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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.)
Yay!
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http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=9791
has alot of responces from raster on this subject so its worth a read and there also seems to be some progress on the whole debate
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
Sounds like a just attempt for attention.
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.
no funding at all
This sounds resentful. Was there some kind of expectation that somebody would fund your trip to a conference? If you choose to write open source code, you are chosing to have no money. That's your choice. But dont complain about it.
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.
Note: the previous post was about Nickell's post, not the other way around.
Ah, thanks for qualifying this. Now it is about as clear as a galaxy full of dark matter.
... are there any screenshots?
Don't call me a cowboy, and don't tell me to slow down!
i had no idea all the stuff going on with Enlightenment (haven't used it for years), but after reading what Rasterman had to say, i think i'll begin checking Enlightenment out again. Does it play well with Fedora?
It's not enough that people don't read the articles? Now Slashdot is actively discouraging them from reading the summaries?
Anyone else think this article sounded a bit more superhero than it turned out to be?
"Rasterman Responds To Seth And Havoc"
RasterMan, defender of good finally reengages his age old enemies Seth, and his evil master Havoc.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Tuesday, 22 February 2005
:) He mentions "A sophisticated drawing layer" (read his blog for the full text). We have that - Evas. it can accelerate via OpenGL, it's got a FAST software renderer. It can render to the Linux Framebuffer. It can render to memory. It can render using DirectFB. It can render using *GASP* ... Cairo! It can display in Qtopia. We can add new engines for new targets with little effort. Evas scales down to rendering at usable speeds on embedded devices (100-600Mhz ARM CPU's, limited RAM etc.). He discusses a toolkit that aggressively takes advantage of this - we have been working on EWL and Edje. Edje is a lower layer theme/layout system, with EWL being a full widget set on top of this, giving you whiz-bang themes with widget layout built on top of an Evas canvas with everything punting down to the rendering layer at the bottom there. We are doing our own Window Manager - and the day Xrender stops sucking, we will add compositing to it too - re-using all the layers we already have to do this. We have a low level acceleration mechanism (OpenGL) but its too unstable for use IMHO. This is a problem that needs fixing and is something that needs to be addressed.
:) Hundreds of snowflakes driving down the screen... E17 has a toy module for just this... and flames to burn them up as they hit the bottom of the screen. All with glorious alpha blending. He speaks of animated background desktops with things like grass blowing in the breeze - We do that already in E17. The desktop BG is an Edje file - and thus is capable of all the animation and effects Edje and Evas offer. In fact take a look at the following 2 video files (they are jerky because xvidcap is jerky and thats just how it is - in real life they are smooth as a babies bottom - you just have to see these things "live" to believe it. Also note - this has NO hardware acceleration. I am hoping one day to have acceleration available that is good enough for production use).
Enlightenment the experimental toolkit
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.
What I'll go into is some of the things Seth and Havoc talk about that we have already done and are well under way or very mature. Things we have advocated for years and have already solved - quite optimally. Our designs are forward-looking and just WAITING for drivers to catch up and stop "sucking". I could write essays about the many ways to address this issue alone (XRender), but I won't go there this time. I've been there before.
First let me talk about Seth's blog. He discusses "Next-Generation Rendering For the Free Desktop". This is great. this is just what we need... oh wait. it's just what we've been DOING for years!
Now he goes on to say what this will enable: "Toolkit themes that draw with layer blending effects" - Done. EWL, Evas, Edje. "Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly and animated clouds of smoke when you click on them". OK - we don't have the smoke - but we have all the animation, glinting in the light, fading, glowing, sliding, etc. etc. etc. We have an entire engine devoted to just this (Edje), a theme description language, compiler, scripting engine, compressed theme format usable "live" without installation etc. He goes on to talk of "Alpha transparency whenever you want" - Done. Evas. Live window thumbnails - XRender has to improve something WICKED for this to be sane.
files/e17_movie-02.avi
files/e17_mov
A full release of enlightenment is something I dearly look forward to. DR16 is, for my purposes, the best wm available for linux. I cannot live without the drag bar! That is, of course, when I'm not using my mac...
I would like to see some of enlightenment's features integrated with my aqua mac. Any suggestions?
linux will never fully beat out windows as long it continues hanging on to old bloated technology like X ...real innovators would of designed something more efficient and powerful by now, but the sad truth is that microsoft is able to make more technological advancements than the linux community because it's better able to phase out technology that's past its prime.
If people expect him to be somewhere, and he can't, maybe he owes them a good explaination?
I suppose he could just say, "I'm Batman," vanish inot the shadows, and activate his lurking device, but that might lack a certain something.
the vids on his site are amazing! the theme he's got on there is ugly as sin, but seeing through that and looking at the tech behined the whole thing, and you see what the future could be.
all the nice effects that mac and longhorn will be doing next year could be tied into xorg/gnome within 6 months.
all rasters stuff is on freedesktop.org, so it's all open.
in a perfect world, someone like novell would hire raster to work with the gnome xorg devs. get evas+cairo into the desktop stack, and have gnome 2.12 running with some amazing eyecandy.
i wish i was but oh well
...out of control. That is beautiful. Yeah, yeah, on my for-fun desktop only, but hey, that really is beautiful.
He was probably disappointed he could go... but nowhere did I see him being resentful. I think you're reading too much into his statements.
Do you have some kind of agenda against people with no money?
And in other news:
e17 to ship with Duke Nukem Forever!
Rasterman, you're brilliant; but in the immortal words of Guillermo Díaz :
Wrap it up B!
put the what in the where?
I'm happy, hope you're happy too...
sulli
RTFJ.
Since when were Rasta's avid Gen-X'ers?
So take the Pepsi challenge -- check out E17 for yourself and see if he's full of shit.
The OSNews story has a link to a FC2 yum repo in one of the coments, but I haven't found a source repo for those packages (I'm on PPC, so I need to rebuild the packages :().
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.
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
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.
If they develop Linux for long enough, they will end up with Windows.
The same is true in reverse.
In other words.. STFU.
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!
I saw the videos before they got slashdotted, and I have to say it looks amazing, stunning and beautiful, but completely useless. Just the stuff my sister loves.
I mean, I don't need snowflakes falling on flames with live window resizing, it would distract me, but there are a lot of people in the world who'd love that.
I can imagine a company porting Firefox to Enlightenment to use all this and producing a set top box that a family can use and would be proud to show visitors (you've seen people do that, right). Make the box look cool (max mini) and then blow everything else out of the water on the screen.
Me, I'll stick with 20th century rendering tech, taking only the usability improvements, but I can still see this taking off.
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.
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.
someone can put torrents of the videos?
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.
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?
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=9762&off set=60&rows=75#337521
[ Rayiner Hashem (IP: ---.dc.dc.cox.net)]
"I think the "sad" part refers to the fact that this sort of technology has been ripe for the picking for years now, but only know are people getting around to looking at it, and only then because they are following Microsoft's lead. Interviews, and its successor, Fresco, have always belonged to the "free" camp, unlike competitors like Motif. Yet, the modern Open Source projects have catagorically refused to look at the technology until Microsoft pointed it out to them."
So once again, directly or indirectly, the OSS crowd is chasing tailights.
...copy of Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month so he can figure out why the code he wrote years ago isn't being used.
Hint: Get the payroll sheet of an established software product company. Count up the number of programmers on the sheet. Also ask the programmers how much of their time is spent typing code. Put your findings into the context of the overall company. Solve for X.
But isnt Rasterman the guy that wrote UltraHLE?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
"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?
"Which is as it should be, instead of insisting that people give you money for something which can be copied for pennies."
That's assuming that the costs of software development are solely contained in the distribution, and duplication aspect.
some demo videos from mirrordot:
here and here
Does anyone know whether there are actual DR17 packages downloadable other than building it CVS?
my blog
"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."
A fine aspect as long as society doesn't make it a condition of living within it's purvey.
"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?
The other day I was playing a video through VNC with tight's Java applet (just for fun) and was getting maybe 10-15 fps and goofing around and noticed something amazing: the Java applet was much faster than the native exe (like twice the fps with no pauses). So that got me thinking, why isn't the X server written in Java?
If you think about it, Java is perfect for the X server: it's a long-running process so start-up time is not an issue, and dynamic inlining of the code would be a great performance advantage. There's only one instance running so the memory hog-ness is not a problem. Since the cards do all the major work, the main job is managing lots of little bits of information (thousands of tiny windows, strings, events, clipping regions, etc). That's the kind of thing Java is great at doing.
I mean, despite there being maybe a 1.25-2x performance loss on actually decompressing the tight-encoding, the Java VNC viewer was still faster (I presume) because Java lets you focus on better algorithms and data structures rather than all the piddly details that don't amount to much in the end. About the only drawback would be the garbage collector, but normally this runs in using the X server would basically take 1 instruction, which is much faster than malloc.
Enlightenment is BSD. Let's keep it that way!
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.
Xfree (and derivatives, X.org incl) is optimized for throughput, not interactivity. IOW welcome to the world of high latency. Even Linus has complained about this on numerous occasions, and it's not going to be fixed without a total rewrite.
Also note that Xfree is single-threaded, so it's bound to suck at serving up multiple window GUIs no matter how it's 'fixed'. see here for more on the official kludgy way of improving X interactivity...
He's completely correct about E and all the cool stuff it does NOW, and will do. The problem is that the project lives its entire life on the CVS and dev-list. They need a PR person on the dev-team that will let people in on what's going on.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
"They need a PR person on the dev-team that will let people in on what's going on."
And what does the above mean, when placed in the "the code is the documentation" and "use the source, luke" context?
I know this is hard to understand for some, but eye candy isn't the primary purpose of a desktop, usability is. A desktop using just black-and-white pixels can be far more usable than one with shadows, transparency, and all those other features.
Also, people should remember that neither Apple nor Rasterman invented features such as the use of translucency, blurring, shadows, etc.--they go back many years in the academic literature as visual clues.
Furthermore, support for translucency itself has been discussed in the X community pretty much since the day X11 was released, and the reason for not adding it has been a high cost/benefit ratio. It's only now that hardware has gotten cheap and good enough that many people can use this, and that toolkits are starting to use it, and that people have the software engineering side under control that people are getting around to adding this feature to X11. From a practical point of view, that's probably about the right time.
This guy is just sick based on his motd, and his X11 xdm setup found here.
A) Bowie rocks
B) Go team Venture!
It got slashdotted before I could check them out, does anyone have a mirror or a torrent?
I have it compiled and working on Gentoo. Works well for beta code. I haven't run into to many problems.
;)
First Impressions: It's FAST and has some nice eye candy.
This may be the first Window Manager to get me to move away from WindowMaker
writing a desktop manager from scratch ? Lately E17 has been getting a lot of my attention, and as of today, the media. I used to love enlightenment (0.16). I used it in everything, after the project died a couple of years ago, and just stopped using it. A year or so, the proyect got revived. I tried it again, it was cool, since none of the Linux Desktops seems to implement anything that enlightenment used to have. I dumped it again, it was unsuable for me, since I'm competly used to gnome, and the compatibility with gnome sucked also. E17 is getting usable, at least for most people, and I read the blogs from Seth Nickel, Havoc pennington and Rasterman. I read what they have to say, and I agree with Seth and Havoc; in order to compete we need to begin creating innovation in the graphics department for linux. I believe Rasterman's has a point also, For all I can see on the videos, Enlightenment has most of the things Seth and havoc propose. The problem is not exactly the features, but the way the features are provided. I read on some of the forums for the article on osnews, and some one said that those features would be really cool if they would be implemented on a lower layer, so that Gnome, Kde or even Enlightenment could use them. I think the problem with enlightenment is the fact that is focused on rewirting the wheel. I agree that the wheel is quite amazing, and it has cool features. But enlightenment is still moving to become a desktop manager. I understand that the nature of open source is to create software in different ways and implementations. But why is enlightenment a write from scratch dekstop manager ? Why not expand gnome or Kde ? This is the same case with the looking glass project. It is a really cool set of features, I agree. But they are also creating from scratch. Linux will not advance to peoples desktops if it is not consistent enough. I know some people will think, "Linux is full of options, and that is how it should be". The freedom to create from scratch. I understand all that stuff about freedom and I support it. But the idea that some Desktop manager implements some really cool features, and embeds it so deep into their framework, so that no one can reuse it, is definately a selfish view of open source. So this is what I think would solve the problem: Begin a project to incorporate most of the features in a lower layer, in fact borrowing from proyects like enlightenement, to make the features available through the X window system. And that project should be created by the freedesktop.org project. I think desktop managers should become users of features, instead of implementors, in order for Linux to get to the desktop faster. Gnome could use the features in some way, and Kde in another.
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.
For those looking for a little more Meat check out the DOCS over at Enlightenment.org
I have installed the libraries and have been screwing around with it in my spare time for about two weeks. The docs are a little outdated but give you enough info, so that you can figure it out just by looking at the header files.
once more into the breach
Bongoman, don't give up!
Congoman, live up, yeah!
Binghi-man don't give up!
Keep your culture:
Don't be afraid of the vulture!
Grow your dreadlock:
Don't be afraid of the wolf pack!...
my god they are soooo much better that e in terms of usability. even KDE is better.
True, snowflakes and fire are not necessary. However, I have to say there is something about using a slick UI that makes me actually wanna work. I sometimes, depending on mood, have various desktop images or even none at all. At Apple - yes, I use OS X - they developed the whole Graphite 'theme' for people who work in the color industry as less color on the desktop distracts artists/image people less. So I completely believe UI has a big affect on a persons productivity.
The clock on the video reminds me of the new OS X Tiger Dashboard . They are pretty much a ripoff of Konfabulator which is something I've been using for a while now. But the way the Dashboard widgets work - flipping, spinning, etc - have some appeal for me. There's just something to be said for stuff that really looks cool and works just as well.
So when I see some kick ass eyecandy, that object get's my attention. And as long as I can turn it on or off at various levels or have enough control of it, then it starts to get my admiration for a sweet environment. And once it get's that, then it's a pleasure to work in. Once that happens, work is, er sometimes, fun and the actual process of being productive becomes less of a chore itself. This is why OS X excels - because it provides all kinds of eyecandy but also stays the hell outta the way.
I specifically stay away from Gnome/Metacity or XP desktops because I think those guis leave much to be desired (however, hats off to Gnome guys for at least making something with some kind of community behind it).
Gnome does remedy this a little by having better placement of buttons and things - human interface guidelines? - (more Mac like and opposite of XP, of course), but overall, they're just clones of the Windows95 space and frankly, quite uninspiring to use. Couple that with the more frequent use of Gtk# via C# via M$, and I don't see much of the Linux desktop innovating over the stuff that E already has.
Yes, maybe no one is writing anything based on much of the E libs, but there's something to be said about following or working with a project that inspires people to use it instead of the same old same old. But then again, if Gnome is positioning itself to be more friendly to those that will jump the Windows ship in the future, then I'm sure they don't lose much sleep at night over their decisions.
and why not buy a cabinet instead of building one yourself.
guess you dont have much interest in doing anything yourself. you do it yourself so it is how you want it, precisely. not just so that its good enough.
btw, even that theme in the article's movies, are far far prettier than OSX
And thank god they did because now we get the gorgeous usability of Gnome 2.8 instead of being stuck with stunningly beuatifyl, but nightmarish to use Enlightenment. Rasterman just doesnt get it when it comes to developing for users, not lett hax0rz
Rasterman's comment feels like he is reclaiming some lost honor. The blogs mentioned talks about stuff that Rasterman and the enlightenment team talked about 4 years back when OpenGL proposed a way to get nice hardware acceleration to the linux desktop. However, neither the X people nor the gnome people seemed interested then and so enlightenment went it's own way.
Today, enlightenment has implementations of these technologies while the X- and gnome-people are starting to realize the benefits of them.
While not all of E17's EFL would be appropriate for use in gnome, I feel that evas is spot on to what is needed and it would be a shame if the wheel was reinvented. A port of GTK+ that used evas as it's back-end would be great, and would open up a lot of oppourtunities.
I tlod rHat there years ago we neid to do this.
Wyh didnt thye undrestand!?!?!
--
Raster
Unless you are running some WM like fresco
[http://www.fresco.org/; aka 'Berlin'], hardware acceleration is of little use; there is no (major) software using OpenGL as a backend to render a 2D GUI, thus repeat after me: this is not the acceleration I was looking for...
If the Xorg guys keep up their pace, you might soon be right; but for the moment moving windows around you desktop does not require this nasty binary-only piece-of-junk software from ATI/NVidia.
after using e17 since the day it hit cvs (for probably the past month, it's been the default wm on my desktop machine and the *only* wm on my laptop), I've found it surprisingly beautiful and impressively stable (for cvs). There's a lot of magic coming up to e. It's also true that you have to use it to really understand what I mean about the beauty. Try some of the new apps built off the EFL (there's a file manager, image viewer, rss feeder, etc, etc), but cvs is very active, and I can't wait to see this wm armed and fully operational.
[ you and I are ugly ]
it's pretty logical, really.... .66 or something where they decided to change it to 1.0.
enlightenment has always been one of those not-officially-final sorts of applications that never dips above the version 0.x stages; e users have come to accept by now that e-0.15 will be followed by e-0.16 and e-0.17 in succession. It's kind of like gaim used to be up until about
Anyway, the 999 was to symbolize the approach to e17, and it works well with things like portage's method of versioning as well, i think...but, the earlier versions of releases were also labeled with a _pre* suffix. This suffix got in the way, so recently the team dropped it and replaced it with the *.001, giving them plenty of room (999 releases) before they have to call it e17. All this, of course, barring a rewrite.
got it?
[ you and I are ugly ]
Why cant you scale a line/rectangle/bitmap?, how do you map a high res vector to a low res bt map display?
Is there any need for a "better desktop"
"These things important are not"
But where X goes beyond the desktop, where it's infrastructure will really be most use full, where transparency, layers, alpha, and 3D effects will be most important. When these are used in overlay with real world, real time display. The technology is already here for low power LED direct to retina projections. These thing are being developed and this is the next step.
to quote the man"Do you know what the man is saying? Do you? This is dialectics. It's very simple dialectics. One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions -- you can't blit vectors, you can't go out into bitmaps, you know, without, like, you know, with fractions -- what are you going to map on, one quarter, three-eighths -- what are you going to do when you go from here to vectors or something -- that's dialectic physics, OK? Dialectic logic is there's only love and hate, you either love something or you hate it."
"This is the way the fucking world ends! Look at this fucking shit we're in, man! Not with a bang, with a whimper. And with a whimper, I'm fucking splitting, jack!"
Soundproofing Acoustics noise
No, pixelisation only happens on pixel displays. If you had a true vector display, it would be (presumably) drawing natural lines, like with a pen, so you wouldn't have to antialias at all hopefully. Could work quite nicely... except I wonder how it would draw photos with decent performance and fidelity
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
Rasterman has completely missed the idea of an interactive desktop with this version of E17. The project with its vast arrary of libraries is missing one component: a true physics engine.
Let me illustrate:
The desktop in one of the videos features a nice forest, full of trees and grass (things which easily catch fire). Suddenly, the bottom of his desktop catches fire. All at the same time some snow starts falling from the sky and some new trees suddenly "appear" on screen.
If there was a true interactive desktop, all the trees and grass would catch fire and the snow would slowly extinguish the fire. I'm disappointed. Until this is fixed, I refuse to use E17. I think it needs a physics engine.
has featutred window iconification for a few weeks now.
New feature development is progressing rapidly. If you fetch and compile from CVS ever few days you'll notice new features or bug fixes or tweaks.
That's what I love about open source!
You must be from the Mid-West..
You mean the prophet Emperor Haile Selassie I.
deb http://soulmachine.net/debian unstable/
You may want to try my build script which I wrote.. http://xenon.conception.co.nz/~tmasky/e17build.sh Saves you a bit of time =)
http://lycos42.free.fr/e17/cvs/
The folks that are doing desktop work for Novell and Red Hat will have this stuff released and integrated into major distros long before we ever see E17 in a released state.
E17 has been in the works for how long? And I can't even get the whole thing out of CVS yet, much less a release-quality tarball(/RPM/DEB)?
Maybe E17 is farther along than the website indicates. In that case, they need to get some people to talk publically about it. Coming out of the ol' basement once to bitch about what you have that isn't being used doesn't count.
As everybody is going on about Enlightenment and how it's so great. I agree when Enlightenment came along it was great and I think in terms of vision Rasterman did the world a big favor. I don't think Enlightenment is the way to go. (Not becasue of the technology)
I think one of the strengths of the OpenSource community is to learn from projects. There is a reason why Enlightenment is not the default Windows Manager for Gnome. There is a reason that EVAS is not the default layer or imlib2 not the default image library. I think mostly politically.
The fact is Linus still controls the Kernel not because he is technically the best but because he can play the politics balance great new features with what is needed.
The Gnome team has done a great job and the value of what Raster has done is in learning what works and what not. But the politics still needs to be played on several levels and thats where the gnome team comes in.