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Preview of X Windows Eye Candy
glenkim writes "Remember Seth Nickell's blog entry about next generation X Window rendering? Well, in case you were wondering what it would look like, he's updated his blog with videos of luminocity, the experimental GNOME window manager, and screenshots of programatically themed widgets." From the post: "The wobbly window effect is mildly addictive. Kristian hasn't gotten much work done since he wrote it. He (and now I) spends all day moving windows around and watching them settle."
On the other hand, the similar effect applied to drop down menus did make some sense. It made the menu appearing more obvious and anyone glancing at an unrelated part of the screen and accidentally activating the menu would be more aware of their mistake with this kind of heavily animated approach. It also looked like it wouldn't get in the way, the way it was implemented.
I also liked the translucent file selector. That's the first time I've seen translucency done in a relevant, useful, manner. Yes, I do want to see the window underneath, damn it! Combined with Apple's "attaching selectors to the window they came from" philosophy, you could have quite a massive improvement in usability.
It's nice to see some of the techniques developed largely as eye-candy actually find uses where they have functional, not just subjectively aesthetic, justification.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
So download something that can.
Given the impending slashdotting its going to get, I don't think you will be alone.
liqbase
nothing on my machine plays any of the formats he has
Try mplayer
bash: rtfm: command not found
All that window moving appears to have sucked down all his CPU and bandwidth.
I agree, a lot of these implementations are kind of nifty, but not particularly useful. I looked around but couldn't find any information about how resource-intensive this is.
It seems like part of a loose trend towards bloating Linux for the desktop market. Not that this is a bad thing, but something that should be kept in mind.
Wait till you see the "wobbly server effect"...
Linking to "X Window Eye Candy" Videos on the ./ Frontpage...that's like posting free porn.
You people are crazy. That poor server...
Appears to be down or at least struggling already :(
Mirrordot should hopefully be created here:
Mirrordot link
It's called X actually.
Already being slashdotted, here's the mirrordot mirror.
Posted with karma bonus so everyone will see this post, please don't mod me up as there's no point.
So you looked around, but you were unable to find in the article that they were showcasing this stuff on pretty low rate hardware. (Some internal intel graphics chip iirc.)
And how is actually using the graphic card for what it is supposed to do and thereby using less resources than are needed now bloating?
And something like cairo that gives you faster, better and above all scalable rendering using less resources than are used now is "nifty, but not particularly useful"?
Man, at least try to get a clue befor you start your bitching.
free clue for you http://mirrordot.org/
Yesterday I have tried Xgl, Which also uses OpenGL to draw X. I think Luminocity and xgl are tightly related, but I am not really shure.
:-)
Anyway, what I got was a stable desktop with nice shadow and transparency features. It looks totally cool to have a transparent mplayer behind a transparent xterm that drops a soft shadow on it
Trying it out is fairly easy, just follow this description.
Open Source Alternatives
I just want to pre-emptively respond to all the posts that are going to say, 'well, as usual, Linux is catching up to Microsoft and Apple a couple years after the fact.'
Yes, you may be right. But the difference is that Linux doesn't have to be first, it just has to be better. And it will be. The rich base of command line utilities and a solid kernel are necessary to have great degrees of stability and richness at the higher levels (like an X server). I find my Linux base indispensable (from the point of view of the usefulness and scriptability of all the UNIX tools and primitives), and I think I concord with other Linux users when I say I'd be perfectly happy with my free Linux desktop when it 'catches up' in the less useful things like eye candy and hardware rendering. Because in the end, I'll have a Free, Powerful Desktop that Looks Just As Good As Yours, while you may be stuck with a good-looking, but still proprietary, mess of a system that is still sorely weak in the basics.
Just my two cents... but undoubtedly in the time it took me to write this post, it will no longer be pre-emptive.
"The wobbly window effect is mildly addictive. Kristian hasn't gotten much work done since he wrote it. He (and now I) spends all day moving windows around and watching them settle."
Yeah, this is great becasue as millions of Microsoft customers have proven, less productivity from the same hardware is good.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
You mean X Window System eye candy?
PROOF ?:
we don't like them there liberal "facts" round these parts pardner
--A.Merican
For those of us who don't know, is there a KDE equivalent in the pipeline?
and get with the program
How does this compare to the upcoming Avalon engine for Longhorn?
If I'm watching a video and I move it, I don't want it to wobble around like that. Nor do I want drop down menus to wobble. Though its pretty cool and nifty, I don't see people who want a good OS that looks professional acting like this. Though it does show the power that X can hold in making very cool designs and tansitions, especially when changing virtual desktop areas.
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It's a demo supposed to show what the technologie is capable of. That's all there is to it.
It's not supposed to be the default way of handling windows in metacity, it's not supposed to improve usabiltiy, it is only supposed to show what the new technology can do.
It's called The X Window System, actually.
I did enable Composite in Fedora Core 3 (+xorg from rawhide) but somehow applications think Damage and XFixes aren't there and xdpyinfo seems to agree even though according to the logfiles they *are* present and *do* get initialized. Does anyone have an idea what the problem might be? xcompmgr and luminocity refuse to run without these extensions.
Just pretend the "s" everybody puts at the end stands for "System." You'll feel better.
Those are some interesting new features, quite innovative actually. However, I would be much more interested in hearing how X is being made smaller and faster. Xserver seems to be a nice continuation of Kdrive since the fork, but it is still lagging behind a full Xorg installation. Most X users are not serving up desktops to thin clients, and only need a full install for things like hardware acceleration and multihead support. I would think a small and fast X would greatly benefit desktop adoption, and if any of you have tried Kdrive on modern equipment, it more than feels snappier, it is.
Never start vast projects with half-vast ideas.
... I'd be happy just finding a theme for Metacity that would work well in 800x600. My old Dell LS400 only does 800x600 and when running Linux, the buttons are HUGE and everything is drawn too big.
:) I'm a sucker for stuff like this.
Still, I'll give this a try
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
he should create a video showing this wobbling effect used decently, rather than exaggerated. I'm inclined to believe him when he says that this movement is pleasant to the eye (actually, the sudden appearance of menus and windows seems to irritate new users whose brain is not used to this).
The translucency is done very very well. As mentioned before, this is the first video showing how translucency can be useful.
One might argue that this is an utter waste of resources. Well, in this is not true. Since most PCs sold after 2003 do have some sort of 3d accelerator included (hell, even the intel graphics chipsets have acceleration!), basic 3D acceleration is very cheap. Of course, there are people exaggerating the usage of 3d acceleration for the desktop. For example, there are rumors saying that Longhorn requires pixel shader support. But the consumer-level technology for basic T&L (hell, even the CPU can do this, since we aren't talking about >50k vertices) and some basic texturing without lighting or any nifty multitexturing has been around for almost a DECADE.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
At least the wobbly windows effect is set to FULL (so it shows up well in the videos).
It could be quite nice if turned down to a more subtle level.
Design Fu, Beating the sh*t out of bad apps
Slashdot, Beating the sh*t out of bad boxers
It already exists: Mirrordot
No it's not. From X manpage:
studying for finals
...
imho the windows already wobble
shooting is not too good for my enemies
Now count the number of people with a life who actually care.
excuse my ignorance: is there no video screen capture for linux?
I mean, they did go through all this work to make something look good and then released these crappy monitor shots?
Luminosity is a testbed for technology. It's not meant to show exactly what Gnome 2.12 or X whatever is going to look like.
You say its not useful but what about something like Expose which many users think is useful? Imagine how boring the early versions of it looked which did nothing interesting or useful? Think outside the box for a minute and realize that by using the technology someone may come up with some new ways of interacting with windows that nobody has ever thought of and turns out to be really useful. Your boring and bloated accusation is way close-minded and short-sighted.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
No one cares. Really, no one cares.
-matt
Combine it with the new Enlightenment stuff:
This one
This one
This one
This one
So who said that Linux was mainly textbased?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
As often as this has happened lately, you'd think someone would be courteous enough to put up a torrent of the videos rather than blow away various project websites everytime someone posts video-candy.
Shouldn't have bought that new EU version of Windows without media player ;-)
Sure to get trolled, but I wonder how many more posts like this you'll see once "media-less" Windows has been widely distributed?
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
There are only two H's and two E's in 'Sheesh'
Slashdotted so quickly... Nice work ;)
JoloK
So how soon before we see a live cd with this on it. Anyone taking bets.
All of the most popular multimedia-players for GNU/Linux can play those formats.
Tested with Xine, Totem, VLC and MPlayer.
Your post will not impact on the way people use language. Irregardless, they will still say "X-Windows".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So that's what the new name for Longhorn will be.
With all the effort put into wobbly windows and transparency, it seems like they ought to have windows and buttons themselves looking fairly slick. Instead they look like a slight improvement over Windows 98.
Since this comment keeps finding its way up from -1, Troll, I guess I'll respond. GTK uses themes.
I think someone needs to create better themes. Coders suck as artists and as theme designers. Coders also suck at designing interfaces. We need an interface design contest now, complete with bounties. All artists should be welcomed and no programming experience should be required to contribute. I suggest we make a glass like interface, or an interface such as the interface in the Lain anime series. Lets make something impressive, also lets make it functional. How can we use the extra dimensions and power to make things work better?
Yep, and if everyone would "man X" they would see:
Trolling is a art,
No? Oh, ok.
How about instead of just being able to store windows as bars, let us morph our windows into a sphere which rotates? or a cube? This would allow us to store more windows in less space, it would allow us to have more screen space. No one needs a big bar taking up the bottom of their screen, but spheres floating around looks better and its better for productivity. Think of terminator 2's morphing scene, that could be done to the windows.
here
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Will my post impact the way people use language, especially as it pertains to the word irregardless?
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
I know it's fashionable to bash UI eye candy, but there is a reason for it. For instance, the human eye is very good at determining depth. Drop shadows on windows help distinguish one window from another. When I turned on xcompmgr on my Ubuntu box, it was actually quite surprising how much easier it was to determine what windows are where. When you have Anjuta, Firefox, Glade, and a bunch of other applications open, it can be hard to tell what window is here. Drop shadows help create another way of visually distinguishing window placements that can enhance usability.
Transparency when done right can also help usability. The transparent dialogs here help cement the relationship between a dialog and its parent window. That's why Mac OS X has such great usability - it not only has some visually interesting eye candy, but that eye candy is designed to provide you with a series of visual cues that clue you in on what actions you're performing. The "genie effect" when you minimize a window to the Dock is another example of this - by showing the window move into the Dock you're providing a visual clue that lets you know that you can find that window again in the Dock.
When done right, eye candy can really enhance usability, and thanks to things like the Damage extension, the Render extension, and the Composite extenstion, Linux usability is getting better.
And for the record, those who think that eye candy adds excessive processor bloat, my current Linux system is a Duron 600mHz with 256MB of RAM and a GeForce4 MX. Granted, the T&L engine helps a lot in making the UI responsive, but given that xcompmgr and the Composite extension is essentially beta code it's quite shocking how little processing power this sort of thing takes. Now that T&L engines on graphics cards are pretty much standard, it's time that X put that power to use to enhance usability.
OS X aimed so god damned low to get something out of the door, now they are stuck with old tech. This is the future.
We have SuSE installed at all workplaces here, and Kaffeine (xine based, defaultly installed) played the movie just fine.
So I don't quite see how your computer can't play these movies. :-)
The best way to accelerate a windows server is by 9.81 m/s2
The constant wobbling everytime a window is touched will surely get old quickly.
The developers should tone down the wobble and get a team of artists and GUI designers to come up with a more attractive and USEFUL UI.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
The graphics card performs the effects. Therefore, you would have to read back the framebuffer of the graphics card for each movie frame. On low-end hardware like they used, that cannot be done in real-time. That doesn't mean it can't be done; it was just simpler for this blog entry to set up the camcorder.
Letter
http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/
downloaded and installed, brought up Windows Media player and dragged and dropped the .ogg file on to it to play.
One step closer to MovieOS. TELL me this won't show up in the next Matrix.
Really they have to do something about those icons - it's obvious they were dreamed up in some manky, voodoo swamp while consulting the Hooch.
The squashy home icon is how many years old? Who lives in that ~/, Yoda? Not to mention those back, fwd arrows - like the kind of thing you'd use to take down a Mammoth.
With all the work gone into Gnome (it's an excellent DE BTW), these icons are a stoney anchor holding it back in the dark ages. They should catch up to KDE and actually choose a superior default Icon set from any one of the other excellent sets made by fans at http://art.gnome.org/. What's wrong with good old Gorilla for instance?
This isn't the improvment we're looking for, move along, move along...
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
If there are better themes out there and no Gnome developer I know actually uses the default *why* is it the default still? Everyone hates it and it looks ugly. Even the Gnome developers agree by there changing to something else. -Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Geezus, man! Pick one. There's regardless and then there's irrespective.
That's all we need. How 'bout un-fucking the current UI usability problems with the Linux desktop before adding more superfluous shit on top of an already ridiculously complex system. At least they could use something that already exists.
-- uh...
yes it does seem a bit full circle. I remember that the same thing was said of Enlightenment when it was in existence. Now we have this. Can't we find something better to do like actually fixing gnome itself to be 100% or at 98% bug free. Its been four years and I still get gnome core dumps.....
%nbsp;" Your post will not impact on the way people use language. Irregardless, they will still say "X-Windows"."
Nor apparently on the way they use the word "Irregardless"
If there are better themes out there and no Gnome developer I know actually uses the default *why* is it the default still?
There's going to be a new default theme in 2.12. The current frontrunner is ClearLooks. If gnome.org wasn't dead right now, I'd link you to the wiki page, but for now you can read a snippet from Google's search results.
get a patent on that, folks. otherwise the big shark will try to steal this nice idea too.
Sorry, but I don't go for eye candy.
I have all the 'fluff' switched off.
Get me a working (and I mean REALLY WORKING) speech input device and I'll shower you with dollars, get me more eye candy and I'll just have to switch off more stuff when I configure a new desktop.
All this theming and other bs is just distracting from the real issue, which is can you get some work done with this machine or are you going to sit there tweaking the fluff all day long ?
Way too much attention to form, too little on content.
MP3 Search Engine
The kernel has nothing to do with it.
Any recent version of Xine (or any player based on it, like Totem, Kaffeine) has support for those formats out the box, aswell as other multimedia players such as MPlayer or VLC.
It would be nice if the MPEG4 video he has on his site were actually MPEG4 files. They are some crazy AVI encapsulated video format.
it was called NT.
What a waste. A window manager? There are a ton of valuable things they could be spending time on.
A waste? More valuable things? Perhaps, you could enlighten everyone by presenting your project for the open source community?
Lead by example. Otherwise, just be thankful that someone else is using their time and expertise to create something that you're going to download and take for granted.
I'll admit to being a junkie for the eye candy. Does anyone know when we will start to see this stuff included in the major distrubutions? A few months, a year?
See my Home Theater
Shut the fuck up. Seriously. Every time there is an article on /. about X11 eye candy, a troop of future-shock losers come forward and start complaining about how we "don't need this" or how it's "totally useless" and other nonsense. It's called "progress" and we should talk about how we can apply this technology in interesting ways (like Apple has done with Aqua) instead of bitching about how it shouldn't even be created in the first place.
Join Tor today!
ACID Flashback!!!
Yeah it's cool, but how much of your system's resources does it take up?
I mean hell, I can't even stand KDE and have been using IceWM for a while now for the specific reason that it runs light.
Sugapablo
Rasterman http://www.rasterman.com/index.php?page=News posted some videos of enlightenment doing some stuff like that just after havoc's original post. And let me say that I tried e17 in a p200mmx, and even with all the shining stuff moving around, it still was more responsive than GTK2.
:)
Of course, before enlightenment 17 hits final, it will be rewritten by the millionth time to support holographic interfaces in flying cars for cyborgs. But it will still support it earlier and better than GNOME or KDE
Somebody had their crazy flakes this morning. It doesn't matter if the kernel is identical... How many installations have you seen (with X) that don't have Xine *or* Totem *or* one of the other 800 compatible players? They're pretty common apps. Hell, I had both of those and I didn't even realize :)
...the fonts suck. I still use fonts from windows on Linux. (I wish I was capable of creating a nice font.)
The previous lack of X development has meant that X needs a lot of work, making it cool and look better than Windows will impress a lot of people who think Windows looks nice.
While some things aren't needed they increase the fun factor of using a computer, this makes computer use for the less confident more pleasurable I guess.
.. with fondu.
Mac fonts (particularly Helvetica Neue, Lucida Grande, and Futura) look pretty darned good on Linux, though I still prefer OS X's 'softer' rendering..
All this stuff breaks Xinerama, unless that has been updated to work properly with OpenGL.
:/
I would have really loved a GL-capable Xinerama back in 2001
You're missing grandparent's point. He was saying that it is not X WindowS. It is always mentioned that the S should be left out - it's not Microsoft Windows and X Windows. Stop being a smartass karma-whore. A lot of people leave out "System" when the context is not formal.
Your +4 post is redundant to my more detailed -1 post made much earlier.
:
:
There is no such thing as X Windows. It has always been called
"The X Window System" not X Windows.
It is called that in all 7 out of 7 of the books I purchased on it a few years ago.
I cannot believe people do not know how to describe The X Window System in Slashdot submissions! Shame shame,
Am I the only one here that knows what it is called?
There is no PLURAL "S" on Window in "The X Window System"
PROOF ?
http://www.x.org/XOrg_background.html
Sheesh!
Note that this had to be posted again because the fools that hat ethe truth modded it redundant -1 even though it was FIRST (#12034782 8:46AM), factual, accurate and truthful.
So sorry but I had to repost it again so that at least SOMEONE can learn what it is called.
http://r00tshell.com/slash_cache/gnome_seth_blog/
If he can do that with a window what could he do with some pictures of cute anime girls?!?
pseudo transparent anyway - just use "aterm -tr"
then you have to play around with font colors that you can actually see against your root image tho.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
This never made sense to me until I realised that it's just a window system called X. Compare to the W Window System, the Dave Window System, etc.
The only real fix is to go back in time and make them pick a better name.
Then shouldn't it rather be called "The X Windowing System"?
> you could enlighten everyone by presenting your project for the open source community?
I just wrote a database replicator for the
GPL database Sqlite. It's going through testing
right now before it's released as a GPL program.
I wrote a program to help match people to pets
for a local animal shelter. I donated it to
the local non profit shelter.
I ported the old game 'Adventure' to linux, and
wrote character generators for D&D, and
host them free on my servers.
I pay for all the connectivity, electricity,
and equipment to host one of the most popular
costuming web sites on the internet. Everything
on it is free.
I think I contribute sufficiently to be able
to bitch with a clear conscience.
Now, I'd like you to explain to me why it matters
what my contributions are? How does what I've
contributed change the validity of the question
I've posed?
> just be thankful that someone else is using their time and expertise to create something that you're going to download and take for granted.
I run Gentoo at home, without a window manager.
Gnome, and almost all the other window managers,
are bloated beyond all need. Who freakin needs
windows that wiggle? It's a waste.
They're going down the same stupid path
Microsoft is. They don't have anything useful
to put into the program, rather than realizing
it and moving on, they just keep adding
more useless kruft. Maybe they just keep
doing it because they're having a pissing
contest with KDE.
Linux shouldn't play the "me too" game. We
should innovate and lead. Unfortunately they're
not even winning in the "me too" game.
If they wanted to do something useful there are
a TON of things available.
One that comes to mind instantly
is writing a replacement for X Windows.
It makes it very difficult to do gaming on Linux.
Why don't they port Gnome to run against frame
buffer (or something similar), so we could run a
GUI without X? Linux could take the pc gaming
niche market if it performed well. They already
have the knowledge for the task so it wouldn't
have much learning curve. DirectX would be a lot
easier to emulate without X.
Wine could use some help.
Mozilla and Firefox could use some help.
etc...
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Alright, I admit it: that was mildly amusing.
These videos were shot with a camcorder. Why would an X developer make crude videos like this, when there are great tools for recording X graphics, like vnc2swf?
--
make install -not war
I realize you've gotten a lot of responses already, but here's something for everyone else.
The beauty of Theora is that it's completely open source and does have any (known) patent licensing issues. This means that in theory, anything capable of playing a video should be able to play Theora, for free.
On Linux, use mplayer, xine, vlc, or anything based on Gstreamer.
On Windows, download the DirectShow codec or the RealPlayer plugin, or use the Windows version of one of the Linux players.
Now that Theora codec has reached a final state, there should be no excuse for anyone to not be able to play it (barring hardware limitations).
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Yeah. So TURN OFF THE WALLPAPER, GENIUS!
A nice flat colour or maybe smooth shading from one to another is easy in the eyes and doesn't confuse people. How many real desks do you see with an image printed on the surface?
What "bloat" are you talking about? It seems to me that both major desktops (KDE and Gnome) are getting faster and less memory-hungry with each new release.
This is not Insightful. This is wrong.
I have been using Linux as my only desktop environment for the last 7 years. Some of my computers are new and some are old. I occassionally upgrade them and I have witnessed Linux bloat first hand.
Slowly over the years the desktop has gotten bigger and slower. It used to be that 128MB was plently of RAM. Moving opaque window used to be quick and snappy. Nowadays KDE 3.2 really needs more than 384 MB to run decently. It used to be that when I did a "ps aux" I knew what every process did. When I do this today with the newest KDE or Gnome I have no idea what most of the processes are for. And these unknown processes are using huge amounts of RAM. Something tells me this is waste.
The first step in fixing the "bloat" problem is acknowledging it exists! It seems to me that the slashdot linux community is in a state of denial. This is nothing new.
I assumed that "The X Window System" was correct (or at least American) English.
3) It's not 'bloat' (whatever that is), it's just using the hardware and X-server abilities to their full.
How can you claim that it is not bloat when you admit you don't even know what bloat is?
I have a 1.6ghz system, 512 RAM, and 128MB NVida card. I use a lightweight WM - IceWM. I dual boot Linux and Windows.
Video performance on the linux side lags badly compared to the windows side. If I grab a window and shake it on the windows side - it's no problem. On the linux side, I get tracing and blurring. Linux GUI feels sluggish compared to Windows.
IMO: transparent windows are beyond useless. The text in one window or menu gets mixed with the other text, and I have to strain to see what's what.
Also IMO: this demonstrates a major problem with linux development. Developers do what they feel like doing, it doesn't matter what users actually want.
"One that comes to mind instantly
is writing a replacement for X Windows.
It makes it very difficult to do gaming on Linux.
Why don't they port Gnome to run against frame
buffer (or something similar), so we could run a
GUI without X? Linux could take the pc gaming
niche market if it performed well. They already
have the knowledge for the task so it wouldn't
have much learning curve. DirectX would be a lot
easier to emulate without X.
Wine could use some help.
Mozilla and Firefox could use some help."
Who needs them? Graphics are over rated. If you're so concerned about eye-candy, you don't need a graphical browser. Use Lynx.
People like eye candy... and guess what? It's FUN. Sometimes people like to spend their energy doing things that don't really have a point. Music? Fiction? Do we really need these?
.. sure though modern distributions are excellent for out-of-the-box video playback. albeit the software is a little non-free.
Windows users especially have a hell of a time hunting down codecs most Linux users never need to think about.
You seem to assume that Apple will rest on their laurels. Recent additions include such things as core image and core video which is quite a leap forward.
www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/coreimage.html
Also, it's not just about how things appear on screen, but how it all works underneath and also how it is being used by application developers.
What gives OSX a lead in the GUI department is the Cocoa Framework and programming model, associated development tools and consistent use of interface design guidelines.
I wouldn't consider Linux to be catching up to OSX in the GUI space _unless_ GNUstep becomes more mature, gets a more modern appearance and is going to be widely and consistently used for application development on Linux.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not trying to praise Apple here. After all, this technology came from NeXT and was at some point in time co-developed with SUN. Apple were just extremely lucky that NeXT saved their butts with this awesome technology.
Let's be honest, compared to other Unix windowing systems such as NEWS and OPENSTEP, X11 is archaic. It's bad enough that NEWS didn't catch on as a standard. Hopefully GNUstep will become more mature and finally take off, now that it is nearing a 1.0 release.
http://www.gnustep.org
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
>> Mozilla and Firefox could use some help."
>Who needs them? Graphics are over rated. If you're >so concerned about eye-candy, you don't need a >graphical browser. Use Lynx.
Are you really trying to argue we don't need
a browser without graphics? or one that's less
full of bugs? or one that's free?
You're just arguing for argument's sake.
Did you have anything serious to contribute?
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
i see all these programs that could use some help. why arent you helping them instead of bitching about how others CHOOSE to use THIER time.
does irony have to come in the form of a frying pan to the head for people to recognize it?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Apple could learn a lot from these videos alone. OS X set the bar in 2000 (or whenever) with drop-shadow windows, scalable icons, and live-rendering-while-morphing windows, and it improved usability and feel immensely. But if we really want inert lights on a flat surface to feel like objects, more needs to be done.
I think one of the coolest parts of the wobbly windows demo is the way that new windows don't just appear, they sort of fade in and splat onto the desktop. I think some sort of physics model for movement/creation/disappearance of windows and menus is the next important step in the feel of the end-user experience.
Maybe in Mac OS X 10.5? (ie 2007)
How long 'til this shows up in standard linux distros?
Listen you dumb cunt... a real desktop might not have a picture painted on it, but it's sure as hell going to have a clear desk cover with lots of photos, post it notes and various documents sitting on it if the end-user is a human being with a fucking life. Just because you have a clean desk in both the real and virtual worlds doesn't mean everyone else does. Why don't you do fuck yourself with a hot soldering iron you worthless pile of assflap?
Slackware for example comes without libtheora. Yes, I use mplayer but it can't play theora without libtheora. I still have to download, build libtheora and then recompile mplayer. All this for playing only one file from art.gnome.org.
wow, this is all well and good but if you've been looking into how e17 is coming along you could easily see that we've been at this stage for awhile now. how come e17 hasn't gotten this well deserved attention?
move along, nothing to see here.
>> I have a 1.6ghz system, 512 RAM, and 128MB NVida card. I use a lightweight WM - IceWM. I dual boot Linux and Windows.>>
I have an 800mhz 512mb RAM and 16mb vid card laptop and I use Debian with gnome 2.8 and it's great.
>>Also IMO: this demonstrates a major problem with linux development. Developers do what they feel like doing, it doesn't matter what users actually want.>>
Ah yes, words from the oracle. Any group, even private corporations (gasp!) have R&D groups (though they are usually secretive -- hm, I wonder why?). The product groups use the R&D to refine products. You seem to mistake the fact that Linux R&D is public for it being at the same level as Microsoft product announcements and marketing vapourware.
This is a technology demo, people. They said as much.
Exactly. Unix is nearly 40 years old and while Linux is not Unix, many many many of it's concepts, file hierarchy, command line utilities, IPC mechanisms are very Unix like. "Not that that's a bad thing", but progress instead of eye-candy would be nice. Free is NOT the selling point but rather, "well engineered", "thoroughly tested", "available", "stable" are. With over 100+ distros out there with no end of forking in sight, how is anyone to take all this seriously? Make it so my filesytem will recover no matter how many times I flagrantly power-off the CPU, forget about command line utilities (they're for "I'm an uber geek" type folks), get rid of dependency hell, reconcile the best known distros and come up with a consensus for average joe blow.,
>> What a waste. A window manager? There are a ton of valuable things they could be spending time on.>>
How's your work coming on the cure for cancer? What? You do what for a living? Stop wasting your time right now!
Now, I'd like you to explain to me why it matters what my contributions are? How does what I've contributed change the validity of the question I've posed?
I asked because assigning value to a project is relative. You don't believe that the UI developments in the article are useful. As a GUI developer, I wholeheartedly disagree. Most of the demo work that they are showing off is not just eye candy, but proof-of-concept of new tools that are needed for future GUI development.
I'm certain many people don't list Adventure and D&D character generation as high on the list of priorities. If you believe that there are projects that are more important than this one, go work on them, but don't bitch at someone else just for having a differing value set.
From the site:
Closed for patent infringement
This site has been shut down because of numerous patent violations in MPlayer. The other free software multimedia players are next.
Multimedia is a patent minefield. All important techniques and formats are covered by broad and trivial patents that are harming progress and alternative implementations, such as free software multimedia players.
The European commission has just passed its directive on software patents, violating democratic rules and procedures to the sole benefit of big non-European corporation and Ireland and to the detriment of small and medium sized businesses (which comprise 99% of the European software industry) and free software.
The European parliament will now be taking the last stand against software patents in a voting for which an absolute majority is needed. Such a majority is hard to come by in a parliament with a low attendance level.
But not all is lost yet as long as you decide it is time to make a difference and take action. This is our last opportunity to fend off software patents worldwide, there will be no second chance for the foreseeable future.
Signing petitions will not suffice. Contact your local EU representatives and educate them why software patents are a bad idea in the first place and why they must attend that parliament session to vote against them. Make it clear that they need to stop the machinations of the EU council and reaffirm the power of the EU parliament, the only democratically elected EU institution. For in-depth information and starting points to get active visit the software patent page of the FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure) and NoSoftwarePatents.com.
Wish us luck, we will need it.
Granted you can still get into the site for the time being with a link on the very bottom, but when did this happen?
What I'm really waiting for is easier and dynamic configuration, including true hot-plugging of displays. I want to be able to plug in a new monitor and have X recognizes it. You can dynamically resize the screen to a limited extent, but the available video sizes are still limited to what's in the xorg.conf.
Also, why don't we have fast user switching? I want to have multiple desktops belonging to multiple users, and switch between them quickly.
Fast user switching can be viewed as a special case of screen virtualization: Your applications are always talking to virtual server, either VNC or (better) NX. A physical display can then switch between different virual servers, multiple displays can share the same server, you can move display, or you can switch users.
This kind of stuff is much more important than eye candy, and you'll have more of a chance to make a name for yourself.
Who's there?
Amazon...
Amazon who?
Amazon's here to patent this idea...
We're only cynical because people have shown us we're right
I forgot what I wanted to say, but honestly, it was important.
No sincerly, it is too much, cut a few frame from each animation and it become usable but as of now each single animation is too long, just watching the video was stressing me out. The wobble is neat, very neat, but realize you'll have to watch this animation each time you will manipulate the window or menu. Animation should be short, used for introduction or removal of an object, if you animation has a 1.5 sec. duration this is what it cuts on productivity and patience, I use an OS to work not to be impressed by the guy who wrote it. MacOSX animation for example are very short, the longest one is the Genie effect and it barely reach a second, the wobble in the video I just saw had a 2-3 sec duration, it was very annoying.
:))
then again if my only complaint is with the animation duration it means those guys did a very good job!
well actually, I have another complaint: doesn't linux or BSD or anything that was used in the video has any screen capture tool cause the guy holding the camera was, I think, trying to be artsy and "cool" but I just wanted to punch him to unconsciousness.
This demonstration was very reminiscent of the one Jobs did with one of those Panther releases or whatever (I'm not an Apple user) in which he rotated/flipped windows with live video in them.
Taken as eye candy looking for a use, this was an okay article. If it was meant to be a "look where we're headed" announcement, more details as to "why" would have been appropriate.
translucency and shadows. Now that is beyond any doubt in my mind extremely useful in making a screen easy on the eye. The rest of the crap (and yes I mean crap) is well..... useless. I'm sorry but what I see is more stuff to turn off and disable.
I'm trying to get mail out to my number one client along with copies of 2 spreadsheets and an invoice. All the while my windows are flopping around laundry in a windstorm. Sorry. But there are other less bloated "features" needed.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
http://www.stardock.com/products/windowfx/
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
It's been a VERY long time since X worked well at 800x600. I remember trying to use X back in '95, and many programs assumed you had 1024x768, so they would be too big for the screen. Some wouldn't even start. If anything, apps have gotten better since then, using GTK/Qt for dynamically sized windows etc.
Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and when you're beholding a graphical effect that you never truly thought possible, but spent hours coding anyway only to find out it works... well, it tends to look pretty great. Then you look at it a month later and realise it's useless ;)
i think i need to go change my shorts.
The effects aren't quite as polished as Luminocity (yes, ironic), but the idea's been out there for a while:
Old video: http://www.stardock.com/video/windowfx1.wmv
New video: http://www.stardock.com/video/winfx21.wmv
Is this the same as the dynamic resizing effect in WMP9/10 or Firefox, or something more like the weird super-choppy brushed-metal resizing you get in itunes?
...I'm just lying by the pool, soaking up the irony of you telling someone to grow the fuck up when your sig comes from The Lion King.
> I asked because assigning value to a project is relative.
My contributions have no effect on the value
other people place on GUI design, or on how
I value it. It might serve to enlighten how I
value things, but that isn't why you asked.
You disagreed with my argument and instead of
offering a rational rebuttal you sought to
belittle the author.
> I'm certain many people don't list Adventure and D&D character generation as high on the list of priorities
You asked. They get downloaded so someone must
think they have some value. You ignored
all the other things I mentioned.
I'm sorry if someone pissed in your cornflakes
this morning but don't belittle me, as you
put it, "for having a differing value set"
I can't see how you can prioritize GUI
tweaks higher than any number of other things.
If you want to have a rational discussion
I'm all for it. If not, just ignore the
rest of this and we can both move on to
more positive things.
Is there anything fundamentally new or different
in the GUI? Is there anything that makes it
any better than what was in the
Apple design bible from 15 years ago?
The only new thing I've seen is gesture
recognition. I don't think anyone has
implemented it except as a browser plugin.
Even that is only a minor improvement in
speed. I've not seen anyone do any human
factors research to see if any GUI features
will reduce carpal tunnel syndrome, etc.
Was there any usability research done to
see how to really improve the GUI? Or how
to improve it for the handicapped?
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
The X11 fork is showing great promise. This is the first time in 6 months I have wanted to install and experiment with new software on a linux box. I will have to do it at work, as I have 'switched' to Mac OS X at home. No need for an eye candy war on that machine, as I rarely fire up X11 on it.
i have to admit, it's easier to mod something down, rather than up because people's mind work that way, unfortunately. How many times can you remember laughing with other people about somebody who made some sort of mistake? Now how many times can you remember giving a compliment, together with other people, to an individual? It's easy to be negative, and it costs alot more energy to be positive.
:)
:D
And then somebody who says the truth gets silenced, by another person with too many modpoints and not enough braincells
Just to make sure this doesn't get modded up: ALL mods SUCK! kisses!
Typical clueless troll. The kernel has nothing to do with this. The person grousing about the video formats should be up on the latest codecs. Theora and MPEG4 are where things are at these days. Would you also attack someone who told a Windows user to install RealPlayer to watch RealMedia format files on their PC by saying, "The typical Windows Power-user response."I don't know what your problem is... Everything works fine on my particular installation. You must be doing something wrong. Try rewriting the Windows kernal so that it's exactly like mine and then it should work for you"? Didn't think so. Go fuck yourself.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Fedora can play most(all?) of these formats and there is not a single non-free piece of software on it. Hell they won't even let mp3's play because of the non-freeness.
Regards,
Steve
Anyone care to clue me in with a link on how to play the theora stream with mplayer? (The AVI plays fine, just interested in keeping my mplayer play *everything* and ogg video isn't there yet)
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
What a waste. A window manager? There are a ton of valuable things they could be spending time on.
This isn't the improvment we're looking for, move along, move along...
What enhancements are you working on again?
In other words, why should they do what you want? This is Open Source, they should be doing what they want.
Well, for one thing, Flash movies don't play very well on most open source platforms. Macromedia only support a few mainstream machines. So while vnc-to-[insert movie format] (which tools exist for) might be an option, vnc2swf is a bad choice.
For another thing, VNC is too high-level, and the new X protocols that make this stuff possible probably aren't supported by VNC yet. Perhaps even less so, by the vnc2(whatever) tools.
...is this networkable?
I just want my mouse to stop stalling and for form elements to have some keyboard intellegence. If I cared about drop shadows and translucent boot prompts I wouldn't be using X.
As far as eye candy goes.....those wobbly windows are pretty damn sweet. :)
and you have your two neurons otherwise engaged in turning things to sh*t?
riiiight!, it'st the reason we don't have holographic TV's!... is that why you walk around with an eyepatch?
Oh the Irony!
you mean, like, not Redmond approved stuff???
yeah! they should be focusing on the critical stuff!!!, like all those security holes in IE!!!, and...
I think people did a great job with that: it brings a sense of style and pizazz to the X11 platform that it has been lacking in the past. That's important for raising interest in a platform, marketing it, attracting users, and all that.
However, although many people confuse the two, the thing to keep in mind that style and pizazz don't mean improved usability. Improving usability is the harder problem, and improving usability while looking stylish is even harder. Many of today's very stylish user interfaces have worse usability than some of their predecessors.
A second problem with UIs is that they are still far too hard to develop; even with the best toolkits, it's still a lot of work. And the more visual constraints and visual functionality you put into the UI, the more application programmers are burdened with things unrelated to producing a high quality UI.
Things that happen at the window manager level (floppy windows, etc.) are generally fairly harmless in terms of usability or software development. Other things, like sophisticated theme engines, make it a lot harder to deliver a usable UI, because the details of how buttons look do matter. As a simple example, coloring OK and Cancel buttons green and red respectively might well improve usability (some toolkits used to do this), but it would kill the style of many themes.
True, no one cares, like no one cares about spelling. But still it irritates some people when the editors overlook it.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
My sincere apologies for any perceived insult. At no point was I attempting to belittle you or your projects. Frankly, my reaction was to the implication that because you do not see the value in their project, others won't either. You could have made constructive suggestions or simply chose not to use it, but instead you belittled their project by dismissing it as trivial and unimportant.
As far as I'm concerned, this discussion has very little to do with "GUI tweaks" and more to do with simple respect for people who make their work freely available.
I had to take a dramamine after watching that video.
> In other words, why should they do what you want?
That's a great question!
There's no reason why they should.
I merely pointed out that I thought their
priority list needed to be rethought.
They really need to "Think outside the widget".
I probably won't benefit from it either way.
GUI's have all the features I ever wanted now.
If they did 'reach a bit higher' I might
benefit from it some day. I doubt it will
happen though.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Wow, I definitely don't want my windows to do this!
Video games give a good demonstration of what it is possible to do with a video card. That is irrelevant to what was demonstrated in these videos.
These videos were a demonstration of the type of thing that is possible because of the composite and damage (and perhaps a few other) extensions recently added to xorg. Before this, you were stuck with fairly static windows and fake transparency if you were using anything but a special X replacement (like XDirectFB or something). These videos show transparent, wobbly windows and real-time previews that weren't possible with regular X before.
Anyone who comes away from this saying, "No shit, graphics cards have been able to animate wobbly stuff for years," is missing the point by a lot. The hardware's been there, but the framework for using it hasn't. Now the framework is there, and people are demonstrating what's possible with it. It's a tech demo of the X extensions, not of whatever old graphics card was running in that guy's laptop. Games aren't a demonstration of that.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
To combining the wobbly window effect, and image viewer, and some of my favorite web sites From Utah's new list for ISPs. Boing!
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The Wobble effect was set at it's highest level, to appear on video more clearly. This is stated by the web site. They claim actual usabilty gains come from a more moderate setting. As Luminocity is a testbed for features before including them in to other WM's, I'm happy to see lots of brainstormy-ness there.
Looks good for your age..
> my reaction was to the implication that because you do not see the value in their project, others won't either
I thought it was a fair question, even if
it might have been badly put. If more
than one person doesn't see the value in it,
then perhaps it's value should be re-examined?
Why be insulted because someone questions your
motivations? A well placed question can be
an opportunity for more than just an argument.
It's a chance to see something you might have
missed. Who knows, there might be something
valuable there for you!
I tried to suggest they could better spend their
time. I did make some suggestions, and I did
choose not to use it. If they had understood my
point and reevaluated their priorities,
they would have made their own priority list.
Nobody really needs my suggestions and they'd
probably be disregarded anyway.
I've made my work freely available, and paid
for the bandwidth. I don't feel a lot of respect
is being granted me. It probably comes down
to you, and others, don't value my contributions
highly so no respect is granted. I'm doing the
same. I don't value yet another bit of eye candy
as being particularly worthwile, so I don't grant
much respect.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Yes, this looks pretty good for what it shows. However, I'm still wondering how much effect all these technologies will have if they're not fully integrated.
An app that draws using OpenGL is nice, but if it's talking OpenGL directly, while another app is controlling the display via GTK, and still others are using Qt or Evas, and widgets are limited to the widget space, and windows are limited to the windows, and window managers are limited to the window frame, etc...
Well, you've gotta wonder just how much fluidity you can obtain with such a setup, no? And that's before we get into different animation timing, competing vram cache managers, and all the other horrible things that will probably get in the way :(
The name of the program is X Window. Therefore the headline should read:
Preview of X Window Eye Candy
or
Preview of X Window's Eye Candy
Insert witty sig here.
...the WobblyWindows are more "aqua" than Aqua now!
(Sorry, Mac fans.)
This is a shot fired across enlightenment's bow. Let the GUI competitions begin!
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Is your post supposed to be a poem or something?
That's pretty funny, because I've referred to X11 as X Windows since I was an MIT undergrad, and that's typically how most old hands from that place refer to it. You know, MIT, the place where X was first developed. (Yes, I even used X10 briefly before the campus fully transitioned to X11.)
Even the much-loved RMS (that's Richard Stallman, for those who aren't aware) has referred to it as "X Windows" in articles he's written. So whoever the idiot is that keeps correcting people to call it "X Window," can you please shut the fsck up? Seriously. Not to mention the fact that the person who keeps doing this is obviously not a native English speaker, because "X Window" sounds retarded and just plain wrong, at least to American ears. It might sound great in Germany or Russia or possibly even in the UK (though I highly doubt a UK speaker of English would say that).
Besides, X11 can display more than one window at a time, so calling it "X Window" just sounds... retarded. And I'm not someone who uses the term "retarded" or "brain damaged" lightly, but both definitely apply in this case.
Last point: Common usage in language is usually what counts, folks. Just because some jackass claims that "the standard says foo, so call it foo" doesn't mean that negates years of common use. Some of us have been using X11 (and its predecessors) longer than these pipsqueaks who chime in with these idiotic "it's called X Window, not X Windows!" threads.
OSX gives you enough rope to hang yourself with.
And just enough extra to moor a yacht.
They were just nice enough to give you a default environment that doesn't need tinkering and you'd never have to pop the hood. This is why you pay for it.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Which does not negate years of common usage that predate the books you bought. I pointed out in another posting that even Richard Stallman has referred to X11 as "X Windows" in articles he's written. Not that everything RMS writes is sacrosanct, but I should point out that his ties to the MIT community (where the X Window System originated) go back a long way, and most of us ex-MIT people like to call it X Windows because it's convenient and descriptive, regardless of what some jackass pedant thinks.
Yes, but truncating "The X Window System" to "X Window" is decidedly wrong from a linguistic standpoint, at least for American English speakers. The OP was trying to tell people it was called "X Window," which comes up every few months, and touches off a firestorm of crap posts.
Yeah! Geez, everyone knows ^W is more efficient.
Funny enough, a fair number of MIT folks (including yours truly) referred to it as that for a long time... you know, before formal documentation solidified and people started pointing to the docs as "proof" that their way of referring to this software was the One True Way.
Since "The X Windowing System" is rather cumbersome (both in print and in speech), people like me call it "X Windows" as a vernacular abbreviation, or "X11" to be super-brief. I don't consider these wrong. I know I'm in good company in my usage, and I am constantly bewildered by the astoundingly stupid pedantry that surrounds this subject. Try talking to some of the folks who worked on X or used X from the get-go, and you'll see a very much more relaxed usage than what some of these young whippersnappers are spouting off about.
Not sure you concord with anyone.
If you're using Firefox, you might try using the following smart bookmark: dict
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=concord
"The X Window System" may be correct English (at least American), but "The X Windowing System" is no less correct... and some purists might say it is technically more correct. Both are just cumbersome to use in speech or print.
This comment may be late, and my get buried, but i just wanted to correct the slashdot title for this article. (Which is strange cause /. is so reliable for facts)
it is: X Window system
it is not: X Windows system
Can you see the difference? There is no s on 'window'. I know that MS has taught us all to use the word 'windows', but we should keep our heads and use the correct names for technology.
As a reference, i will cite the X.org Website where they make reference to the "X Window System" extensively.
Thanks Zonk. You couldn't even copy from the submitter's words, who got it correct.
It appears more to me that they are arguing that by your logic, Lynx is *all* that's needed so why waste time on all the other graphical browser gimmicks blah blah blah.
...
Hey, so you don't care about this stuff and think it's a waste of time... that doesn't make it a waste of time in everyone's view. People contribute in areas they good at, when it interests them. If other areas interested them, they'd probably be contributing there already rather than to this. Obviously their areas of interest don't necessarily overlap yours
(\(\
(^v^)
(")")
This is the cute vorpal bunny virus, copy to your sig or runaway, runaway in fear!
a dialog that pops up totally ripped from OS X asking you for the admin password when you install a program
You know, more than anything else, Windows needed this. A password confirmation to install software, but implemented in an easy way (so those "Home Users" who refuse to learn about Admin and Regular User accounts can learn to use it). Maybe now spyware will ASK to be installed before automatically helping itself to your System32 folder.
Having written a few widget themes, I feel the need to interject...
By writing algorithmic renders rather than fixed pixbuf based widgets, we can increase how dramatic the visual effects are without driving people nuts.
Since GTK+ themes are predominantly pixmap based and Seth is primarily a GTK+ user, he might not realize that programatically themed widgets are old hat. GTK+ 1.x had them (though they really didn't catch on for some reason), and Qt 2.x had them. The theming in Qt 3.x is so good that pixmap based themes are all but dead in KDE.
As a theme writer, I can say without hesitation that we aren't even close to the potential of what we can do on the software side. Hardware rendering will give us new tools and palettes, but that's no reason to discount the software toolbox we have now.
However, any single rendering of a tiger stripe button would get old very quickly when repeated all over the screen ad nauseum.
Looking at his screenshots, I see that Seth is reinventing the wheel. Unless he wants animated widgets (which would quickly become a true nauseum), the same tiger strip effect can be done by offsetting the widget background on a large pixmap. A few "marble" themes I have run across do this. As for his planet and sketch examples, a traditional software rendering would be hardpressed to reproduce it, but it doesn't matter because the results are too annoying. Do we *really* want that much variation in widgets?
On the positive side, his sketch example does illustrate a huge benefit of hardware rendering: the ability to get some nice subtle curves on the fly.
I don't want to sound like I'm knocking hardware rendering. I'm not. But that doesn't mean that software rendering is ready for the death bed. Until Linux and BSD get ubiquitous high quality open source video drivers for all hardware, software rendering is going to remain.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Nice thread hijacking, dude. Looks like someone wasn't breast fed enough when he was a kid.
True.
I hadn't given enough thought to the idea that some
people might be able to make a solid contribution
to GUI design, but not much to Cancer research.
So it makes more sense to do what you can, rather
than trying to do something you can't.
Thanks!
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
I just wrote a... I wrote a... I ported the... I pay for all... I think I contribute...
Gee Ditto, your shit don't stink!
(...sorry, couldn't help myself)
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Don't underestimate the power of the command line. Aside from allowing powerful (and not terribly difficult) scripting, and allowing one to run an application over a stupid ssh session, and allowing one to run a GUI-free server, it also lets people develop backends completely separate from the server itself. See transcode (http://www.transcoding.org/) for an example.
I don't see how forking is a problem. You don't seriously expect the ubergeek to run the same distro as her grandfather, do you? I *do* agree that things like filesystem stability are major selling points. However, I don't think that Seth Nickell would be hacking filesystem drivers if he weren't enabling stunning X effects.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
/me's jaw drops...
I'll upgrade hardware for that. That's really cool. Work? What's that? Check out my new desktop effects. Wow!
Wait. Go back to the part where OSX or Windows have dynamic themes or resolution-independent rendering. I must have missed that.
And no, I don't mean the idea that Quartz theoretically supports arbitrary-DPI displays but really uses bitmaps right now, but it *could* draw a vector desktop, any minute now. These are actual screenshots, right now.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
As this is Gnome, shouldn't it be Gristian?
The problem with some of you making all these claims on how eye candy on the UI is just this evil thing seems a little unfounded. If you like your fvwm or whatever, then great stick to it. But don't discourage this kind of innovation just because you think its useless. I am certain you will be able to turn it off if you don't like it. Remember, you will always have your bash shell to cuddle up with at night.
You've missed the point entirely. Not everything that "we" do needs to have some higher purpose for the good of humanity. Some people like to spend their time doing recreational things. Some people take things seriously that others would consider pointless or a waste of time...
Art is a great example of this. How does Art further cancer research? Or solve hunger problems? It doesn't do any of those things directly. Does that mean that it's a waste of time? Should we stop creating art (composing music, poetry, fiction, etc.) because it doesn't further cancer research?
I find the glimpse of your world view pretty sad.
they cribbed the boob-jiggle code from dead or alive for those windows
Okay, so your WM is already released, debugged and stable. So what do you care what other people do?
One problem with the "official" names is that none of them are good in casual conversation.
Most of them are at least four syllables and sound stilted. "X11" doesn't just liltingly trip over your tongue. (I blame the syllable transition "ee-leh".)
But plain "X" doesn't really lend itself to ideal conversation either: it's the prefix to a lot of terms used in such conversation (xterm, xfree86, etc), and so there's a desire-- and a good one-- to append something to close off the term, so somebody isn't listening for the rest of the word anymore.
That's why "X Windows", I feel, is such a common term. It fills a need that the officially-sanctioned terms don't.
It's more a matter of priorities.
Don't get me wrong, I like Linux, I'm using Linux right now. But Linux could stand some improvement. In fact, there are some fairly serious issues that have been around for years.
If I were to make a linux wish list, transparent windows would be nowhere near the top of that list.
You completely exagerated the point I was trying
to make, and added an insulting note at the end.
What's up with that? What did I do to you?
The world *is* a pretty sad place. A lot of really
bad stuff is happening. It would be nice if I
could bury my head in the sand and ignore it
like you suggest.
Are you really arguing that it's okay to waste
time on frivilous things when you could be doing
something that isn't? It's a good rationalization,
but I don't buy it.
There's a time and place for everything. My
suggestion was that their effort could be better
placed, nothing more.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
I didn't post any of that until he asked
what I had contributed. So you slam me
for answering his question?
You, and a couple of the other posters, insist on
making this into an affront to your honor,
a personal attack on you, or some
twisted way for me to brag in public.
Everything in those posts was about respect,
contributions, or emotions. None of it
was about technology. None of it answered
the question.
It doesn't matter what my contributions
are, or if my shit stinks. The question was
couldn't spend their time on something
more important.
It occurs to me the answer is simple.
They really did do what was important.
*To them*. They did it so they could
continue to be the "big fish". So people would
love them because they're the "gods of GUI".
Nobody else is allowed to accomplish
anything because people would love them better.
Nobody is allowed to question their
accomplishments because then less people
might love them.
Which seems to what motivated you too.
Seems like a really sad way to live.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Just port more games to Linux and that's all I need, 64bits please.
Getting old fast, Shit!
In KDE, simply go the the K Menu->Switch User.
Works fairly quickly, but is happier with more than 256MB RAM. Only downside is sound is locked for every session except the first. I can't wait for the sound situation in Linux to get simplified and fixed. *sigh*
I hereby declare that the winner of this argument is the poster who called the other poster a "dumb cunt". This is Trolstoy's First Law: The first poster to call another one a "dumb cunt" in an argument is automatically the winner of the argument.