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Hawaii Desktop Stable Released, Powered By Qt 5.2 & Wayland
An anonymous reader writes "The Maui OS Project has made their first stable release of the Hawaii Desktop. Hawaii is still catching up with GNOME, Xfce, and KDE in terms of features, but it's written from scratch atop next-generation open-source technologies. In particular, Hawaii 0.2.0 is powered by the brand new Qt 5.2 tool-kit and runs natively on Wayland's Weston 1.3 compositor. Hawaii 0.2.0 carries all standard Linux desktop features but more advanced desktop functionality is planned while focusing around a Wayland design and eventually their own Green Island Compositor."
QT is last generation. Next generation is javascript using node. It never blocks! It never wastes time creating new threads! That's why it's faster.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I'll check it out when Hawaii reaches 0.5.0, and it better have the theme song play when I log in.
Another Desktop??? Can't we focus on getting ONE right?
"Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"
Seriously.
what's that now? Its called internal support for freeRDP
They have a main webpage with a clean design, and they explain what they do and why anyone in the target audience should care, without falling prey to corporate-speak. That alone bests more than 90% of previous desktop environments, yet is the bare minimum than any user-facing project should have. Plus, the FAQ and About pages actually explain their motivations rather than a few obscure technical details.
That "operating system, a suite of software that makes your computer run" made me shed tears of joy.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Are there any screenshots available? I can't seem to find any.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
X works on my operating system.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Another Desktop??? Can't we focus on getting ONE right?
If only Windows 8 users had that option; how many would have taken it? I have moved from a full time Gnome User(Driven away by Gnome Shell) to KDE(Great Applications\Themeing....Poor Desktop) to XFCE(Like Gnome 2 at its best, with some cravats/advantages).
The bottom line is there may not be One right, maybe many rights and many wrongs. Android is a great Phone OS but I would not like to use it full time as my Desktop...but to have access to its large catalogue of touchscreen games on GNU/Linux I would kill for, and there is no reason they can't run in a tradition WIMP environment.
servers sir don't need desktops ! and there we have high penetration, unfortunately companies are starting to right gui only installers for linux, we the server geeks don't want a damn desktop on our servers. we want to squeeze as much performance as we can out of the hardware !
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
If they want people to try their they should atleast include an ISO. Sadly no ISO is available, so why will people waste time compiling the thing ?
No its good old fashioned WIMP. The menu button shows large icons which is rubbish, but this is definitely a Desktop not a tablet interface.
They have pictures and everything.
> Other than network transparency, what exactly of value does X do that Wayland doesn't?
How about multiple displays? This is a handy feature for when one of your apps (Steam) like to take over your entire screen.
Wayland either needs to support the old way of doing things or have a new way of doing things that's a suitable replacement. Sandboxing apps written by developers with a single user OS mindset would not be a bad genuine "killer feature".
"Gets rid of that vile thing called X" is not a killer feature.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Why is it news that someone created yet another Linux distro with yet another permutation of packages? Why is it impressive that Hawaii "features a dynamic, flicker free and fast system"?
The summary mentions that theres potentially a new DE here, why are there no details on it?
Decades of backwards and forwards compatibility. The real question is: What does Wayland offer?
And yes, I think it is stupid to design in 2013 a display protocol which is not network transparent at its core. In a world where internet is finally everywhere, and X (if embraced) would allow to move a game from smartphone to TV when coming home. Or a text window from notebook to tablet for discussion around a table, or .... And no, RDP does not cut it.
That, and it seems like the biggest headaches (but not all of them, systemd how I hate thee) are desktop related.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Don't think it's fair to count Android devices as Linux, given that it's a very closed platform and doesn't have any of the basic functionality that most of us expect from a desktop operating system.
Though given the direction Microsoft and Apple seem to want to go with their desktop systems... maybe in a couple of years it'll be a fair comparison. :)
Another post mentioning Wayland...I still have hope it will die a quiet death so the Linux GUI can get back on track...
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
Decades of backwards and forwards compatibility. The real question is: What does Wayland offer?
And yes, I think it is stupid to design in 2013 a display protocol which is not network transparent at its core. In a world where internet is finally everywhere, and X (if embraced) would allow to move a game from smartphone to TV when coming home. Or a text window from notebook to tablet for discussion around a table, or .... And no, RDP does not cut it.
But by that standard X is not network transparent at its core. Anyone using X on a desktop (GTK, QT apps) will be using the SHM, Randr, XVideo, XInput2 etc extensions which means that after start-up a typical application is not using much of the core protocol. When you try to use one of these applications over a network the toolkits fall back to using the core X protocol just to blast lots of large pixmaps down the wire, because the core X11 protocol graphics is so outdated it just can't handle alpha blending, properly hinted fonts and so on. How is that different from RDP, except that RDP was designed and heavily optimized for that use case (and yes, RDP can send individual windows, not just the whole desktop).
That's quiet apart from the fact that X11 was designed to use local, narrow-band (by modern standards) networks to render simple (by modern standards) graphics. It is very 'chatty' in terms of round-trips it requires. Using it over high-latency links is not pleasant at all, even if the bandwidth of the link is orders of magnitude greater than was available in 1990. It's just not optimized well for current use.
Wayland offers a simpler, saner design that doesn't have duplication of effort between applications, compositors, window managers and the core. It eliminates decades of subsystems that have to be supported but are duplicative or totally useless (such as the cross-platform ELF library loading, the crappy bitmap font rendering and the 'stippled line' support). It is built around the assumption that there may well be graphics accelerators of varying capabilities that may be used, rather than insisting that using such support is an 'extension'. Most significantly, many of the core X.org developers are working on it, because they don't see that X can be taken much further.
Turning off my techie and programmer sides for a moment, what I do know as a user is that, regardless of whether or not the things I run are causing any of those to be invoked, all the X apps I run are indeed pragmatically absolutely network transparent. If I run gedit or kate remotely on the LAN, it is just as responsive and usable and featureful as locally. Same with eclipse. Same with gnome-terminal and konsole. Same with libreoffice. Same with damn close to every single other app I use. Practically the only one where I can even tell the difference is mplayer, but it's bloody amazing to me that mplayer even works at all remotely. And it does.
So, in my particular experience, none of the things you point out have any relevance at all to network transparency. It's not that the point of view is of no interest or even no validity; it's that it is not relevant to my needs.
Yeah, I use Gnome2 plus some KDE apps, both with all the juvenile eye candy useless bullshit turned off. Because I have things to get done, efficiently. And X is getting it done.
For who?
For me the year of the Linux desktop was around 2000. (Red Hat 4.2) This was largely because of license changes by MS, but that was the year I switched over to Linux. My wife was already on Apple. Her year of the Linux desktop was around 2007. Because of changes in the Apple licensing, which meant that I no longer felt willing to do support work on an Apple system. And also because the music score editing programs on Linux had reached a bare minimum of acceptability. (She's still quite unsatisfied.)
For other people, other considerations apply. I doubt that it will EVER be the choice for all desktop users, unless other groups stop making desktop systems.
P.S.: The Linux desktop environment has deteriorated markedly over the last two years. The peak thus far was will late editions of KDE3. Gnome2 was acceptable. Currently I'm using a Debian LXDE, and my wife is using an Ubuntu-lts flavored KDE.
P.P.S: My neighbors across the street use Apple. They don't seem to have any fewer problems than does my wife, but it's generally things like "the keyboard is turned off", which I can asist them with without agreeing to an Apple EULA.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I going to try it but no QEMU or VirtualBox support yet.
Monolithic instead of modular is not necessarily sane it just looks better in block diagrams. The original proposal for Wayland (one toolkit, one unalterable window manager, linux only by design) is not really what I would call sane but it has developed into a more modular idea and become more sane - a bit like X really :)
This keeps getting repeated but seems to be a misrepresentation of Kieth Packard saying "looks interesting - good luck with your Wayland project".
The Judge threw that rubbish out in Microsoft vs Netscape and went with the textbook definition instead. It looks like the "beige box is the hard drive" crowd have won.
X doesn't allow that. X has frequent round trips. Which means over a WAN it is a very high latency protocol. The fixes for that have been to semi-shatter "network transparency". X can only work well on a mid latency setup, a LAN, the environment it evolved to handle. So no, X wouldn't allow you to do those things.
Worse it doesn't even allow you to do those things locally, Because one of the areas X also sucks at is complex graphics like TV and graphics and games. And that's because you can't share video buffers with applications buffers because it is client / server. So what that means is that locally you get many of the disadvantages of client / server or at the very least 1/2 graphical performance especially for games.
The reason people think X is obsolete is because the use case for which X is designed and optimized is rare in today's world.
But by that standard X is not network transparent at its core. Anyone using X on a desktop (GTK, QT apps) will be using the SHM, Randr, XVideo, XInput2 etc extensions which means that after start-up a typical application is not using much of the core protocol.
That X11 had been designed to be extensible is one of its strength. That there is special support to make all overhead go away for local client does not seem to be something bad to me. As you correctly point out: this is transparent to most applications:
When you try to use one of these applications over a network the toolkits fall back to using the core X protocol just to blast lots of large pixmaps down the wire, because the core X11 protocol graphics is so outdated it just can't handle alpha blending, properly hinted fonts and so on.
You seem to be confused. X has been extended for example with XRender which supports alpha blending. But this has nothing to do with network transparency, XRender is perfectly network transparent.
How is that different from RDP, except that RDP was designed and heavily optimized for that use case (and yes, RDP can send individual windows, not just the whole desktop).
The important part is to realize that showing graphics remotely is only a minor part of a network transparent display protocol.
That's quiet apart from the fact that X11 was designed to use local, narrow-band (by modern standards) networks to render simple (by modern standards) graphics.
First of all, X was designed to be flexible. This is why it is still great, because could and has been adapted to modern requirements.
It is very 'chatty' in terms of round-trips it requires. Using it over high-latency links is not pleasant at all, even if the bandwidth of the link is orders of magnitude greater than was available in 1990. It's just not optimized well for current use.
Again, this is a misunderstanding. Many X applications do indeed suck over high-latency links. But this is not an inherent problem of the X protocol, but because nobody toolkits are doing things in a stupid way and nobody fixed it.
Wayland offers a simpler, saner design that doesn't have duplication of effort between applications, compositors, window managers and the core.
You seem to think that this monolithic design is a good idea. I disagree. Wayland was really simple in the beginning, now as it starts to become useful it is getting more complex duplicating a lot of stuff which has already been solved in X a long time ago. At the time it will be able to replace X, it will not be much simpler anymore, but a lot less powerful. Maybe some old stuff can get eliminated, but I doubt that this is worth it: I do not see how any of this 'old stuff' gets into the way of doing 'new stuff' on top of the X protocol.
It eliminates decades of subsystems that have to be supported but are duplicative or totally useless (such as the cross-platform ELF library loading, the crappy bitmap font rendering and the 'stippled line' support).
I don't see how bitmap font rendering or 'stuppled line' support can be a great maintance burden. For ELF library loading this might be different, but this does not seem to be a core problem of X.
It is built around the assumption that there may well be graphics accelerators of varying capabilities that may be used, rather than insisting that using such support is an 'extension'.
This doesn't make sense.
Most significantly, many of the core X.org developers are working on it, because they don't see that X can be taken much further.
This seems to be a myth. Some people who now work on Wayland have commited to X would be more accurate.
In a world where internet is finally everywhere, and X (if embraced) would allow to move a game from smartphone to TV when coming home. Or a text window from notebook to tablet for discussion around a table, or .
X doesn't allow that. X has frequent round trips. Which means over a WAN it is a very high latency protocol. The fixes for that have been to semi-shatter "network transparency".
X allows that. You have to hack in at the client side, because no toolkit bothers to implement moving windows from screen to the others, but I did it for some of my applications. The same is true for roundtrips. The protocol is asynchronous, but toolkits use it in a synchronous way.
X can only work well on a mid latency setup, a LAN, the environment it evolved to handle. So no, X wouldn't allow you to do those things.
Worse it doesn't even allow you to do those things locally, Because one of the areas X also sucks at is complex graphics like TV and graphics and games.
What is wrong with OpenGL?
And that's because you can't share video buffers with applications buffers because it is client / server.
You mean DRI does not exist?
That's X culture i.e. Unix culture more than it is X itself. If they were genuinely implementing using X you wouldn't be happy. What you are happy about is they care to make remote work well. I don't think that's going away. With a separation of protocols so that Unix developers have an explicit: local, LAN and WAN solution it will be much easier than having a LAN solution and then throwing a local solution on top and trying to get that to work and then some gimmicks to make WAN work....
Yeah right, just look how abysmal it performs:
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/
Left 4 Dead 2 on Windows 7 with Direct3D drivers, we get 270.6 FPS as
OpenGL implementation on Windows. Left 4 Dead 2 is now running at 303.4 FPS
Left 4 Dead 2 is running at 315 FPS on Linux.
I use CUDA for HPC. I also use X over the network everyday. Please don't educate me about bandwidth. Your point seems to be that sending OpenGL over the network is not a good idea and that it is better to send the rendering result. This is certainly true for many 3D applications such as games. Guess what. Both can be done with the X protocol. No need to break compatibility.
That's mostly proving that OpenGL is fast. Which it is. You know one of the major reasons *why* OpenGL is fast? Because it practically bypasses your X server in order to get anything done.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Please read my comment again, especially the portion in brackets. By not reading it you failed the test your handle is named after :)
Right. The X doesn't do much. It is also not slow for what it does. So why replace it?