 is all on top of the X bitmap system, right?
Any movement on chucking that in favor of a bitmap independant system?
"The OSS GUI world is so deeply rooted in Qt/KDE and GTK+/Gnome that there's no chance at *all* that people will adopt his APIs for the next gen display system."
So the OSS community pissed away their window of opportunity, and then complain about the bed they have to lie in?
Have you seen E17? It really looks great. I compiled and ran it on a PII dual CPU box and it ran nice and smoothly over SSH tunneled VNC! :) The only problem with it right now is that many major features are missing (it's devel so what can you expect?). You can't iconify apps yet, and there is no complete app panel to launch your apps with. But there are some beautiful animations in the WM and the basic dead panel that put it at the very least on par with Mac OS X.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
That's exactly how I feel. I used to use E16 back when I used GNOME 1.x, but I always felt like the E development process was a black box. Eventually I moved to GNOME 2.x (where E16 didn't work so well), and later to Xfce, and it's like it's all been very quiet.
The E community seems very closed. That's not to say they aren't welcoming of new members, just that they don't reach out. At all. They don't appear to participate in any of Freedesktop's activities, and tend to keep to themselves, plodding along. And now Rasterman is complaining that Seth and Havoc are only now talking about things that E has done for years. Maybe if Rasterman had been a bit more proactive, and joined the greater Linux desktop community, he could have shared his ideas. Maybe if E17 actually had some developer/preview releases (no, telling everyone who's interested to grab it from CVS doesn't count as having releases), the technology would be better understood by outsiders. But no, they have to sit in their little black box all day...
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
what i need is something like... ooh... a job to DO enlightenment instead of doing it on evenings and weekends. trust me - a manager would be able to do nothing here - he has no resources to work this. they have all gone usefully into building what is the back-end of e17 (itsw rendering, theme, core event layer etc.) and it's paying off now in leaps and bounds.
:)
what you may not realise is - my day job has nothing to do with x, graphics, e, etc. it's rather mundane, BUT i get to see the world and experience life
--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------