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KDE GUI

Alpha-Blending On KDE 192

Posted by CmdrTaco from the baby-stepping-to-aesthetically-perfect dept.
PimpBot writes: "Check this story out on The Dot. The KDE team is getting some pretty sweet alpha-blending going with their latest CVS for KDE 2.1. The story has pretty eye-candy." Most of what is there is already being done within efm, but kde probably has a larger installed user base. Of course this stuff is really only with icons and images, and not fonts, which await the ubercool Xrender extension which does just that (or even cooler, the RGB Decimation for antialiasing text under X on LCD screens). Yum.
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Alpha-Blending on KDE More

Alpha-Blending on KDE

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  • Imlib alpha blends the image bits client side and sends the bits back to the server. This is Inefficient As Hell(tm), especially if you're on a remote display. Ever try to run GIMP across a dial-up connection? Putting alpha-blending and anti-aliasing into the protocol allows the hard work to be done server side. That means 1) you don't push image bits over the wire and 2) the server hardware can accelerate it. Also trying running MesaGL vs. hardware-accelerated glx to see the difference.

  • ...and then of course, a post like the above is read, and the grinding of gears can be heard as a mad rush to mod up the original post takes place. This appears to be very true. If there is a flamish original article, it will be mod'ed down. If there is someone to state that "Of course it is not flamebait, there are valid points, etc." it is mod'ed up.

    It is quite entertaining to watch the dynamics of the moderation system. Perhaps the above article is insightful, perhaps it is not. This is definitely OT, and should be mod'ed down for precisely this reason and no other.

  • Wrong. I'm running an X server on NT, and it has a neat feature where I can map an X LFD onto a TrueType font. So all my X programs use perfectly scalalbe, anti-aliased fonts now, with no client modification. Duh squared.

    There is nothing in X which prevents a server from rendering nice, anti-aliased fonts. It's a QOI issue.

    Now, if non-PC X server vendors would just get off their butts and add *default* support for it...

  • Oh, don't get me wrong, I agree with you on that point - Corperatism is really nasty. But then again, corperatism is not fully capitalism either.

    I like to see capitalism as a system where companies maximize profit by competeting to best server the customer.

    Corperatism is a system where capitalism is broken to the point that instead of companies seeing themselves as serving customers, they instead view the customers to be serving the company's needs.

    Corperatism is not a far shot from a collectivly run fudalism

  • Regarding the google caching:

    A couple months ago, slashdot linked to my site, at this page [pjrc.com], from this slashdot article [slashdot.org]. I actually had a few emails back and forth with Rob (CmdrTaco) in the week before the link, and I asked him to avoid linking until I could get all the images over to a faster vitual hosted site, and I was still putting a lot of work into overhauling the page and writing the latest info (I had just finished a new board design for the player).

    Well, the slashdot effect was indeed mighty, and my poor little site served up about 40000 hits, which appears to have been less than 1 in every 5 attempts, perhaps even less, I'll never know.

    A couple people posted links to the google cached page, which was actually this older version of the project [pjrc.com]... not at all the same thing, and certainly not the one that the slashdot article was about.

    So based on my real experience, a sample of one, the google cache was not only ineffective, but it did more harm than good. Rob linked to the page right after new content was posted (a common scenario of a news site), and the google cache had an older (totally different) version that led many readers to find material older, but similar enough that they could not tell the difference.

  • well i'm sorry sir, considering that our university uses NT 4 on Pentium II 400's I think I should know how well it runs, but thenagain, comparisons are relative... NT on those machines is a lot slower than linux or freebsd running a different desktop on the same machines (which we also have)... if NT runs fast/fine for you on a 486 DX2 so be it, i could hardly get win95 to run on a 486DX2 50mhz machine, it would take almost 5 minutes from startup to when the hard drive stopped grinding, but you should know that there is so much faster systems out there
  • Communism because it results in a lower standard of living for all

    Huh? Communism (if actually implemented properly), would result in a lower standard of linving for some, in as much as no one gets the mansions, the limosine's and the caviar. Hell, I don't consider that a "higher" standard of living anyway, as I don't fancy any of those things, but that's what would go away. Communism would also increase the standard of living dramatically for those who under capitalism have the bottom end of the stick. All those people who don't have any houses at all to sleep in and no food at all to eat would have a drastic increase in standard of living. It would put people on a more level playing field.

    Now, before you all get huffy and puffy about how this couldn't work, I did say that this would be the case if communism were implemented properly, and I will be the first to admit the difficulties involved in that.

    Joshua

    Terradot [terradot.org]

  • Phrased differently, open source is capitalism, except the resource that the free market is competing for, and the one the system is trying to maximize, is poeple's time, not money.

    Care about freedom?
  • For those of us who don't know, can someone explain what the hell Alpha Blending is? Everything I've read assumes that you already know this critial piece of info. I can get a general understanding from context, but a good definition would be lovely here.

    Cheers, Joshua

    Terradot [terradot.org]

  • Actually permedia 2 has hardware accelerated 2D alpha blending too, but since it's a pretty old chipset that never really took off anyway, I dont suppose it matters all that much.
  • Why do all seem communism as such a bad thing? really think, is it just what your culture have learned you? or have you sat down and thought about it? For you that are American I suppose that your "pinkie" scare comes from the Mccarthy period when regular witch-huntes(spelling?) were arranged.

    "both suffer in comparison to the Capitalist competition - the products made by Communists were, and are inferior in build and technology, to those made by Capitalists"

    Mayhap so, but communism put the first satelite and man in space and produced higly valued scientists. Is products really all that matters?

    "both seem to believe that making money is bad, and have successfully indoctrinated many people with the idea - something anyone would see is wrong"

    Making money isnt bad at all, it proves you have something special to give your community, but making too much money is bad. Why would you be allowed to earn 20 times the sum of the general worker? Maybe you excel in a skill, but you arent that good. Skilled people should always have a bonus, but it cannot be huge.

    "like Communism the idea is fatally flawed"

    Why?
    because the "smart" people cant buy their expensive whores? they still have a home and tv(computer maybe?).

    I agree that the soviet union had a flawed implementation of communism, but the "idea base" is really good.

    I know this is the wrong place to say this because all of you are people that are going to be assimilated into the corporate engine of captalism(including me?). But the life of the regular worker would probably get better while the "smart" people would get it just a little bit worse.

    We all are brother and sisters and therefore we cannot allow people to collect huge resources that should be more equally distributed amongst the people.

    Production and resources is not all that matters.

    I suppose this concludes my rabble. Anyone is welcome to continue this discussion by email
    chemic@linuxmail.org
  • Funny, it (KDE2 standard install) runs pretty fast on my old crufty S3 ViRGe DX (4MB) at 1024-16. Zooms on the G200, but quite a bit faster than Gnome on the S3...

    --
  • One place I worked at was so cheap that I had NT on a 486 DX2/66 with 64MB RAM. It took 15 minutes to boot up, Word took a couple of minutes to come up, and it was barely usable for anything other than a mainframe session. I think you're talking complete crap somehow.
  • wow, that's crazy i've got an old p200 myself, but with only 96 megs of ram, but I use Mandrake and KDE runs great on it.
  • Well if it's difficult for a multi-billion dollar corporation like Microsoft to do anything fresh, I don't feel it reflects too badly on the KDE people to make baby improvements over the windows interface. But somehow deep down I can't help feeling that the desktop metaphor is just a local maximum with respect to what could be done. It just isn't elegant. Example: Why does the desktop metaphor need a "show desktop" feature? Sure it makes it more usable, but surely there's a way to present things so that kind of quirk just isn't possible.

    Oh well, so far, it appears not.

  • AA-fonts for KDE (Score:3)

    by RPoet ( 20693 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @09:02AM (#582861) Journal
    Every post CmdrTaco does about KDE is riddled with excuses ("Most of what is there is already being done within efm...", "Of course this stuff is really only with icons and images, and not fonts...").

    Well lookie here! [keithp.com].

    --

  • Re:MS Blending (Score:3)

    by Prophet of Doom ( 250947 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @09:06AM (#582862)
    I think it is important to mimic a little of the look and feel of Windows. If Linux is to compete with MS in the desktop market I don't see any other way to do it. Regardless of anyone's feelings about the Windows GUI it is a fact that the enormous majority of people are familiar with it, you could say that it is the design standard. In order to be intuitive it is going to have to be Windows-like.

    Luckily this doesn't mean that it can't be innovative. KDE (and Gnome) have many features that Windows doesn't, particularly in the area of customization, and I think those differences will give it a leg up eventually. Unfortunately, in order to get into the homes of the average user, it is going to have to offer them an interface that they can recognize, something that looks like Windows.

  • I'm copying this AC comment b/c someone felt it was overrated, although it does present a few very valid points, and a legitimate complaint. The following is not my own comment, but deserves to be read. I would reccomend the moderator (or author) who did this reread the moderation guidelines (updated 9.9, whatever that means).

    The FAQ does a wonderful job at answering why they don't mirror commercial sites.

    But commercial sites tend to have enough bandwidth because they have money.

    But who gets slashdotted the worst? Free software projects (yes, those things that give you the right to freely distribute them) and personal webpages on cablemodem, DSL or other limited bandwidth connections. It may take days or weeks to get the OK to mirror a commercial site because of IP restrictions, but is that really indicitive of what smaller websites would do? Did they even try?

    -Anonymous Coward
  • Microsoft already implemented fading menus on Windows 2000 (sysfader.exe; you see it pop up on the Task Manager [taskmgr.exe] whenever you pop down a menu). And that was back in September 1999, way before 2.2.16 was decently stable. Yes, it does take some CPU power to do, but, most importantly, it does not disrupt other processes which are running.

    Can KDE perform its alpha blending without instigating a segfault? Only time will tell.

  • Hi Simon, long time no see. ;-)

    Given that it took about 30 seconds for the machine to stop thrashing enough (128meg RAM, celeron 400) to bring up this reply page, I suspect we have *very* different views of "ran fine". Well ... that, or you were running NT3.00 or one of the earlier ones. :)

    For the rest of the people in the thread - people do complain about the bloat in KDE. That's the reason I use WindowMaker instead...

    Paul
  • About 3 years ago when I was first exposed to linux, I wondered XFree didn't support anti-aliasing or alpha blending. It seemed like a pretty (easy, logical, neat) thing to implement, but why wasn't it happening? I had experienced games that used this technique, and was quite impressed. Microsoft beat XFree/KDE to the punch in Windows 2000, but did it take that to make the free GUI weenies realize that it was important to implement?

  • png (Score:1)

    by mach-5 ( 73873 )
    Cool...the graphics are in png. Very nice to see someone using that format.

    png is to gif, as beta is to vhs
  • Yes, I was immediately aware of X's monochrome bitmap text representation. However, it does not mean we couldn't change that. There might be some programs that would break with new libraries, but most just rely on the X server to handle everything but the string's contents.

    Furthermore, alpha blending is as simple as hacking up your 32-bit display mode so that the unused byte contains the transparency information and is not just ignored by the X server when drawing and clipping windows. Most apps would end up (directly or indirectly) zeroing that byte, which would convey "Totally opaque" so nothing breaks.

    We could also define additional flags such that apps without transparency would be optimized and clipping enabled for stuff underneath, etc. Or flags that would specify what kind of blending to use for the window (mix, additive, screen, multiply, etc.). Can you say cool special effects? Think the GIMP's layers all the time.
  • one must give credit to microsoft. Their interfaces are easy to use and make quite a bit of sense. They dont spend millions of dollars in research for nothing. Every car has a steering wheel. They all look basically the same. Why? Because it's a good idea. Just because MS put it in doesnt mean its immediately evil..geez some zealots on here cant see beyond their own ass...
  • I don't know. Embedded Qt has some merit (it does alpha blending as well!) and Berlin is always there. But seriously, I see Linux and I am happy. I see X, and I reboot into BeOS.
  • "If I'm wrong, and the [MS] guys have managed to make [GDI] jump through a hoop that high, kudos to
    them." - George Hoffman, Be Inc.

    (Paraphrased, replace MS with E, and GDI with X)
  • "Why is it that the default X courier font always looks like it got smashed in a garbage masher?"

    A good question! Try blowing up the font to 72 dpi and you will have your answer...

    - Steeltoe

  • amazing linux innovation (Score:4)

    by Trepidity ( 597 ) <delirium-slashdot@@@hackish...org> on Monday December 04, 2000 @01:20PM (#582873)
    Cool. Now I can have a desktop with anti-aliased fonts, alpha blended icons, and long uptimes. [windows2000.com] Who would've thunk it.
  • ... or does the text preview function in konqueror leave you with mixed feelings? Apart from the fact that I can't see the usefullness, I also don't like having my .fetchmailrc file or similar displayed openly.

    And to get back to it's usefullness factor: The first half dozen #include-statements in a C source file will tell me exactly what this file is all about. Riiiiiight.

  • KDE 2.0 is nice, but it needs improved stability much more than it needs improved eye candy.

    I look forward to the day when I can use KDE 2.0 as my desktop without frequent bug encounters.

    -John
  • See Steve Gibson's comments at his Web site about this. (Sorry, too lazy to give an exact URL.) He debunks M$ quite effectively (and has some quite nice examples, which I'd love to see on a laptop).

    No, he doesn't.

    See Ron Feigenblatt's website [geocities.com] for a more balanced (and informed) view on this.

    And here's what ClearType is from the Microsoft Research team:

    Brief overview [microsoft.com]
    IEEE paper on the technology [microsoft.com]
    Paper for the Society for Information Display Symposium [microsoft.com]

    Try reading those. Gibson literally does not know what he's talking about here. For a start, what the Apple II does is NOT sub-pixel rendering. It's not even pixel-color splitting, as all the color splitting occurs in the NTSC signal, not at the phosphor level (you'll see more than one green phosphor per green pixel).

    Simon
  • OSX doesn't use the BSD kernel, its a mixture of sorts. It uses the Mach micro kernel with a BSD subsystem. So its not actually BSD as it is a hybrid of BSD.

  • Re:One question... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is false. There's a fundamental flaw in the way Windows software is written that makes it impossible to customize its appearance significantly.


    This is false.

    You are confusing the window manager (explorer.exe in Windows) with the underlying graphics system. To demonstrate this, I invite you to (1) do a search for windowblinds; (2) customize twm using relative or absolute positioning, as the spirit moves you.
  • EFM is dead.

    No longer. Deceased. Yadda-yadda-yadda. The code is orphaned, is not being maintained, and will not be. Why? It was a playtoy, to figure out what was really needed in E17, and how to best do it.

    If you really want debs, try http://people.debian.org/~ljlane/downloads/. Please note, if you can't make it work, there is no recourse! Trying #e on openprojects.net for help will probably only get you yelled at.
  • Why is it that when Apple uses alpha effects in Mac OS X it's "a waste of CPU power" but when KDE uses alpha effect it's "pretty sweet"?
  • Which is exactly what /. should do. Simply have an automatic note both on the link and on the mirror saying that this is a mirror created X hours ago and provide a link if people want to try the slashdotted site.
  • Slashdotted already! Anyone got a mirror?
    ***
  • Can anyone get a mirron with some JPG files instead? Thanks.
  • Well, Apple is supposed to be the graphical environment, so adding a feature that'll make pretty pictures prettier would be a pretty awful thing to do, wouldn't it? Do not moderate unless the sarcasm stains your monitor...

  • Re:One question... (Score:3)

    by MouseR ( 3264 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @10:38AM (#582885) Homepage
    I fail to see how parent was insightfull, but let me comment on this:

    You have two choices for the window decorations in OS X: Rainbow Jelly Beans, and Grey Jelly Beans

    This is beta, unfinished software. Also,

    Now KDE, on the other hand [...] can be customized to your heart's content, modified in any reasonable way

    Well, so can Mac OS 9, and Windows*. Lastly, I'll comment on:

    and most of all, not used at all if you don't feel like using it!

    Nobody forces you to use Mac OS X.

    Let me remind you why you seem to like Linux: free Speech (oppose Free Beer). Part of that is your freedom NOT to use Mac OS X.

    Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
  • Out of curiousity, who is the 'we' that is referred to? Is it
    a) CS majors
    b) Linux users
    c) The intersection of CS majors and Linux users?
    I'm /guessing/ (a) from context clues. As an opposing view, I would like to say that myself and all of my CS major friends don't care about how the NT kernel or Linux kernel work and really don't care about NDAs. Most of us are pretty exclusive Windows users who have had dedicated Linux machines at some point in time (myself for 3 years straight) but decided to 'move on', for lack of a better term.
  • Hmm I understood your post until "etc", what is that?

    :)

  • Ok, I don't usually respond to trolls but I'll bite this time...

    (a) On a news scale this is up there with 'Word gets new spelling dialog' (b) The pictures aren't very impressive compared with say, OSX

    So it is with open source software - the Capitalist option is superior to the Communist one - Windows is greatly superior to KDE/Gnome, and Solaris is better than Linux.

    Is it just me or does anyone else find this strangely ironic? You say that OSX and Capitalist solutions are inherently superior to Open Source solutions but OSX is using an open source solution for arguably the most important part of the whole OS... it's kernel (BSD).

    Some look at pretty pictures and oogle, others look at the underlying infrastructure and marvel.

  • I'm an idiot, otherwise i wouldn't replay to such a flamebait.
    both rely on the principle that working together as a community will produce better results than each man for himself
    yeah right, if you had anything to do with OSS you would have seen that commonly projects consist of a core team, and the a lot of people that regulary either submit bug reports or evn check in bug fixes.
    Ever used CDE? While I think CDE is not all that bad(*duck*) if you compare on the basis of userfriendliness, kde/gnome both win.But then again that's all subjective

    Linux has never produced any thing original
    How in the world should a kernel produces something? If you mean the Linux, but I would rather say OpenSource Unix community, you are teribbly mistaken.
    Just an example : as mentioned EFM.
    EFM is in my opinion terribly innovative, the old filemanager concept taken to new heights.
    And how much room is thee for innovation in the O/S market? While implementations may vary, concepts are largely similar.

    since it free, you can't complain when you find out it isn't very good
    yeah, if I pay RHAT a lot of money to support my system I can't complain? You bet I can! Recently looked at a EULA? People like MS and also Sun have succeded in the goal to hold liability from them. The only way a OSS Software Corp. can make money is by providing support for the product, therefore they have to take care of Quality.
    Who do I go to if my closed Source product is not maintained properly?

  • This is a straw-man argument. You can't immediately label the GNU project as communistic and then start destroying communism.

    Free Software was born in America, bastion of capitalism, and is now shared by the world. How many people who support free software support communism?

    >both rely on the principle that working together
    >as a community will produce better results than
    >each man for himself

    Free software is intended to bring the community together to do needed work for the common good. I'm not sure what this has to do with communism. Communism is about labor and the government regulation of it to stop exploitation by 19th century Capitalists.

    I don't see Stallman ranting about how all projects should fall under his (or anyone's) jurisdiction. Communism is about centralization; free software is about decentralization.

    >the products made by Communists were, and are
    >inferior in build and technology

    That is because communism is a system of government where anyone is guaranteed a job in a factory and forced to work. It promotes laziness because people are given money whether they do a good job or not. I don't see what this has to do with free software.

    >Linux companies have fallen through the floor

    Linux companies are no different than any other dot-com company. When you play with venture capital, you get burned. What does this have to do with free software?

    Before trolling again, you might want to try reading some Marx to figure out if the application of 19th Century Philosophy really applies to the 21st century.

    Lucas


    --

  • As soon as Linux has gained some self-respect, you see people making different and (in some cases) useless beautifications of the gui, instead of going for making ease of use for the Joe the User.

    I guess that's the price of popularity...

  • I noticed this post on dot.kde.org [kde.org] some time last week, and I still haven't come up with a reason to have my icons overlapping. It's cluttered, even if they can blend.

    However, an icon that blends with the background would be cool. AFAIK, this isn't really possible as long as you're using the X root window for the background, though.
  • I use linux with WindowMaker and Enlightenment, both GUIs function just like I described.

    The point I was trying to make is that the start -> shutdown -> log out sequence is hardly intuitive. It's not even logical; a win9x box is the only machine I know of where you push the "start" button to turn it off, and slipping the logoff function under "shut down" just adds a further level of ridiculously confusing cruft.

    If you want a thorough explanation of the elements of the windows GUI that suck (and a lot of other apps too), look at the interface hall of shame [iarchitect.com] (not a goatse.cx link, I promise).

    If a 90% market share is the best reason you can think of to use windows... BAAAA, you're a sheep. If 90% of people drove a Yugo, I still wouldn't want one.
  • But it seems to me that this 'RGB decimation', although cool, is the exact same thing, but a different approach, to MS ClearType (tm?).

    NOt that MS deserves the credit.. but the point is.. isn't this technically a patented MS technology? or is it only the end result that is the same, and the process is quite different.

  • Again, I'm confused by people's perceptions of the "Slashdot opinion." Most of the posts I read (or at least recall reading) comment on how "sweet" Mac OS X looks. I can't remember ever reading a post complaining that it was a waste of CPU power.
  • Umm, MS didn't beat anyone to the punch. 1) MS doesn't have REAL alpha blending (and neither will KDE) like OS X does. In these GUIs, the translucency effect only lasts as long as the object the transparant window is over doesn't change. After that it breaks down. Its nothing that cool, BeOS, QNX, and even E has had it for a long time. 2) X still doesn't support anti-aliasing, and its not an easy thing to implement. X has a major problem in that its designers left the door totally wide open for different GUIs, but decided to keep the rendering protocol hard to extend. As such, it thinks that all fonts are monochrome bitmaps. It took a ton of work to get X to do TrueType, and anti-aliasing, which needs to blend the text with the window underneath will also be a ton of work. Its great that it is so far along now, but I can guarentee it wasn't easy. Its a nifty effect, but it is not easy to implement, (since it changes the rendering model significantly) and everyone except X has had it for a while now.
  • You make a good point, but these screenshots weren't meant to accompany a press release. This functionality was added in the last week and the pictures were generated in the course of discussion between developers. (See this thread [kde.org].) I doubt if they were intended to be seen by such a large audience.
  • You just have an alpha components in addition to Red, Green, Blue components that indicates % transparency. So given two overlapping pixels RGBA-1 and RGBA-2, the new pixel is calculated at:

    R = R1 * A1 + R2 * A2
    G = G1 * A1 + G2 * A2
    B = B1 * A1 + B2 * A2
    A = A1 + A2

    If you're using floats to show intensity, anything results greater than one equals one, with ints anything greater than 255 is 255.

    Some people go the other way where 0 Alpha is opaque, so you'd substitute A with (1 - A).

    It's really no big deal, just eats clock cycles.
  • It's sad that X is so far behind though. One one hand you have OS-X and its fully anti-aliased, alpha-blended primative model, and X is struggling to get anti-aliased fonts to work. I don't care what the sysadmins and UNIX grognards say, X is holding Linux back.

  • Ok, I know I should let this silly thread die, but I'm a sucker for trolls...

    it doesn't matter whether Windows is easy to use, only that it is easier than any other OS. (It is)

    That's very much a matter of opionion. Linux is easier for me, I have lots of friends who find MacOS easier. In any case, you haven't established that "ease-of-use" == "success". If that were true then Windows 3.0 would never have made it against MacOS.

    why haven't the infinite number of eyes that is Open Source been able to pull it off yet?

    Two reasons: 1)for most hackers ease of use for the end user has absolutely nothing to do with success; 2)the folks who do care about ease-of-use haven't been at it very long. Considering how young the products are, they're doing extremely well.

    The stock market, their accountants, blah blah.

    And what do the stock market valuations of Linux "dot-coms" have to do with anything? Most of them had no possible hope of making money to begin with. A few (RedHat & VA for example) do have real business plans and will become profitable companies. But this does nothing to change the fact that well established, profitable companies see value in supporting Linux.

    The well is running dry. Don't expect IBM to stay in the game much longer.

    Actually IBM is going full-steam ahead. Linux is a great way for them to compete with Sun. Then there's Dell, Compaq, Intel, and a small herd of embedded companies that I'm not very familiar with. Add to that thousands of much smaller companies with niche products or services that you'll never hear about: ISPs, system integraters, consultants for small offices, vertical market developers. They make money in their markets and contribute a little back to the community as a whole, even if it's just the odd patch or a small network administration tool.

  • Let's just put it this way, at least with KDE it's optional waste.

  • Not like communism... (Score:3)

    by Ami Ganguli ( 921 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @09:12AM (#582908) Homepage

    There are lots of false statements in this troll, but the communism analogy is interesting because it looks correct at first glance (most of the others are obviously wrong and don't really need to be addressed).

    Looking a little deeper you see the flaw: Communism and Capitalism are about allocating scarce resources. There's only so much "stuff" (T.V.s, houses, whatever). Under Capitalism the people who own the capital get the stuff, under communism everybody gets a little bit of the stuff.

    1) Intellectual property is fundamentally different. There's no limit on how many people can possess or use intellectual property, and my use of certain information doesn't hinder anybody else's use of the same information.

    2) Certain types of IP are actually _more_ valuable if more people use it. If I can get you to use my wordprocessor, for example, then my copy of the wordprocessor is actually more valuable to me because I can exchange documents with you more easily.

    The people who thought up Capitalism and Communism lived in an era where "hard-goods" were the only commodity worth thinking about. Neither of these theories is going to get very far in explaining the economics of software.

  • Whose butt, because I've seen some pretty sweet ones...

  • Re:JPG? (Score:3)

    by 1010011010 ( 53039 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @09:14AM (#582910) Homepage
    Try here: http://www.flyingbuttmonkeys.com/mirrors/ftp.kde.c om/pub/dot/img/ [flyingbuttmonkeys.com]


    ________________________________________
  • In the comparison section of the site, there're sections for "Bitmap text", "Anti-aliased text", and "Anti-aliased text with gamma adjustment". I think that the gamma adjustment version looks best among the three, but what is gamma adjustment? I mean, I know what it is in the Quake III sense ;), but I don't quite comprehend this context.

    PS Does anyone have a mirror of that supposedly pretty eye candy [kde.com]?

    Alex Bischoff
    ---

  • Re:So? (Score:4)

    by Rupert ( 28001 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @09:16AM (#582912) Homepage Journal
    Furthermore, Linux is bad for humanity because it means people will no longer take Computer Science degrees - there won't be any money in Computing because of all the free software, so software will suffer a brain drain

    Good. People who take CS (or any other discipline) degrees because of the money they can make are precisely the sort of people that Computing (or Architecture, or Law) can well do without.

    Most software is never distributed. It is written in-house, to be used in-house. None of that is affected by free software (apart from the bottom line of the vast majority of companies).

    Computer Science graduates tend to be the least able programmers of all the people I deal with. For every MIT turning out brilliant programmers (none of whom would dream of working at my company) there are a hundred state universities turning out VB monkeys and Delphi parrots.

    Is this flamebait? Sure, but it's also true, and my karma is maxed out anyway.

    --

  • Mirror (Score:3)

    by perlyking ( 198166 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @09:19AM (#582913) Homepage
    Images HERE [geocities.com] and
    HERE [geocities.com]
    Not that great IMHO

  • i mentioned this actually, with regards to the defaults command-line tool in MacOS X.

    you see, the thing is with the MacOS is that the operating system defaults to the options of the clueless user, but has a considerable number of "hidden" features for the power user. this is even more applicable to MacOS X

    for instance the "developer tools" (such as gcc) are not installed in the default MacOS X install, and i'm willing to bet that even Terminal.app will be an optional component. this is to shield the newbies from their computer, and in my oppinion is a very good thing.

    however, it would be wrong to assume that just because the configuration options don't jump out at you that they don't exist. there are a lot of hidden features in MacOS X that people are finding out about already, and i suspect that more will come with the final release. Apple knows that power users are going to want to tweak their machines, but they don't want new users confusing themselves and messing up their boxes by clicking preferences.

    for instance, to add (real) translucence to Terminal windows, one would type the following command in the terminal:
    defaults write com.apple.Terminal TerminalOpaqueness x
    or to add the trash to your desktop ala classic MacOS:
    defaults write com.apple.Finder Desktop.HasTrash 1

    but i digress. the point of this little tutorial is to explain to you that MacOS X has considerable customization potential (including themes [mac.com] support). i wouldn't be surprised if we'll see a command to turn off the Aqua eye-candy such as:
    defaults com.apple.Finder Aqua.Effects 0

    so please, don't write of MacOS X customizations just yet. there's already a lot of possibilities out there, and there will probably be many more in the final version

    - j

  • Re:slashdot needs to mirror stuff (Score:3)

    by 1010011010 ( 53039 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @09:22AM (#582929) Homepage
    It's even in the FAQ [slashdot.org] as to why they do not mirror things. But if you want a mirror, look at http://www.flyingbuttmonkeys.com/mirrors/ftp.kde.c om/pub/dot/img/ [flyingbuttmonkeys.com]


    ________________________________________

  • Re:"gamma adjustment"? (Score:3)

    by moogla ( 118134 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @09:22AM (#582931) Homepage Journal
    Simply stated, VGA montiors do not emit light at equal powers for equal changes in the values stored in the raster image. They relate by a power function (or gamma function, hence the name) Since the anti-aliasing works by linearly interpolating between the foreground and background, the edges might look too fuzzy and dark to the human eye due to that inconsistency. To make it seem more smooth, like text on paper, we fuddle with how much blending we use between the foreground and background to account for gamma and the eye's sensitivity. Same thing in Quake, you adjust the gamma for different monitors so the transition from light to dark looks convincingly real.

    Hope this helps.
  • Yeah, that's something nobody talks about around here. A standard installation of KDE includes enough bloatware and eye candy to make it virtually unusable on anything with less than 64M and an 8M video card.

    And don't pipe up with the "but I can customize it for my needs" crap. Any GUI can be stripped down if you want. That's not the point.

  • Re:KDE perty? (Score:3)

    by zerovoid ( 201369 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @09:23AM (#582933) Homepage
    apparently you haven't looked at KDE 2. Even out of the box, KDE 2 is very attractive. Over all, it can be customized anyway you like. I'm getting really tired of everyone bashing KDE everytime there is an article about it on slashdot. It happens to be the most complete and stable desktop/window manager.

    zerovoid
  • but rather that there are analagous symptoms of failure

    I don't see any evidence of failure. Open Source is getting more popular all the time.

    there are no signs that Linux will *ever* be as easy as Windows,

    Windows isn't really all that easy to use (ask your mother), and beating it on the useability scale shouldn't be that hard. The current incarnations of GNOME and KDE come pretty close, and they haven't been working at it for nearly as long as MS. On the other hand, how did ease of use come to be the same thing as success anyway?

    and without money it cannot innovate

    1) They've done pretty well so far, 2) who says they don't have money? I dispute the claim that innovation requires a lot of money - most of the interesting stuff originates in Universities. The money just helps to "commercialize" an idea. However, if money is needed, companies like IBM have lots and they're investing it in Linux.

  • Show me the source, biatch!

    Until I can see it, it doesn't exist.
    -Chris
  • The well is running dry. Don't expect IBM to stay in the game much longer.

    Oh, really!

    IBM is operating on the ABM plan: Anything But Microsoft. Almost all IBM apps support the obligatory NT/2000, as well as Sun, Linux (4 distributions and gaining), and AIX. Today at IBM I attended a lecture on Linux and Globalization. Don't kid yourself, IBM isn't dropping Linux anytime soon.
    (Especially when it took them ten years to step away from os/2 and they still make fixpacks for that!)

    A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close

  • serif fonts are more readable on _paper_. Sans-serif fonts are more readable on the screen.

  • Re:Imlib2 anybody? (Score:3)

    by HeUnique ( 187 ) <hetz-home@cobol2java. c o m> on Monday December 04, 2000 @11:25AM (#582951) Homepage
    Yes, you're point is correct, but..

    On this issue, Keith from the X core dev. team has hacked QT libraries which actually shows you EVERYTHING on KDE.

    Which means - once this extension will be officially released (probably in XFree 4.0.2) - and TrollTech will add Keith's modifications - then you could use the anti-aliasing fonts - but it won't be worth to lots of people here..

    Why? cause only Matrox graphics card got this hardware accelerated. Others (for now) if they want to use it will need to use software rendering - which is VERY slow.

    So, Matrox users - smile :)

  • Re:"gamma adjustment"? (Score:3)

    by spitzak ( 4019 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @11:35AM (#582956) Homepage
    The amount of light produced on the screen is not equal to the number placed into the screen buffer multiplied by some constant. Instead it is a power, or "gamma" function, a reasonable estimate is that the light produced is equal to pow(v,2) where v is the number in the buffer scaled to the 0-1 range.

    If your antialiased calculation is that a pixel is 50% filled (a = .5), the simple but wrong answer for the output pixel is .5*f+.5*b (where f is the color of the letter you are drawing and b is the color that is already there). But say f=1 and b=0, the result is .5, which is not half as bright as f, but instead only about 25% as bright.

    The correct result should be about .71, which is the pixel value that is halfway in brightness between 0 and 1.

    An easy way to do this is to calculate an alpha value instead of .5 of .71, and then use the normal linear compositing rule. This will result in perfect white on black text. However if you use it to draw black on white you will get .29 in the pixel, which is more wrong than the .5 the simple rule produces (the correct answer should again be .71). It appears this is the solution being done here (except he calculated the alpha for black on white), this can be seen by the rather bad appearance of the reverse-video text.

    The correct solution is to composite an output value that is pow(pow(f*a,g)+pow(b*(1-a),g),1/g) where g is the alpha value. This is computationally ridiculous so some kind of approximation must be used, though I'm not sure what yet.

  • Re:"gamma adjustment"? (Score:3)

    by 1010011010 ( 53039 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @09:27AM (#582960) Homepage
    Yes: http://www.flyingbuttmonkeys.com/mirrors/ftp.kde.c om/pub/dot/img/ [flyingbuttmonkeys.com]


    ________________________________________
  • * both suffer in comparison to the Capitalist competition - the products made by Communists were, and are inferior in build and technology, to those made by Capitalists. So it is with open source software - the Capitalist option is superior to the Communist one - Windows is greatly superior to KDE/Gnome, and Solaris is better than Linux.

    It was at about this point that you should have determined that this was a troll. Maybe the next item after that, but that's pushing it.

    Bonus points if you picked it up after "Open source software is, plainly, too open - like Communism". Don't be fooled by the fact that the first few paragraphs were on-topic and fairly reasonable.

  • Imlib2 anybody? (Score:3)

    by cms108 ( 96258 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @09:50AM (#582963)
    Yes, it all looks very nice, but it's not earth shattering is it?
    Imlib2 has been able to do the alpha blending thing for ages, it hasn't been used much outside efm, but it's there. Dunno about antialiased fonts yet though. [rasterman.com]
    Maybe the reason nobody knows about it is because it's not actually that usefull. But i'm sure that's missing the point - it looks nice, and that's what's important. Ace.

  • Re:It's about time (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    *sigh*

    The XServer gives fonts to the XClients as black-and-white (1-bit) bitmaps.

    In order to do antialiasing, you need to implement your own font-handling system, which will by nature exclude all pre-existing X apps, and anything which doesn't use your font handling code.

    Duh.

  • Is it just me or is the example .png really ugly? (Score:5)

    by gattaca ( 27954 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @09:54AM (#582971)
    Ok, it's just me...

    I'm spending a lot of life building GUI's (in Java) and I have some questions about icons and eye-candy:

    As hackers, we all know that you can unplug one icon and replace it with another, the type of graphic art is totally unrelated to the quality of the code and the app, and so on, but, the look and feel can have a pretty major effect on the way people take to your software.

    In my experience, if people are a little unsure how much they should trust your code, and how much time they should invest in it, 'clean and professional' is more likely to give the right impression than 'cute and well drawn'. Think Nokia mobile phone vs. a Micky Mouse novelty candlestick one. (I'm not saying that the icons are as bad as that - just that that's the sort of distinction I'm trying to make).

    I know it's all themed, and you can set the theme to be whatever you want, but I would suggest that the default theme should be much more 'serious'. We all love the penguin, some love the KDE dragon, but would we get more respect if the images were less cuddly - harder? I guess this is why the Playstation 2 looks like it does, and why it's logo is made up of a set of straight lines on a white background. It looks hi-tech and cool.

    Someone else (rebelcool) made the point that 'looking like Windows is a good thing because Microsoft have spent a lot of money on research and they know what they're doing'. I kind of agree with that, but there is a better reason: Most people who use a computer understand the Microsoft GUI. It might not be the best on a level playing field, but the playing field isn't level - pretty much everyone is familiar with Microsoft's GUI.

    To use the same steering wheel analogy: Every car has a steering wheel because every car has a steering wheel. Thus, steering wheels make the best user-interfaces, simply because they mean that anyone with a driving license can just get in and drive off.

    One final point, I'm so used to Unix I find typing on a Windows box feels like I have boxing gloves on. I hate it, I find it frustrating. So I install bash shells and emacs, and do everything I can to make it look like what I'm used to. It's a pain, and I certainly can't do it on a stranger's computer I happen to be using for a bit. I have an enormous amount of empathy for Windows users in a hurry who have to make the switch in the other direction.

  • slashdot needs to mirror stuff (Score:3)

    by myc ( 105406 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @08:39AM (#582972)
    really. all that posting stories does is denial of service attack someone's server. the links point to two measly png images. how hard can mirroring that be? it's been said before and it needs to be said again, slashdot editors need to be more considerate and responsible, considering their site's popularity.


    ---
    Santa Claus: "Ho ho ho!"

  • Re:Alpha Blending? (Score:3)

    by Forkenhoppen ( 16574 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @07:24PM (#582974)
    There are typically three componenets to every pixel in the image you see. A red component, a blue component, and a green component. When working with images, there tends to be another component used on top of these three, called the alpha channel. Essentially, the alpha defines how transparent each pixel is. (ie; how much of whatever's below it is mixed in with it. This gives the illusion of one image showing through another.)

    Alpha blending's simply become a necessity these days. The fact that it's taken X this long to even contemplate getting true support for it's a danged shame, but better late than never I suppose.

    As an aside, to all of those of you who're suggesting people check out Berlin instead, I would caution you to hold your horses. Sure it supports alpha blending, and a host of new features, but it's not a drop-in replacement for X. X and Berlin are totally different beasts, with totally different purposes. (ie; X is a dumb terminal, displaying whatever the client programs want it to, while Berlin tends to be more object-oriented, with objects relied upon by clients having the capability of running on the server-side.)

  • Re:It's about time (Score:3)

    by spitzak ( 4019 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @11:45AM (#582975) Homepage
    Completely wrong!

    For an X Client there is a bunch of Xlib calls that draw fonts and they could easily draw antialiased, without changing any API at all. Yes it would require a TrueColor visual and only the copy transfer function would work (any other combination would give you 1-bit fonts), but this if implemented would be immediately useful by almost all X programs.

    Windows did not have antialiased text at first either, you know. They successfully added it so that programs using the old calls could draw the antialiased text. They had exactly the same limitations I propose for X, ie it does not work for non-true-color modes and does not work for binary functions other than copy.

    The fact that the interface to the font server would have to change is not an excuse. The font server is an internal api as far as the majority of applications are concerned! Besides the X server could interface to old font servers by asking for the fonts 4 times bigger and doing down-rez antialiasing.

    The real problem is complete laziness and a paranoia far worse than MicroSoft about back compatability from the X Consortium.

  • I know, I should read the Don't Feed the Troll signs, but I'll bite.
    • America was born on the subversion of intellectual property. We went from third-world to first-world because someone stole the plans to Britain's factories and built them here
    • In Linux, not everything is copied, but a lot is. That actually makes it better. For example, if I want to make an innovative OS in open-source-world, you can just take GNU/Linux and make your modifications, you don't have to start from scratch. In the closed-source role, if you want a new OS, you have to write everything from scratch or buy it - the C library, the compiler, interpreted languages, everything. That's a task no one company can really accomplish anymore (except M$). So, contrast the difference in development time through OSS and closed source, and you see immediately the benefit. Almost everything in life is copied, and simply altered a little. Even most great "inventions" are really that inventive.
    • The performance of Linux companies has to do more with the fact that this is such a new ball game than anything else. People simply haven't figured out that the way you make money here is not the same as elsewhere. The performance of Linux stock prices have nothing to do with reality.
    • OSS is actually more capitalistic than closed-source, because it honors physical property over intellectual property. Closed-source software tries to deny a user the right to his physical property based on vaporous claims of intellectual property. OSS is a remedy to that situation. Things can be sold because they are in limited supply, ideas shouldn't be because they can be copied without diminishing supply. Closed-source is trying to switch that around.


  • Thank you.

    I've had to say this to people numerous times as well. It happens far too often. There needs to be a jargon word for making a flawed argument based on the assumption that everyon thinks the same, the same way "trolling" and "astroturfing" apply to other kinds of posts. "Borging" comes to mind for me.

    Then shooting down one of these people would be as easy as saying "I'm sorry, but you're borging." and provide a link to a web page that describes borging.

    --
    Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.

  • Re:One question... (Score:3)

    by PimpBot ( 32046 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @11:47AM (#582981) Homepage
    Uhm. I submitted the article, and I think both are "pretty sweet" ;-)
    --------------------------
  • Is anti-aliasing really the answer?

    Yeah, my Mac can anti-alias fonts at the OS level if you want it to. But personally, I think it ends up looking like blurry crap. Most of the time, I turn off the anti-aliasing.

    Thing is, it's possible to do that on the Mac OS because the fonts don't look like hell when they're not anti-aliased. I don't really care about alpha channel blending etc... why is it that the default X courier font always looks like it got smashed in a garbage masher? Why do serif fonts always seem to look LESS legible under X (exactly the opposite of the reason serifs were put there to begin with)?

    Everybody in the font-design community always bitches about how often fonts are ripped off, how you can't make any money selling fonts. So if you're resigned to that, font designers, then why not work on some good, legible, Open Source fonts that won't look like ass under X?
  • The answer is extremely simple:

    You can turn it OFF on KDE.

    Have you ever tried to disable all the pretty greased-window hallucinogenic effects in OS X? Well, let me tell you it's not possible to do, at least without tweaking things that Apple doesn't normally want you to tweak. You have two choices for the window decorations in OS X: Rainbow Jelly Beans, and Grey Jelly Beans, both of which drive me up the wall after a while of using them. Now KDE, on the other hand (along with Gnome, and just about anything else to do with Linux) can be customized to your heart's content, modified in any reasonable way, and most of all, not used at all if you don't feel like using it!

    Just my two cents.

  • Re:slashdot needs to mirror stuff (Score:4)

    by skoda ( 211470 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @10:01AM (#582996) Homepage
    I don't know if /. should mirror stuff or not, but I think the reasons in the FAQ are a bit weak in places.

    Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off.

    I agree with that completely. It also avoids nasty legal battles over copyright & IP issues.

    Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads easily withstand the Slashdot Effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits.

    This is sounding good...

    But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be, only this time my cache is out of date!

    Have a 24 hour cache-and-purge policy. The mirror would be an alternate link option, like I see at Download sites, in case the site-proper is overwhelmed. Also, this means that after one day, there's no more risk of people seeing outdated information unknowingly from the /. mirror. Finally, a 24 time limit might make it more palatable for those who are concerned about IP issues.

    I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?

    I don't mean any disrespect to the /. crew, but I think this is a bit overly pretentious. I'm not a hardcore /.er, but my impression is that this is not a place for to find fast-breaking news. Indeed, today's fast-breaking news was a link to one of many traditional (online) news sources. If people want hot news, they monitor the wire services, the secondaries (e.g. CNN), the stock ticker, etc.) If they don't do that, then I doubt they care if the news is 6 minutes old or 6 hours old.

    Finally, if the /. kills the site linked to, such that no one can get to it for the next several hours, then what has not waiting a few hours to to get mirror-permissions gained us? (hint: nothing)

    So the quick answer is: "Sure, caching would be neat." It would make things a lot easier when servers go down, but it's a complicated issue that would need to be thought through in great detail before being implemented.

    I imagine there are some real legal and technical issues to be worked out before a mirroring system could be implemented. However, I don't think the reasons given in the FAQ are compelling.

    But what do I know? I'm just a joe who doesn't run an insanely popular news/discussion website that can crush small nations with a single link.
    -----
    D. Fischer

  • Re:slashdot needs to mirror stuff (Score:3)

    by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @10:07AM (#582998)
    Well, Google at least caches sites. Why couldn't Slashdot simply link to the Google *cache*. If people wanted the fresh site, they could read the blaring text on top that said that it was a Google cache of the document you can reach by clicking on the following link. Then the issue is DOSing Google, but I think they can deal with it a bit better than old pizza-box or pototo server.

  • Re:One question... (Score:3)

    by iso ( 87585 ) <slash@warpzero[ ]fo ['.in' in gap]> on Monday December 04, 2000 @10:12AM (#583000) Homepage
    that's not "Insightful," it didn't even answer the guy's question!

    sure this may be the reason why you like KDE more than Aqua, but your little rant has nothing to do with the fact that Aqua is considered "waste" and KDE is "cool."

    and as far as Aqua goes, who cares if it can only be changed through options that "Apple doesn't normally want you to tweak?" in most cases these things can be changed. i would be very surprised if the final release of OS X didn't have an option to shut off Aqua's effects, perhaps through the "default" command.

    but at any rate, wah, you don't like Aqua, you don't like the "Jelly Beans." that doesn't give you an excuse to write an evangelical flame in response to a legitimate question.

    - j
  • gdk-pixbuf, which is already included in Gnome, and is part of the upcoming Gtk+ 1.4, has done alpha blended pixmaps for quite a while.
    --
    The world is divided in two categories:
    those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
  • Not to mention that the image links are to an FTP server, which is a pretty sorry place to link to when you know you're going to have more than 100 attempts in any given minute.

  • Re:One question... (Score:3)

    by aonifer ( 64619 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @12:08PM (#583018)
    sure this may be the reason why you like KDE more than Aqua, but your little rant has nothing to do with the fact that Aqua is considered "waste" and KDE is "cool."

    By whom? You do realize that if person A says that Aqua is a waste and person B says alpha blending on KDE is cool, that doesn't mean that person A also thinks alpha blending on KDE is cool, don't you? Furthermore, if person C says that KDE is cool and Aqua is not, that doesn't mean that everyone on Slashdot but you agrees.

    Contrary to what some believe, everyone on Slashdot does not share exactly the same opinion on everything at all times.
  • Google's cache is updated infrequently (monthly at best, I think). If the link is newer than the Google cache, then the cache won't be of any use.

    For older sites, then your idea is good (a little too sensible and obvious for me, I fear :)
    -----
    D. Fischer
  • I imagine there are some real legal and technical issues to be worked out before a mirroring system could be implemented.

    One possibility for the legal problems would be to cook up a standard for automatically providing permission for other people to cache a site, similar to how a robots.txt works for spidering. The iffy part would be figuring out what the default behavior would be in the absence of a 'cache.txt'.

    Even nicer would be a distributed group of authoritative servers where cached copies could register themselves. Those servers could also serve as authorities to provide hashes of the mirrored files, allowing clients to automagically verify that a given cached copy is legit.

    Although I suppose to a degree, such a project would be reinventing freenet. On the other hand, it'd be simpler to implement since you wouldn't be worrying about anonymity issues, as much.

  • 1) Any alpha-blending code out there for us graphical newbies who want to see how it's done?
    2) Second, has EFM been released as a .deb yet?

  • That's probably because many people here feel about free software as about something that belongs to all of us.

    Why if your neighbor buys an SUV it's "a waste of power", but if you buy it "it's pretty sweet"?

  • errm, I'm confused.
    You start off by saying that [it's] an Explorer ripoff and that's a bad thing. You then go on to say how much you like a Mac interface, and that something that worked more like a Mac would be a good thing.
    Your last sentence is Howzabout some innovation, instead of redoing something someone else has already done?

    Forgive me if I'm misrepresenting you by paraphrasing... Isn't making a GUI work a bit like insert your favorite GUI here redoing something someone else has already done.

    I agree with your point though, whatever system you use, faffing around to get it to feel like the one you would like to be using is a pain in the backside and best to be avoided. As I said in a different post, if you're trying to persuade people to trust and use something new, making it behave and look like something that they are familiar with may well be a good thing to do.

    Dropping features you like - rather than turning them off, is clearly a mistake because if someone else gives you those features you're going to go with them. My main point is different though - it's what the default should look like. Themes and L&F allow you to offer a 'look like a new mac but with the cool bits from the old mac' functionality with one click.

  • Have you ever tried to disable all the pretty greased-window hallucinogenic effects in OS X? Well, let me tell you it's not possible to do, at least without tweaking things that Apple doesn't normally want you to tweak.

    *chuckle* So the day has come to pass where Linux/KDE users can point at an Apple GUI and say that it's harder to configure than their own...

    ...Now KDE, on the other hand (along with Gnome, and just about anything else to do with Linux) can be customized to your heart's content, modified in any reasonable way, and most of all, not used at all if you don't feel like using it!

    You are perfectly welcome to boot OS X straight to console. You can download and compile Darwin to basically the same end, and it's completely free, to boot.

    That said, you're absolutely right. You can indeed turn off a great deal of the eye candy that comes with Aqua, and yes, some of it requires going a bit farther than the happy pop-up menus they provide. I challenge you, though, to run the perfect Linux/KDE environment, completely tuned to your own metrics, without going a bit farther than the happy pop-up menus provided...

    $ man reality

  • Re:So? (Score:4)

    by moogla ( 118134 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @08:57AM (#583035) Homepage Journal
    *groans*

    I'm a CS major. A lot of us Linux users are. We hate not knowing how the NT kernel works. We hate paying thousands of dollars and signing non-disclosure agreements just to take a peek. Linux is an attempt to do it all over. And guess what? It's doing a damn good job, considering that it's practically reverse engineering (minus any BSD stuff). Linux==communism? Hardly. Linux is the means to an end. I think the vendors who see it destined for a desktop market, etc. are disillusioned. It's bringing the Unix environment home. How do you think I learned Solaris (Sys V)? Training courses? Innovation? Here's innovation for you: Kernel modules (no reboots!) Proc filesystem Clone syscall interface ...there's probably a lot more but I don't want to misrepresent. Also, do not confuse Linux (the kernel) with GNU's entourage (compiler, libraries, tools, etc.) and XFree. The distributions put these together. Talk to them about packaging innovative windowing systems.

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