Next Generation X11

Rene Rebe writes "The German News site Golem is running a report (babelfish translation) about the next generation X11 projects, like the OpenGL X-Server Xgl, Luminocity as well as Enlightenment 17. The report is including many screenshots and five videos."

Comments

Why isn't this already out?

[AKAImBatman]

1995: We'll have really neat X11 desktops Real Soon Now(TM)! See, here's a demo!
1998: We'll have really neat X11 desktops Real Soon Now(TM)! See, here's a demo!
2000: We'll have really neat X11 desktops Real Soon Now(TM)! See, here's a demo!
2005: We'll have really neat X11 desktops Real Soon Now(TM)! See, here's a demo!

Nope, never heard these promises before...

Joking aside, I didn't see anything in the photos or videos that's revolutionary. Enlightenment looks like its usual "prrreeeeetttyyy" self, and X11 is shown with various transparency and warping effects that have been available on other platforms but have been largely unused.

The question of "Why have they gone unused?" seems to be pretty well answered by some of these videos. i.e. None of the applications seem to do much of anything different than current applications do. The only difference is that they have a "cool" interface. All I can say to that is, Kai's Power Tools had a "cool" interface as well. Didn't get them (or hundreds of other "me too!" programs) very far.

The truely interesting projects I've seen lately are:

1. Sun's Looking Glass Project. While it's not revolutionary in of itself, it is an excellent evolutionary step in user interface improvements. Sun really took the right path by keeping with existing Desktop designs, but improving on existing concepts like sticky notes and window shading (the ability to "fold up" a window). They've also left the door wide open for developers to leverage the new desktop for new UI concepts that fully utilize the 3D abilities of the system.

2. There was an "Ask Slashdot" a few days ago with a guy who was working on the mother of all touchpads. It was literally more of an interactive tactical plot that could have amazing uses in collaberative work.

Re:Why isn't this already out?

[Skraut]

Yeah wasn't there a Y windows in the works at one point.

While at times I've been firmly in the "There needs to be an X with less crap in it" camp, I've learned to really appreciate the network transparency. Though I do still wish it was a choice, something that could easilly be plugged in, or removed depending on the system install. The Linux Kernel is so flexable in how you can customize it for the hardware situation, its a shame you can't do the same thing for X.

Re:Why isn't this already out?

[ciroknight]

I think the real problem is, everyone knows X Windows is broken, but nobody knows what to do about it. A few reactionary people set apart to create projects like Fresco and Y-Windows, but the fact is, those are just as useless without knowing what was broken in X Windows in the first place.

As a Mac OS X user, a previous Windows user, and a current Linux Desktop user, I will not be the first to tell you that X is slooow. Windows seems more responsive than most Linux desktop distros I've used, and Mac OS X puts both to shame. Java applications on the Mac (or Windows) even seem more responsive than X Windows.

I still profess that the problem lies with the widget set/window manager not being integrated into the core, but that's just my opinion, and I'm not an expert. It just seems to me that there has to be some code that's shared between the two systems, and together, both systems generate excessive overhead that can be eliminated if we weren't so obstanant in preference of either KDE or GNOME.

To be honest, I'm surprised there hasn't been a project yet to integrate GNOME into X, which I'm surprised hasn't sparked a project to integrate KDE into X (two new forks). It'd be a nice graduate project if someone had the time, and I'd love to see what a GUI on linux could actually perform like.

Lastly, the problem comes with there being absolutely no good drivers available. Honestly, even though NVidia/ATi tries, they're not up to par with what they've got on the Windows platform, and Apple developers have had the luxury of seeing the developer's specs, so their drivers are just as impecible.

I think one of the best things that could come out of open source as of now, would be out of the ReactOS department. Find a way to use ATi's and Nvidia's drivers, then wrap them in such a way they can be used to draw X. I think that'd be an ideal solution, even if 20 people reply and tell me that this is technically unfeasable, and that licences and shit keep us from doing this legally.

Re:Why isn't this already out?

[WillerZ]

You need to look in either Andrew's arch repository or mine for a more up-to-date version of Y. It's still years away from being usable wherever you get it from, so don't bother unless you want to hack on it. See my other rant: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=146748&cid=122 93465.

When Y gets to the slightly-usable stage I'll submit a story to /. myself.

Phil

Re:Why isn't this already out?

[ciroknight]

Integrating Gnome or KDE in X??? Just where do you live? Insane planet? X is underlaying layer for desktops not desktop it self.

And that's a reason I think it is broken. Most current desktop operating systems have realized that the underpinning technologies for running the Graphical User Interface are just as important as the overpinnings that make it look good, and make it useful. The "middlepinnings" and the "sub-underpinnings" like OpenGL and transparency/image blurring/antialiasing/supersampling in Linux are other examples of screw ups; where everything is implemented as seperate projects, they are all going off in different directions, each leaving each other behind. If there were a central coordinating force, they'd be working together, and getting somewhere.

Again, integrating Ati and Nvidia drivers in X? People do use other cards you know. You can't make X specific for those cards, and say screw others.

I said nothing of this? I just said that X needed better drivers, and maybe a way to do this is to wrap the Windows drivers. Besides, these are the two largest graphic card companies, and other graphic card companies have already released not only specs, but open source drivers, and it was announced here. I'm too lazy to do a search and provide links, as I'm already late for class at the moment.

What's next that you hope? Integrating X with kernel and CPU?

Hell, Windows integrated their GUI into the Kernel ages ago. Mac OS X uses their graphical environment as a kernel plugin. It's a tried and tested approach, but if you are seeking my opinion, I believe it to be flawed, and that X is doing the right thing in staying out of Kernel matters.

As for not being responsivene, either you screwed with settings, or you use some partialy supported video card. I have a Radeon 9200, 7000 and an NVidia TNT2. Sadly, the TNT2 proved to be most usable under Linux, but still performed better under Windows. As for ATi, I've yet to get either video card working.

Re:Why isn't this already out?

[Ed Avis]

When I first came to Linux I couldn't figure out how applications displayed things on the X server. I was used to the idea that to draw a line on screen you save the return address on the stack, then jump to some operating system address. It draws the line for you and then returns.

So... how did this work on Linux? Was the X server process mapped into memory at a fixed logical address so other programs can know what routines to call?

It was rather a surprise to find that to draw something on the screen you had to format a message and send it down a TCP/IP link or at best a Unix socket, involving at least two context switches. No wonder computers are so slow nowadays...

Re:Why isn't this already out?

[Anonymous Coward]

On Channel 2, the Linux community screams that network transparency doesn't add a lot of overhead to the graphics system. Meanwhile, on Channel 4, the Linux community screams that monolithic kernels beat microkernels because procedure calls are more efficient than message passing.

These aren't necessarily opposing opinions: the graphics system is different than a kernel. But in a GUI environment, both are going to be responsible for a *lot* of communication, so I find it intriguing that people are able to hold both opinions at once.

Re:Why isn't this already out?

[bushidocoder]

I realize that, but there are places where memory is allocated inproc as nonshared - see this from GnomeLive about the total cost of buffers for X.

Re:Why isn't this already out?

[Ambassador Kosh]

Memory usage reported by X is not even close to accurate. The X process also memory maps your video card in most cases and even the reports the agp buffer size sometimes. So if you have a large memory card you can sometimes see X reporting that is using many hundreds of megs of ram. I have 3 vid cards in this box and X will sometimes report up to 400M of ram used. However I have 1G of ram and the system will show almost all of it free despite what X is showing.

The problem is that accurately showing up how much real memory is used is a VERY difficult process. Linux shows it one way, Windows shows it another way and neither are close to what people probably think of as right.

Re:Why isn't this already out?

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, the obvious difference is that the GUI subsystem in Windows runs in kernel mode, so applications don't use IPC to make graphics-related calls, they use a system call interface. Obviously this entails the overhead of transitioning from the client process to kernel mode when a batch of commands is sent from the client, but the kernel-mode GUI subsystem is then able to directly interact with the hardware. With a client/server design, on the other hand, doing the same thing requires a transition from the client process to kernel mode, then from kernel mode to the server process and then from the server process back to kernel mode. It's patently obvious that the latter model is far less efficient.

Y Windows

[BlacBaron]

I recall seeing this a while ago Y Windows

X free of CPU and RAM usage

[Anonymous Coward]

Many complain that CPU speed does not increase much from the user perspective but what if the new X11 tech brings us GPU based jpeg decompression?

Surf your photos and they go straight to the GPU instead of storing a CPU decompressed bitmap in RAM, the speedup would be incredible. Low CPU usage in laptops as GPU does the work.

Remote X11 display without recompression of the network stream? It would become as fast as surfing. Requested jpegs being send straight to the receivers GPU, simply upgrade the GPU in school computers to get very fast thin client Linux boxes.

Look at Apple's Core Image in Tiger: possibilities will be amazing.

Re:X free of CPU and RAM usage

[Nagus]

Dude, jpeg decompression is so efficient that it's basically free. I mean, loading the actual data from disk (or network) takes a hell of a lot more time than decompressing it.

Much more interesting is the ability to render SVG images with hardware acceleration. The xsvg renderer will give us that ability (when used with glitz as cairo backend).

Resolution-independent graphics, rendered at high speed. That is what will make for really amazing possibilities.

bootstrapping problems

[CowbertPrime]

We were discussing the X11 OpenGL server at the LWE X BoF session. IIRC, the current problem with full native implementation of the OGL server is that starting the ogl server requires the dri layer, which requires an X server to be running.

Movie representations of computer UI

[Winterblink]

I remember watching movies like Hackers, which is a fairly decent movie overall, and totally laughing at their representation of the user interfaces on the computers. From the seriously hacked up and personalized desktops on everyone's PCs to the "flying through the mainframe" hacking at the end of the film, I was convinced it was there as a joke.

But it seems nowadays desktop environments are getting to be SO customizable and graphically "enhanced", I start to wonder whether those old movies weren't jokes but rather premonitory.

What I want

[RealProgrammer]

I want an interface that lets me think in 3D.

• I want to be able to grab an edge of a window and push that edge out of the way, with the window aspect changing according to how far I push it. Grab the left border and move it right, and the contents of the window compresses (e.g., making the text look skinny).
• I want to be have a large virtual desktop which I can zoom out away from to show groups of screen objects (windows, icons, local backdrops, etc.), and zoom in on to show the objects close up. The objects should not all be in the same plane, so when I zoom in on one set of object I can still see ("far off") other tiny sets of objects. One effect of that would be to allow hiearchical groups of objects.
• I want to take a group of objects and wrap them in a box, which I can label arbitrarily. The box should have variable opacity, perhaps password security, and should respond to signals (it should be a process).
• I don't want to have to use a pointing device. If necessary, I'd rather use a subvocal microphone/sensor, keyboard mouse driver, eyeglasses, or a chin strap than a mouse, touch pad, trackball, or nipple.
• I want a video driver / X server that outputs stereovision to two displays (or two halves of a single display).

And I want it to be Free.

To answer the obvious retort: every time I get started learning X programming, my feeble little brain starts to hurt. Kudos to you wizards out there who grok X.

Re:What I want

[duerra]

http://www.hamar.sk/sphere/

Un-fun code

[truthsearch]

I couldn't disagree more (you knew somebody had to, right? ;) Plenty of high quality un-fun code is written in the open source community. Think every line of the Linux kernel or GCC was fun to write? It's not as much the fun as how badly someone wants it. People have been toying around with this sort of thing for a long time. But there doesn't seem to be enough real community demand to get a big enough team to hammer it out.

I know nothing of graphics programming. But if I was very interested in having accelerated window animations I'd learn OpenGL and help out. There will always be someone who wants that itch scratched.

Advanced graphics programs?

[starseeker]

Window manager effects and all are nice, but the part I find interesting is whether Gimp et. al. will be able to more easily impliment things like layers and transparency now. Anybody know how that would work?

Re:bablefish

[toxis]

abgekupfert is the perfect form of the verb abkupfern (Kupfer = copper) which comes from the old profession of engraving famous paintings in copper and other metals.

Though it takes a lot of talent those engravers (Kupferstecher) were not creative by themselves and if today a German says something is abgekupfert he/she means it is still just a copy and ignores the hard work behind it.

did someone say Berlin Project?

[displague]

Or was that Fresco?

Either way, the website hasn't been touched in two years...

Okay, so how do I get some eye-candy

[moonbender]

I'm probably going to wipe off XP from my laptop RSN. I've already got Ubuntu on it, but I'll probably re-install from scratch anyway. Not sure which distro yet, pending any other convincing arguments I might just end up re-installing Ubuntu. But that's beside the point.

All those demos are nice and all, but are there any usable ways of getting cool eye-candy in a working, moderately stable Linux install today? Without all the hassle of checking out code from a VCS? Is Enlightenment a sensible choice for an install that should primarily just work? For instance, I'm going to install OpenOffice and to stuff for the university on it - is working with OOO better supported in Gnome or KDE than in E, or is there no difference? I like some eye-candy (if it doesn't get in the way, XP-style), but it's no use if the prerequisite is a system too geeky or unstable to do any work on.

Isn't it too complicates

[wereHamster]

Is it just me or do you also have the impression that the whole X11 server architecture is way too complicated.

Xorg (the xserver), dri, drm, kernel modules, Xgl, mesa.

What amazes me, Xgl rund on top of the xserver (Xorg), because theres something with dri that Xgl can't do directly.

I've created a simple (and by simple I really mean simple) 'xserver': the basic idea was to take an existing API and build the 'xserver' on top of it, the API is OpenGL. Windows are special objects in memory that can be shared between the client and the server. The client creates an window and tells the server 'hey, there's a user and he/she wants to see this window, please put the window with ID xyz onto the first monitor so he/she can see it'. and the server loads the object and puts it into the frontbuffer. and the client can draw (write) to the window and the server reads from it. and both the server and client use the same API (OpenGL) to draw things, the server into the frontbuffer, the client into the window object. Of course there's a tiny API for handling these objects, but that's only very few functions, maybe 15, that's enough.
And it works. Now if someone writes a driver that makes use of the GPU/video ram, this could be really fast. Currently it supports the mesa software opengl library for rendering.

Useless Vs Useful fx (and other improvements)

[master_p]

Am I the only one that turns off GUI effects like windows zooming in and out, menus folding and unfolding etc after about 5 minutes of use? From the screenshots in the presented link, we can see zooming windows effects and transparent windows. Where is the usefulness in that? it's still down to working with xterm and the apps like the Gimp (with all the (possible ?) usability problems that it has).

The useful effects are:

a) window shadows; it really enchances the depth perception;
b) zooming from and to icons; it really gives a sense of connection to the source for each window;
c) transparent notifications (for example when new e-mails arrive)

I don't think X-Windows need more effects than the above.

But what the X desktop really needs is the following:

a) a way to programmatically specify new server-client protocols in order to minimize round trips. For example, an application's GUI could live entirely on the display server, and the application is simply reduced to using the available protocol to build widget trees. This can also be used for rich WAN applications, including the internet.

b) a widget toolkit endorsed by the X-Window committee (whatever that means), that comes as default with X, is simple and easy to use, using one of the new protocols specified above.

c) the ability to do macro-commands, either by recording them using mouse and keyboard or by entering them via an X11 script language.

The above will make a killer combination...if coupled with an information-management application like TreePad as the desktop shell, then X11 will be a true winning desktop environment.