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FVWM-Crystal 3.0.4: Speed and Transparency

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the back-in-the-day dept.

michuk writes "PolishLinux.org has published a review of FVWM-Crystal 3.0.4: "FVWM-Crystal is an eye-candy, functional and ultra-fast desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX, based on FVWM. Crystal can be used even on very old machines, thus it is a noticeable alternative to popular desktop choices like XFCE or Fluxbox.""

31 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sure... by Watson+Ladd · · Score: 2, Informative

    The article says it should be compared to KDE or GNOME, not Flukebox or BlackBox in terms of functionality vs. system load.

    --
    Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
  2. Coral Cache by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 4, Informative

    The server is melting, here's the coral cache link.

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
  3. Oops by dreamchaser · · Score: 5, Funny

    "FVWM-Crystal is an eye-candy, functional and ultra-fast desktop environment"

    As opposed to their webserver...

  4. the 'f' was for feeble by nurb432 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Since the story comments that the developers dont remember what it stood for since its 'so old' . Geeeh. Old is not a few years..

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
    1. Re:the 'f' was for feeble by ZmjbS · · Score: 2, Interesting
      http://www.fvwm.org/history.php
      Originally, the "F" in fvwm stood for "feeble". But then...
    2. Re:the 'f' was for feeble by MightyYar · · Score: 2, Informative

      I did a quick search on Google Groups, and the oldest thing that I could find was "feeble" in a 1994-era Wine FAQ. Interestingly, my understanding of what WINE stands for was wrong, too. I always thought that it was "Wine Is Not an Emulator", but in the FAQ from 1994 it says "WINdows Emulator"... so there you go.

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  5. Original sites! by MoogMan · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sometimes it doesn't hurt to link to the original site - or better, a pre-emptive Corel Cache of the original site !

  6. Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications by QCompson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Every time I have experimented with a lightweight fast desktop (fluxbox, icewm, xfce, etc.), I am initially impressed at how snappy the desktop itself feels, but once I launch a few applications, I am again disappointed at the overall slow feel of the apps themselves.

    FVWM with Nautilus? When I use nautilus in another environment (window manager, whatever), it always starts slower than it does in Gnome (I know, I know, preload gnome-stuff and all that, but if you have to do that, what's the point?). Once nautilus is open, it still behaves sluggish and ackward. And it's not just nautilus. I have the same issue with konqueror, firefox, music apps, k3b, and more. A lightweight desktop is fast if I just want to login and look at your wallpaper, but once I try to get something done, I have the same old issues.

    I can't quite describe the problem, but even after the tremendous improvements that have been made to the Linux desktop in the past few years, it still feels... slow. I'm not trying to troll here. I love Linux, and I wish it all the success in the world, but it just doesn't feel as snappy to me as windows 2000/XP. Seems like lost mouse-clicks and slow window redraws are a large part of the problem. Perhaps the problem lies with X, or with my own warped sense of perception... who knows?

    1. Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications by Kaypro · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I have to completely agree. My gut feeling is that the main cause of this may be the GTK toolkit. It's a great library but they need to concentrate I think on two main things: speed and appearance. It still feels sluggish compared to Windows and it just doesn't look quite right or polished as Windows. Some of the widgets just look awkward no matter what theme engine you use. Don't get me wrong I use Linux most of the time, but in my experience Windows still reigns in speed even compared to OSX. OSX has the appearance down pat but still is slow compared to Windows. It's minor nitpicking I know. Productivity is what counts but it would still be nice to clear these two issues up.

      --

      Eddy.WriteLinux.Com

    2. Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      My guess is that part of the problem results from having so many different toolkits that must be loaded into memory from the hard drive first. I know what you mean - KDE apps under fluxbox start slow - but when one opens Firefox, Kmail, and OpenOffice one starts up what are essentially three completely different systems for rendering graphics (particularly in the case of OpenOffice).

      I can't help but believe that there is a LOT of redundant activity going on there, that could be avoided if we identify what is ACTUALLY DIFFERENT about the way GTK, QT, OpenOffice, etc are doing things at the graphics level and abstract everything they are doing the same onto a common library. I can see programmers working differently with different styles, but the libs should be reduced to accomidating those styles when possible.

    3. Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      From the slashdot submission:

      thus it is a noticeable alternative to popular desktop choices like XFCE or Fluxbox.

      This must be a definition of popular with which I am unfamilar

    4. Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications by Paralizer · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I have noticed GTK applications take 3-5 seconds to load, it's a bit annoying but it doesn't cost productivity.

      I've been using FVWM for about a year now, and it's absolutely amazing at creating a desktop environment that increases your productivity. Since it's so flexible, I suspect the advantages are not limited to someone who uses their desktop like I do, but for virtually anyone.

      Some of the key features that help me include
      • scrolling on a title bar shades
      • scrolling on the desktop switches to the next virtual desktop (I use 8)
      • and a Quake-like console bound to ALT+1
      And I'm a minimalist, I've read forum posts where some people have ALT+some click doing something radical, and mouse gestures doing others. Little things like that are useful enough that I don't care it takes an extra second or two to launch some programs, I make up for it plus (arbitrary number) in handy features.

      I just wish it was easier to edit the config, or at least have a (near compelete?) tutorial for editing the .fvwm2rc :(
    5. Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications by ultranova · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I have to completely agree. My gut feeling is that the main cause of this may be the GTK toolkit. It's a great library but they need to concentrate I think on two main things: speed and appearance. It still feels sluggish compared to Windows and it just doesn't look quite right or polished as Windows.

      In other words, GTK is a great UI library except it's slow and looks bad :). But no, I don't think that GTK is the problem. I have a gtk-gnutella instance running in a 200MHz box, accessed over XVNC, and it reacts just fast even when the machine is under load. No, I think that the real culprit is that Gnome apps typically use a hundred libs each and Firefox has its interface rewritten in XUL. All this adds layers of abstraction that increase reaction time and decrease speed.

      Gnome has its own virtual file system driver, for crying out loud ! WTF does a desktop need a file system driver for ?!?

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    6. Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications by MartinG · · Score: 5, Insightful

      My gut feeling is that the main cause of this may be the GTK toolkit.

      Well it just so happens that gut feeling, despite being the most popular tool, is almost totally useless when applied to performance measurement in software.

      Seriously, I solve performance issues in a range of applications on an almost daily basis as part of my job. After a few years, you stop being surprised at exactly how little correlation there is between your gut feeling of what is causing slowdown and what really is.

      Measurement is the only useful approach to performance. I've said it many times before, and many greater programmers than me said it long before that.

      A couple of quotes:

      "Measurement is a crucial component of performance improvement since reasoning and intuition are fallible guides and must be supplemented with tools like timing commands and profilers." - Kernighan and Pike

      "You cannot tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so do not try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is." - Rob Pike

      --
      -- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz .@adgimnoprstu
    7. Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications by Slayk · · Score: 2, Informative
      Gnome has its own virtual file system driver, for crying out loud ! WTF does a desktop need a file system driver for ?!?
      So that Gnome applications are portable wherever Gnome VFS exists, and gain the benefit of working with whatever GnomeVFS works with?

      I like how my desktop works pretty well over SFTP/SMB/FTP (and I guess WebDAV but I've never used that) without me caring what protocol the bits are going over. Gnome is a framework in additon to being a desktop.
    8. Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications by Cid+Highwind · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If you don't believe me, get a 200 MHz computer, run a GTK+ 1.2 app from back then (e.g. X-chat), then run the same app that has been ported to GTK+ 2.0. You [i]will[/i] notice a difference!

      You mean there's a price to be paid for having anti-aliased text, real unicode support, and using resolution-independant vectors to draw the widgets and icons? Say it ain't so!

      --
      0 1 - just my two bits
    9. Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications by abigor · · Score: 2, Interesting

      1. The client/server architecture of X uses sockets. In the case of Linux, domain sockets are implemented as shared memory, same as in NT 3.51 and earlier. But it's still a kernel function to manage that stuff.

      2. Context switching between applications or whatever and the X server. Context switching is handled in the kernel. A userspace switch is probably a good order of magnitude slower than a kernel switch. X generates a lot of round-trip traffic, though I guess that depends on toolkit implementers as much as anything else.

      And probably a lot more things that an actual expert on this stuff could talk about. Basically, any X drawing event could be a context switch, and since X has a lot of events (which is why it sucks over slow links, and Microsoft's RDC doesn't), that's a lot of switching. I seem to recall reading a paper ages ago about how to minimise X events, like certain caching strategies, but I don't know if these are used by toolkits or not.

    10. Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications by MadMidnightBomber · · Score: 2, Funny
      "Measurement is a crucial component of performance improvement since reasoning and intuition are fallible guides and must be supplemented with tools like timing commands and profilers." - Kernighan and Pike

      "You cannot tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so do not try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is." - Rob Pike

      And what would they know about programming? I'm waiting until I hear it from Bill Gates.

      :p

      --
      "It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
    11. Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 2, Funny

      What the hell is a Quake-like console? You fire a little gun to run commands and navigate folder directories using WASD?!

      --
      Comment of the year
    12. Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It is true that the way X and Linux work induces a lot of user-kernel switches and context switches. However, that doesn't mean that this has to be the case for any combination of kernel and graphics subsystem. I can very much imagine a system where applications acquire a piece memory to draw on, and all the display server needs to do is manage which pieces of memory go where on the graphics framebuffer (the video hardware might take care of the z-ordering) and send events. This would severely reduce the traffic between the clients and the server, and thus the number of switches of any kind.

      ``I seem to recall reading a paper ages ago about how to minimise X events, like certain caching strategies, but I don't know if these are used by toolkits or not.''

      Probably one of lbx (doesn't gain you much), dxpc (gains you quite a bit) or nx (gains you a lot). They all compress requests (reduced traffic), bundle request (fewer packets and switches), and cache responses (eliminating certain sequences altogether). All this is done on the raw X protocol stream, so it's transparent to applications and toolkits. nx also offers replacement X libraries that use the more efficient protocol, and freedesktop.org has been working on next-generation X libraries as well.

      --
      Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
  7. FVWM-Crystal is nice, but... by Darkael · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Fvwm-Crystal is really nice, it shows how powerful and flexible Fvwm can be while still being light and fast. But its main drawback is that when something goes wrong, you are screwed unless you know Fvwm very well, and this is not something easy to achieve (for those who don't know Fvwm, just look at the man page.

    Also, while we are on the subject of Fvwm, check out Metisse, a nice experimental Fvwm-based OpenGL desktop. I'm not sure if it's still actively maintened though. It would be a nice thing too if they ported it to Xgl.

  8. Wow! by Goaway · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So basically "eye candy" means "skins and transparency"? That'd be pretty awesome, in 1996.

    1. Re:Wow! by Stalyn · · Score: 2, Funny

      Is the new Enlightenment out?

      --
      The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
  9. Re:ICEWM works just fine for me by hahiss · · Score: 2, Funny

    You mean you use a window manager? I mean, you can do just about everything without a windowing system; just use screen + links2, vim, muttng, etc!

    --
    "Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
  10. Re:ICEWM works just fine for me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    And you don't use a window manager? Check your sig.

  11. Desktop or Window Manager by 10Ghz · · Score: 5, Informative

    Last time I checked, FVWM was just a WM, and not a proper desktop as such.

    --
    Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
  12. Sort of... by Kadin2048 · · Score: 2, Informative

    There seems to be one in-progress on Wikipedia:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_desktop _environments

    Right now it only compares Gnome, KDE, and xfe, and then it really only lists somewhat superficial differences. If it were fleshed out, I think it could be quite handy.

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  13. Re: WNT by MsGeek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    WNT is to VMS what HAL is to IBM. QED.

    --
    Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
  14. Re:ICEWM works just fine for me by WilliamSChips · · Score: 2, Funny

    You use octal and harmonic tones? Hand in your geek card.

    I feed my computer instructions by telepathy and recieve them the same way.

    myspace profiles give me a headache.

    --
    Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
  15. Re:Nobody? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    There's a "nobody" account here on my machine. When he logs in I'll ask him what it means.

  16. Re:As an avid FVWM 1.24 user... by spauldo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There isn't an FVWM 3 - it's version 3 of this theme that runs on top of FVWM 2.5.

    I made the switch to FVWM 2 through a lot of other window managers. I held on to the 1.x series 'til enlightenment DR13 ( I think), then gnome/sawmill was working enough to use, then after a few years went back to FVWM. I like 2.x much better - my current config doesn't do a whole lot 1.x doesn't do, but there's a trick or two I pull that I'm pretty sure 1.x wouldn't let me get away with.

    One question though - if you're running the same binary, is it still linked with libc5, or were you an early glibc convert?

    --
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