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

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: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...