Xorg and Desktop Eyecandy 416
BonoLeBonobo writes "Xorg is going to include a new acceleration architecture which will help desktops to have better eye-candy effects thanks to a better XRender, thus composite, acceleration. Developped by Zack Rusin, a KDE and Qt developper, this new feature should be present in Xorg in September. Porting the existing drivers to this new acceleration architecture should be easy."
more extensions (Score:1, Insightful)
Eye Candy (Score:5, Insightful)
Some one find some screen shots or we will have nothing to talk about.
Re:more extensions (Score:2, Insightful)
What users would really need for desktop linux... (Score:3, Insightful)
And so on.
If you go by the past track record... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some situations in which sponsored closed software wins every time, and one of those is hardware drivers. When a new API is released, a team of paid developers that know your hardware inside and out (because they work for the company that design it) will do a better job of porting their code quickly, and will be able t o do it much faster.
I don't really care how much slashdot fanboys rant about NVidia, the people who actually use high-end video cards in Linux know the truth - NVidia is and has always been oders of magnitude above the rest.
They can keep the drivers closed till hell freezes over for all I care - they work, they work great, they have more frequent stable updates with bugfixes and new features than any FLOSS drivers I know of.
many live cd linuxes stuck at 60hz refresh...... (Score:3, Insightful)
Dual Monitor Support (Score:5, Insightful)
I would much perfer that over more "eyecandy"
Re:Perfect (Score:3, Insightful)
I never understood why people find DEs like Gnome or KDE hard to use anyway or even poor , if set up properly
All you need to do is to Burma shave some of the options and your flying , KDE for me is a far better working environment than windows .
Re:What users would really need for desktop linux. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'll probably be modded down, but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously If you wish to post something insightful/informative, don't start it with..."I'll probably get moded down". Don't uderestimate others' ability to mod correctly or atleast meta mod correctly.
And no I am not new here.
Re:I'll probably be modded down, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
We need bigger numbers! (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. I don't understand all those idiots who have stereos with volume controls that only go up to "10"
Mine goes up to "11", for when I need that extra umph.
On a serious note, X11 remains X11 because its core hasn't changed (or needed to change) in many years. R7 will add some nice features, features some of us have been waiting a long time for, but none of those features requires a redesign of X11 (which goes to show how flexible and well designed X11 is), so there is no need to increment X11 to X12 . . . unless you really are just looking to turn the volume up to "11", or in this case, "12".
Re:Perfect (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Desktop Eyecandy? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'll probably be modded down, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
For example on Max OS when you minimize a Window it does a fancy dgeni efect which allows your eyes know that the window just didn't go away but it shrunk into a spot on the dock. While the boxes on linux and windows does a simular thing the Mac method makes it more percises that you know the application is still running it is just smaller, while the linux and windows way makes a person feel the application has stopped when it was minimized.
Semi-Transparencies are good to. It help the person realize there is something under your window. There are a lot of times when an App is open and an other windows is on top of it and you don't know it is there.
Eyecandy when used correctly is not a waist of processing for trivial things but actually an important key in having people understand the environment.
Re:Eye Candy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Perfect (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If you go by the past track record... (Score:5, Insightful)
X != Linux
and not everyone uses X or Windows
http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html [nvidia.com]
Graphics Drivers
Linux IA32
Linux IA64
Linux AMD64/EMT64T
FreeBSD x86
Solaris x64/x86
nForce Drivers
Linux IA32 Drivers
Linux AMD64 Drivers
I am happy for you that *your* setup wins every time, mine's not listed.
Re:Didn't want to fix existing bugs egh ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Xorg crashes my machine on switching from X to a text VC.
This bug is well known and serious - all eye candy and other non-essentials should wait until this and other serious bugs are fixed.
Qaulity before features.
If I wanted it the other way around, I know where to buy Windows.
Eycandy.. bleh. Concentrate on decent font support (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm writing this from a machine with a 1600x1200 Dell 2001FP monitor, and an ATI Radeon 9200SE, connected with DVI running X.Org version 6.8.2. I have never, ever been able to get decent fonts with XFree86 or X.org. The fonts are either too jagged without antialiasing, or too blurry with it.
I have wasted hour after hour following various FAQs, playing with antialiasing, autohinting, and subpixel rendering in my ~/.fonts.conf. I have installed the Bitstream Vera fonts. I have sacrificed a goat and done a rain dance. And still, all those fonts look so blurry that I feel like I'm going blind.
Thinking that it was something about the Radeon, I tried an NVidia 5200 with the commercial NVidia drivers. No joy. I've also tried the ATI fglrx drivers for the Radeon. No joy.
Yet when I plug in my Apple Powerbook, OSX makes the fonts clear and legible, so it must be possible to drive the LCD monitor correctly.
Re:RenderAccel (Score:2, Insightful)
Get rid of this kind of post (Score:1, Insightful)
RESPONSE: Works fine for me, you idiot...
Re:more extensions (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead he was just pointing out the pure stupidity of the fact that X Windows itself must handle drivers for video, sound, mouse, and so forth, rather than relying on services exposed by an underlying layer of the OS (which does not have to be running in ring 0). If the OS handled these devices, AS IT SHOULD, any program could make use of them without having to go through X.
Where do you get the notion that the X server takes care of all the input devices? The kernel already provides access to them through
Raw access to a
Re:Eycandy.. bleh. Concentrate on decent font supp (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:more extensions (Score:2, Insightful)
What the grandparent was suggesting wasn't moving all of the X server code into the kernel. I suggest you enable something like the Secure Access Key in Linux and kill X and see how well you go at getting your video back in a usable state. I have also managed to put the video into an unknown state by simply switching to a text virtual console while X is starting up.
I don't believe X should be responsible for restoring the video context other than its own.
Re:Hell...just solve the crash problem.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, you were just trolling.
Re:Didn't want to fix existing bugs egh ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop knocking this guys work... (Score:1, Insightful)
He should be making X more stable, he should be making RenderExcel work correctly with the nvidia X server, he should be making the composit manager more stable, he should be making copy and paste work between gnome and KDE...
Well guess what? He doesn't work for Nvidia, so he can't help your RenderExcel problems. He decided instead to make a new acceleration architecture....
Just because YOU don't need more then a Pentium II 233 Mhz doesn't mean the REST OF US shouldn't be allowed to buy an Athlon FX-57 or whatever new thing is out. Just because YOU don't need more then 640K of memory (And really, who in their right mind would) doesn't mean the REST OF US aren't allowed to enjoy the greater then 4 gb a 64-bit architecture offers us.
Just because you DON'T LIKE eye candy, doesn't mean the rest of us aren't allowed to enjoy the computer hardware WE have.
You think this guy wasted his time? Learn to code, show him where his time is better spent. Don't jump down his throat for being gracious enough to release his work into the public domain for the REST OF US to enjoy.
Honestly, slashdot seems at first to be about innovation, true competition and letting the best technology win. Progress. Advancement. But every story that talks about a faster CPU, or multiple cores, more memory, expensive video cards, etc is met with "My 486 runs linux command prompt just fine, so only losers with more money then sense will waste either on this."
Re:Concentrate on decent font supp -- mod parent u (Score:5, Insightful)
No you didn't. You said that you tried a few things but completely left out how you tried to go about them. Maybe your attempts were misguided and you missed the obvious solution? If the grandparent used the same method to configure two different operating systems on two different pieces of hardware, maybe he's on to something that you're overlooking.
Just because you're less bad than 19/20 of entrants in a particular contest not related to the subject at hand doesn't mean that you're an expert on this topic.
Re:more extensions (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a fact that graphics cards for many years have required interrupts and DMA to be programmed well, and that is just not something you can do from userspace. Several other things that X does today are at least dubious to do in userspace.
A good graphics driver these days need some sort of help from the kernel, but moving the *entire* driver into ring 0 is indeed a bad idea. The things that can safely and sanely be done from userspace should be.
Re:more extensions (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, the purpose of an OS is to provide hardware abstraction.
Why do we have filesystem code in the OS? Why not just do that in X11 that way we don't need filesystems in both BSD and linux?
For that matter, why put the video drivers in X11? Why not just put them in individual applications. After all, it is waste to have an nvidia driver for windows and MacOS and X11. Why not just have one for photoshop and let it just manage its own screen?
The OS is the right layer for a device driver. There is no reason that driver has to run ring 0 - granted this is harder to accomplish with linux.
Admittedly, this would be a painful transition, but there is no reason that it has to happen in six months. It just wouldn't hurt to admit that putting device drivers in an application is a mistake. X11 is just an application.