The Power of X 410
An anonymous reader writes "The license changes in the last version of Xfree86 have caused many distributions to reject the project in favor of the forked X.Org X server. As X.Org prepares to release the second version of the X.Org "monolithic" X Server (dubbed version 6.8), Ars Technica investigates the future of the X platform, as cooperation between X.Org and projects like GNOME and KDE begin to take take hold at freedesktop.org. Already host to an impressive array of projects, it appears that freedesktop.org will become the hub in which other Free Desktop projects can collaborate. Daniel Stone, release manager for freedesktop.org, gets into the details on how it's all going to work, in conjunction with freedesktop.org's upcoming platform release."
So... (Score:5, Funny)
Progress (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Progress (Score:5, Interesting)
I for one enjoy X.org and a windowing system that can hopefully be kept up to date and have more active development.
But my question is... how many more forks will we have?
James Carr [bluefuzion.com]
Re:Progress (Score:4, Funny)
Think of it this way, Linux is like a fancy dinner, just remember that this fork is for the sala- NO, NOT THAT ONE!
Re:Progress (Score:5, Insightful)
While I love open source, sometimes the fact that it is done for nothing is one of the things that ensures it is developed slowly. Unless you are a full time student, most people are working a day job to put food on the table. Without the cash motivation it is not always easy to spend the time and effort necessary to make a great project. I am not saying the money is what is important to them, though being comfortable, being able to buy a workstation and not living on the street is.
I don't know how many
Re:Progress (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. Sometimes, but not in the caes of Xfree86. There, it appears the main reason was a rediculous level of conservatism from the project leaders, including some of which who no longer even were active developers.
There are plenty of stories out there of presumptive Xfree86 developers who turned their backs on the project after being treated with what they felt was an unfair and arrogant attitude. Many of these are now active in Xfree86.
The problem that it's 'done for nothing', (not true, there are paid developers not living on contributions out there) is actually pretty small, if you're working on a project with a sufficently large interest. For instance, the reason why Linux took off and the GNU Hurd didn't can almost be attributed entirely to leadership differences.
Here the money bit comes in again. When people aren't getting paid, the barrier to exit is lower. You have to be respectful and kind and open and listen. It costs nothing to praise loudly but critizise softly. And be very wary of license changes.
I don't think most
Future contributions are usually determined by the reaction I get. Sometimes, you don't even get one. Some projects don't seem to want bugfixes or more developers. And these are the ones which are prone to forking.
Re:Progress (Score:5, Insightful)
Which, together with the license change, is the reason people have given up on xfree86. X.org 6.8 will include all the flashy cool new stuff people have been talking about for years, like translucent goodness a la mac os x.
I for one enjoy X.org and a windowing system that can hopefully be kept up to date and have more active development.
But my question is... how many more forks will we have?
Given that X.org is the original X foundation that has been maintaining the X11 codebase XFree86 split off of, and all the non-xfree86 X projects are now basically working under the X.org umbrella, I wouldn't say that we're seeing all that many forks.
Hope that compatability is retained (Score:5, Informative)
In this cases it would no longer be possible to remotely work on a UNIX/linux server with windows X-emulators (such as exceed), nor would the typical linux open source app be able to run on other UNIX variants. Which would be very bad for UNIX as a whole and thus also for Linux which is a part of that world.
Re:Hope that compatability is retained (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyhow, rest assured that compatibility is top priority with these changes. You just won't be able to see the shinies.
Re:Progress (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, it has long been true and well-supportable that those XFree86 guys have definitely been a bunch of assholes for a long time. They maintained a really closed community which gave the appearance of complete disdain for what anyone else wanted out of X. Whether their actual behavior was in that mode is arguable (recall the massive enhancements of XFree 4), but they certainly didn't like to "play ball" with the rest of the community.
Then of course this license thing was the last straw, and that's what forced the distros' hands...they couldn't build their systems at all anymore when core components were GPL'd and either linked to XFree stuff or used its code.
In other words, I'm not sure how much this will impact the technical progress of X...but it's certainly good to get a broader base of people working on it, and a more open development in general.
Re:Progress (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you been listening?
(A) There's apparently a ton of longstanding problems with the XFree codebase that are only now being addressed, both in fixing the current codebase and in a longer-term massive redesign/rewrite. The response for years has been "Well, it works..."
(B) There's been an emormous amount of criticism of X protocol design, going back 20 years. But with the rise of OSS frameworks, this reached a breaking point. The X response has been that the Toolkits serve the Windowing System and "Well, X11 is X11..."; rather than the more sensible attitude that the Windowing System should serve the Toolkits (and user programs). This is probably the biggest philosophical difference giving rise to the XFree fork.
The licence change was portrayed as a legal issue, but it was really just the final case of the "XFree Guys are Assholes". If the project wasn't already forking, there would have been no legal shit stirred up.
Re:Progress (Score:4, Insightful)
I have not seen real dissatisfaction with the technical side of XFree86 in the last few years.
I wish you wouldn't remove the In the distro community from my quote like that...it's pretty integral to my meaning.
There's apparently a ton of longstanding problems with the XFree codebase that are only now being addressed, both in fixing the current codebase and in a longer-term massive redesign/rewrite. The response for years has been "Well, it works..."
And this is pretty much precisely what I meant when I said, You hear a lot of bullshit from a lot of people bitching about all the things "wrong with X", but rarely from a well-founded technical basis. If you are out there someplace thinking about how your argument was from a well-founded technical basis...I hate to be the one to tell you, but.....
Re:Progress (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Progress (Score:3, Informative)
``You hear a lot of bullshit from a lot of people bitching about all the things "wrong with X", but rarely from a well-founded technical basis. More often it's from either a "why is X such a bitch to configure" or "gee those XFree guys are a bunch of assholes."''
Actually, I think the most persistant complaint is that X is slow. Whichever way you turn it, and whether or not this is actually XFree86's fault, this is true. X apps feel slower
Re:Progress (Score:4, Informative)
B) Only OS X remembers the contents of windows. Most other OSs do not. So it's not a problem limited to X, and in general it's not a problem that would be a big deal if dumb applications didn't handle EXPOSE events so badly.
C) The buffer copy would only make things twice as slow if the *only* thing the server needed to do with each command buffer is copy it to the graphics card. Of course, the actual processing is much more complex than that. In practice, unless you're doing something stupid like drawing single pixels at a time, the overhead imposed by the X protocol is dwarfed by the actual cost of drawing.
Re:Progress (Score:5, Informative)
Also, you're obviously not a programmer if you think people use single pixels to draw movies or text. Movies use the XVideo extension or OpenGL, which stream pixel data in batches to the graphics card. Text drawing uses server-side pixmaps of each glyph, and the normal case involves simply sending some commands to string together the glyphs that are already in video memory.
Re:Progress (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok. That benchmark even seems to use unaccelerated video, so I was all wrong. Sorry to have spread FUD.
Re:Progress (Score:4, Informative)
My understanding (I've never actually looked too hard at this) was that with videos/movies, you use the Xv extension. That allows the app to decode into a shared memory segment (like the old Xshm extension), and leave the graphics card to do the scaling and YUV=>RGB colour space conversion. You certainly do not send every pixel over the X socket. Otherwise my 1600x1200 display would grind to a halt when playing a movie fullscreen. In reality the player only uses a few percent of my AthlonXP/2400 to decode a DVD or XViD video.
Re:Progress (Score:4, Insightful)
Completely right. I was talking about unaccelerated video in my original post. However, be-fan proved me wrong on that as well. I stand corrected.
Re:Progress (Score:5, Interesting)
First, get this: when you see a problem, there can be a whole bunch of causes. The only way to fix a problem is to correctly identify the cause.
Which you are not doing here. "X apps seem to be slower so X must be slow" may make sense from a non-technical user point of view, but that doesn't mean it's correct. In fact, it isn't.
If you benchmark things and stuff, you'll see that the problem is not in X itself: it's in the toolkits. So if people listened to you and ditched X, we'd still have the same problems because the toolkits are still slow.
Try using something like WindowMaker and some non-GTK non-QT apps. You'll find that they usually respond significantly faster (not on my machine though; Athlon 1.4 Ghz here, I don't find X apps slow).
And try playing 3D games. Look at the high framerate (assuming you're using a good card and driver, like NVidia + vendor drivers). How's that possible for a windowing system that's slow?
I've written several testing apps, for Windows and X. On both platforms, I get the same frame rate.
Expose events: Windows does pretty much the same thing. If I wrote an app that only responds to the paint event once, and I move a window above it, you'll see that the window won't be redrawn. Windows in fact uses the very same expose mechanism.
X *does* in fact have a feature which allows you to save the content of the window. It's saved Backing Store and Save Under (I think). QT and GTK don't use it except when popping up a menu. Ask the toolkit authors why they don't, because I don't know.
Data copying: data is *not* copied when transferring pixmaps, which is about 90-95% of the traffic. On localhost, XFree86/XOrg uses shared memory for that.
On localhost, normal X messages are transferred via unix domain sockets (not TCP sockets), which are almost as fast as shared memory (at least on Linux). Remember, this is small amount of data.
No modern windowing system allows the app to touch the hardware directly. Not Windows, not MacOS X, not BeOS. In fact, Windows internally uses the same message-based communication system as X. Windows apps don't draw directly to the hardware.
Re:Progress (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll have to disagree with you here, because you're comparing apples to oranges. Those KDE and GNOME apps seem slightly slower and less responsive because they've been jammed packed full of functionality. The KDE desktop does about a hundred times as much as the bare WindowMaker window manager. A KDE application is going to pull in ten times the functionality from the KDE librarieas than a bare xlib application will get from X.
The very sam
Re:Progress (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Progress (Score:5, Informative)
I'm using the new X.org (Score:4, Interesting)
I wasn't until I was reading later on that I realized there was a different X on my machine. Even then I was getting confused because much of Slackwares online docs have not been updated to refect this change.
I like X. X is good. Some X'es are better!
Re:I'm using the new X.org (Score:4, Informative)
The X.Org monolithic X is just the XFree86 one from a microsecond before the license change.
More or less nothing has changed in XFree86 since the license change.
who forked from who.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Could be wrong (and frequently am)..
Re:who forked from who.. (Score:5, Informative)
Clear as mud?
Re:who forked from who.. (Score:3, Funny)
X.org devs: Yeah! Oh yeah! Splitters! Splitters!
Dev 2: What?
Dev 1: X.org! Splitters!
Dev 2: We're X.org!
Dev 1: I thought we were XFree86!
Dev 2: XFree86... huh!
Dev 3: Whatever happened to XFre86?
Dev 1: He's over there... (points to lone man)
X.org devs: SPLITTER!!
Let's Talk About X Baby (Score:5, Insightful)
The one caveat is to not micro-modularize; do not release things for install/upgrade that cannot stand on their own (i.e. - limited functionality vs. not executable).
I would like to see 'X' go on a diet, though (if possible).
X in Windows? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:X in Windows? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:X in Windows? (Score:5, Insightful)
Filesystem permissions on NTFS are a joke. In theory, they'd be great, but In reality, XP opens up everything wide for you upon install. They could take the OS X approach and prompt you for a password upon installing things and have a more secure desktop with no user inconvenience, but as it stands, Spyware X can be installed by a user and affect other users because generally, a user has way too much write permission the way MS has set up XP.
Home directories are worthless unless they A. work right and B. Come with well-implemented and executed file permissions. Again, this is an area in which XP is capable, but the issue of most users in an XP system having far too much power weakens it.
The Dos/Windows command prompt was, is, and always will be a joke. It feels like it was written by someone who never had to be productive at a command prompt. It hasn't had command completion until recently, it doesn't have 10% of the utilities (packaged with windows) that one needs to be productive, and it doesn't have enough device/file mappings to be able to truly take advantage of it. Just cause you can do ls doesn't mean you can do du -md 1 | sort -n or dd if=cf_img of=/dev/sdb bs=2k. As an additional kludge, the cmd.exe window is awful for running an editor in and doesn't resize well.
Just because Microsoft provides some of these features doesn't mean it does it well. Truthfully, I think they should give up on the command prompt. they'll never get it right, and remote administration can be done in a web browser anyhow (webmin, anyone?) It's not like they're going to build software remotely as source code is not a popular distrubution method on windows.
Basically, saying that Windows has a command prompt is like saying that linux has direct rendering support. They're both true, but in such useless ways.
Brian
Re:X in Windows? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think [the command line has] gone through many changes at all.
Well, no, not yet; it's still cmd.exe, which only had minor enhancements to command. But the parent was talking about where Windows is headed, which makes the command line a particularly fitting example, because long-in-the-tooth will have MSH, which is vastly different and actually much more of a "real" shell.
Re:X in Windows? (Score:5, Informative)
If you use the latest release of cygwin, it comes with an X.org server that has a rootless WM (like the one in Apple Xfree server). With it, you can run X11 applications next to your Win32 windows as if they were native (same for remote windows).
I use it all the time for remote admin and this is great.
Re:X in Windows? (Score:5, Informative)
Slightly more information: Install cygwin, I usually install the default install, minus emacs, plus the whole X11 directory (then turning off some emacs stuff in there), and explicitly turning on a few things if they aren't already like ssh, ncftp, and whatever else. That part is up to you.
Once it's installed, I make a shortcut for the X server that runs "C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\run.exe XWin -multiwindow -clipboard -unixkill -nowinkill" and bingo, I have X. There's also another flag you'll need if you want your X desktop to span multiple monitors, but I only have one hooked up right now so it's a non-issue.
You can also turn off -multiwindow and run -rootless (I think) and then use a window mangler to manage your assorted X clients. If for some reason you want X clients and Windows apps to look even less alike, this is how you accomplish that.
Re:X in Windows? (Score:2)
It's a bit buggy, but it's 'native' (through cygwin.dll) and gives you X windows that render in the local Windows environment. Better to find native Windows applications, but it'll work in a pinch.
Re:X in Windows? (Score:3, Interesting)
Already happening. Windows' new rendering engine, Avalon [microsoft.com], is completely vector-based. Here's what one of its designers had to say [longhornblogs.com]:
Re:X in Windows? (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed I did. Most of the other people responding to the question did not, however.
The poster wasn't talking about "X Windows under Windows", that's been done by Cygwin and many others. Let's read the original comment again, shall we?
He's talking here about X-like connections, NOT X Windows. In other words, he'd like to see remote terminals based on drawing primit
Re:X in Windows? (Score:3, Interesting)
RDP is much closer in implementation and functionality to X than it is to VNC; in that it doesn't send updates to the screen as bitmaps -- it sends font information, strings, window information, and bitmap information for actual UI bitmap objects (i.e., not everything). I
Nice Screeny's (Score:5, Informative)
KDE and Knome infect X ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Such an integration would destroy the versatility and uniqueness of the X protocoll. Indeed X would degenerate to a remote enabled clone of the Windows desktop after some time.
Yes, want Linux/BSD on the desktop but not this way.
This is like getting an elephant into your car by cutting him into pieces.
Re:KDE and Knome infect X ? (Score:3, Informative)
X needs to remain low level to stay relevant.
Re:KDE and Knome infect X ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:KDE and Knome infect X ? (Score:2)
Re:KDE and Knome infect X ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:KDE and Knome infect X ? (Score:3, Informative)
kde and knome are layers on top of x. i'm sure you realize that.
x tells the video card to draw stuff on the screen.
kde and knome tell x what that stuff should look like. kde and knome wrap windows with decorations. (title bars, etc).
if a user wants to be able to resize their desktop on the fly (go from 1024x768 to 800x600 resolution perhaps), the functionality has to be available in X, then also able to be controled by the window manager
Re:KDE and Knome infect X ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:KDE and Knome infect X ? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's something I'd actually like to happen - the way it was in the NEWS system (just better). In my opinion, it would actually be beneficial to replace the window manager with a script running inside the server, or even to allow application to upload scripts to the server that handle their Menus so that there are no unnecessary delays going back and forth between the X-Server and a remote client for stuff as trivial
Compositing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Compositing (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe for some applications (drawing?) it might be ok, but reading web pages and writing code, transparency makes my eyes hurt...
I remember the first time I saw a neat looking transparent eterm years back. It was very hard to use for any length of time at all, but it is neat to show people.
Back to my glowing monochromatic lime green vt100 serial terminal for another round of nethack. "Welcome Luddite the evoker!"
Re:Compositing (Score:5, Informative)
Compositing is just the tip of the iceberg. (Score:5, Informative)
Right now I am running fedora core 2 and am using the latest release from X.org's CVS.
It seems stable and all that, but it's slow.
GLXGears I am scoring 285 fps with xcompmgr off
and 60-70 with it on. (that turns on the composite features).
Although it does have my dri drivers turned off in both cases (using intel i830-type video driver). I am recompiling as I type right now to enable the new i915 driver for it to see if that makes a difference.
But other people have reported it to be slow. Probably would be nice on my other computer using the Nvidia FX 5900 XT, but I don't want to mess up my desktop with a CVS-based X server.
All in all it's pretty stable and shows the progress that XFree86 was holding back on, unfortunately. Yea for X.org
Oh and also for that guy that says he was nervious about X.org and Freedesktop.org and KDE/Gnome "working to close together". He is a idiot. This isnt' X Windows, this is just the X SERVER. It's one part.
What I'd worry about more is X.org and Linux getting to cozy and unintentially making it more difficult to run on other Unix-like OSes.
X.org has a open invitation for all Unix developers and it would be great if they would get more of their input. (Especially the BSD's)
The future looks good. X.org would like to strip away the dual nature of X's drivers (Mesa/Dri OpenGL drivers + XFree86-type 2D drivers) and get the X server running on pure OpenGL!
That means instead of having to write 2 versions of drivers for video cards, now they only have to worry about the OpenGL version. This means it's easier to get good drivers for Linux and other Unix-like OSes that use X.org servers, and quicker too.
Also the Cairo project is going to be integrated bringing in Vector-based Windows and graphics libraries into X windows and allowing them to also be OpenGL accelerated.
The MS Longhorn waiters, eat your heart out. This is going to be some cool stuff we will have in the next couple years.
Of course OS X is openGL, too, but the cool thing about X windows is the flexibility. All these changes will keep complete backwards compatability with older programs (X clients actually in X terminology), while removing bloat for features that nobody uses/completely obsolete and streamlining developement thru modularlization and extensions.
Stuff like Damage is reducing the X networking load considurably too, making wide spread use of X terminals in businesses and schools more and more fesable.
And all sorts of other improvements are coming.
Changing over to X.org seems to have been a fortuninate move.
Re:Compositing is just the tip of the iceberg. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Compositing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Compositing (Score:5, Informative)
It isn't just the ability to draw translucent windows. By rendering to an offscreen buffer and then compositing on the screen, you can do all sorts of transformations and effects that make the desktop easier to use. Apple's Expose effect is probably the best example.
I'm up to your challenge (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in a GIS (geoprocessing) application to an electrical company. In the user's screen, a map showed up with all polls and wires that are in a location. If you clicked on a poll with, e.g., a transformer, a translucent (big) tooltip came up with all of the transformers specs, where the electricity was coming from, where it was going to, etc (like 20 lines of text). Without dismissing such tooltip, the user is capable of clicking in another poll in the map, and only the contents of the tooltip changed, (maybe it's position if it were possible to move "away" from the current part of the map. The user could even click thru the tooltip, in a poll that was showing below it! (there was a menu item/toolbar speed-button and a hot-key to close the tooltip, obviously)
This kind of interface is *very* practical and would be impossible without translucency. I implemented it in a no-nonsense 15 minutes under BorlandC++/w2k.
Re:Compositing (Score:5, Funny)
tive clod!
Re:Compositing (Score:3, Interesting)
Amazingly, it worked just fine, and was perfectly usable.
On the other hand, VNC from that palmpilot, though I tried it a few times, was just not usable. So I will admit that every once in a while those who claim the shell has better usability do have a point.
What about Y? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What about Y? (Score:5, Insightful)
NVidia driver issue? (Score:3, Interesting)
As far as the article goes all I can read is that they work with both major graphiccards vendors but only ATI delivered so far. Or did I miss something?
Re:NVidia driver issue? (Score:5, Informative)
Also if you take a look at the xorg mailinglist you'll find that the guys at nvidia are working happily with the xorg devs.
As per usual (Score:5, Insightful)
For the less code-inclined, there's always lots of documentation to be written! Manpages need to be written, documentation needs to be released Xorg 6.7. converted from random archaic formats to DocBook, et al. This is one area that really badly needs some love from those with the requisite skills.
I realy wish that this was a higher priority among developers, as it would greatly help both new users, and future developers.
Don't bother with the next cool widget until the docs are up and understandable.
x.org rules! (Score:4, Informative)
Prepare to be blown away (Score:4, Insightful)
There are probably more exiting features than the inclusion of Composite in the next releas (XDamage seems to be a great step forward for X over the network for example and XCB looks interesting too, RTFI) but hey, I'm just a sucker for eyecandy.
All in all I do get the impression that we all should thank Mr. Dawes for behaving in a way that lead to a fork of XFree. Xorg and freedesktop.org put the development of X back on track and it is only just beginning.
Finally, thanks to all the folks at freedesktop.org for doing such a great job and putting the fun back in my computer.
Re:Prepare to be blown away (Score:4, Interesting)
Time for X11R7 or even X12 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Time for X11R7 or even X12 (Score:3, Informative)
The folks at freedesktop.org are in the middle of a whole redesign of X. For example, this is probably going to be the last monolithic release of X, they are working on a replacement for xlib (xcb), there is a lot of discussion about putting certain function that are now provided by X into the kernel (RTFI for more information).
Does that count as a major redesign?
Re:Time for X11R7 or even X12 (Score:3, Insightful)
No. I'm not interested Yet Another Open Source Groups pet project , I want ALL parties who use and/or develop X to sit down and agree on a COMMON standard that comes shipped AS THE DEFAULT on all unix systems, not an optional alternative you download of some website no one has heard of.
Re:Time for X11R7 or even X12 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Time for X11R7 or even X12 (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, you could tell that this was a case of ignorant ranting when the original poster referred to X.org, which is helmed by Keith Packard, as a pet project.
Re:Time for X11R7 or even X12 (Score:5, Insightful)
Time and time again, X11 has showed us that it is better to provide mechanism, not dictate policy--even unto the protocol itself.
The Extensions mechanism provides the X11 protocol with extrodinary forwards compatibility.
You can take a modern X11 Window Server from 2004, connect to it a crufty old X client from some godawful old piece of embedded hardware from twenty years ago, and have it work perfectly. At the same time, your modern server can perform nifty tasks that the protocol's designers never dreamed would be necessary, such as, well, everything Keith Packard and co are doing today.
Re:Time for X11R7 or even X12 (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes it does , but at some point its time to say that "this functionality would be better served being a core part of the system". Eg transparency.
Re:Time for X11R7 or even X12 (Score:5, Insightful)
People said that fonts would be better served by making font rendering a core part of the system. What do we have today to show for it? A crufty, obsolete, nonextensible set of functions for drawing glyphs on the server side, that no new development uses because Xft/pango/fontconfig work together to do a much better job on the client side.
No one foresaw anti-aliased text, Unicode, truetype fonts, glyphs drawn with an alpha channel, etc. Fortunatly the mechanism that X provides allows a client to use these features without requiring every X server it comes into contact with to be upgraded to X12 or whatever.
Re:Time for X11R7 or even X12 (Score:5, Interesting)
Um, X is a textbook example of that philosophy gone horribly wrong.
To its credit, the X consortium tried to rectify their mistake thru the ICCC [tronche.com], but again they fell into the trap of creating something with so much misguided "flexibility" that it's almost impossible to find any apps which actually implement the ICCC in full, let alone cooperate in any meaningful way.
The ICCC has been such a joke, that ten years on something as elementary as copy-paste is still a hit-and-miss affair. And what about projects like the CDE [opengroup.com], or Enlightenment? Everybody's who been serious about using X to craft a desktop has felt the need to introduce policy above and beyond what X has to offer. That's not a sign of X's flexibility or time-tested design: it's a sign that X sucks.
Let's hope freedesktop.org manages to beat some shape into the mess that is X, but they'll only succeed if they're willing to provide policy rather than mechanism. Bad policy that's followed by many is much more useful than good policy that's followed by few, or no policy at all.
Re:Time for X11R7 or even X12 (Score:3, Insightful)
In order words: the free market will force other (commercial) X server vendors to support new, popular extensions.
Whose task is copy&paste (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who often puts together presentations, marketing slides, flyers for printing, etc., this is my single greatest annoyance about Linux at the desktop (and we're using Linux on all our desktops; heck, we're even a SUSE technology partner). Copying text between my Java IDE and OpenOffice gives me only about half a page of text - the rest is simply lost. How on earth can I simply copy from GIMP into an OpenOffice presentation like I can copy/paste from PaintShop pro to PowerPoint? The last time I tried, I couldn't even copy/paste consistently between various KDE apps.
As much as I hate to say it (and I really hate to say it), this is *the* one thing that Windows does right. More or less seamless application integration which works the way I need it to work.
Dan.
Re:Whose task is copy&paste (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux to tinker, Mac to use.
BTW. Windows doesn't really copy/paste well though. Formatted copy in WOrd gives me a headache and Excel doesn't keep to Microsoft's own UI guidelines.
Re:Whose task is copy&paste (Score:3, Insightful)
It's simple. You save to a file in app A and then open it in app B. Honestly, where's the attraction in having your data floating about in a clipboard like some etherial juggling act? Without extra tools you can only hold one thing in the clipboard. If you have to transfer many items you end up copying and pasting things one at a time, like a two-person boat transferring people across a river. But you can have as many files as you like. And they're only limited by your disk space, not your RAM+swap.
This
Re:Whose task is copy&paste (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides which, the advantage to c&p is simplicity. Copying an image from a web page and pa
Re:Whose task is copy&paste (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, there is a standard. People used to misunderstand it but now it's documented clearly. http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/clipboards-s
The X selection mechanism supports contents negotiation, which means that you can copy rich text and images from Mozilla and paste it in OpenOffice with the same markup. In fact, it already can. I tried it - it works. Even images are preserved. Try copying some tables in Gnumeric and paste them in Mozilla Composer. It works - the tables are preserved!
The X selection mechanism is actually technically almost the same as MS Windows's.
Unfortunately not all apps use content negotiation, I don't know why. Gimp is the worst example - it doesn't use the X selection mechanism *at all*, not even on Windows! It uses it's own internal clipboard. So you can copy & paste inside Gimp but not between multiple Gimp processes.
Geez why do I have to post this this over and over? Isn't it about time everybody on Slashdot knows about this?
suggestion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unfortunate... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unfortunate... (Score:5, Insightful)
but that is not what internationalisation is all about, I for example use my computers in english, yet I write and read Finnish on them every day.
äöäöäöäöäöäöäöääöäÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅ 7;
Re:PRECISELY MOD UP+ (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Unfortunate... (Score:5, Funny)
Most people don't need internationalization
I despair. I do not pass GO, I do not collect $200, I just despair.
Re:Wtf has the printer got to do with X? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wtf has the printer got to do with X? (Score:3, Insightful)
Answer these two questions, if you will:
* What do you suggest we should be using on the printer? * Why does it have to be different from what we use for the screen?
For the record, I'm a software developer myself, and I'm extremely happy that I do not need to write and debug my code twice.
Re:Wtf has the printer got to do with X? (Score:5, Informative)
Why distinguish? An application should be able to use the same commands to draw on screen as to a printer, which is just a different display device.
Re:Does it run linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does it run linux? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Does it run linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Does it run linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:unified desktop (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:unified desktop (Score:3, Informative)
Most users new to Linux will be using Gnome and KDE. Most of the programs that they will run into (those which don't do everything themselves, poorly, such as games) are written for GTK+ and Qt. A user's first impression of either desktop environment would be improved tremendously if the default themes for each environemnt didn't look like complete ass.
Fortunatly, the default theme for Gnome 2.8 will be Indubstrial, which is based off the very smooth Industrial theme.
Likewise, the nex
Re:unified desktop (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's my take on it:
I use Linux on my systems (with Gnome as a DE) and I know what you mean some times. Part of the problem is that people write programs for different purposes - e.g. some people will write a program using Qt and the KDE libraries causing the programs to look one way, while somebody else will use Gtk or another toolkit.
It obviously isn't just down to the toolkit, but also depending on who the application is targetted at, most developers (generalising I know) don't have
Re:unified desktop (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Why does Luna look like a pre-schooler threw up after eating several crayons?
2) Why do MS Office, MS Visio, and MS Visual Studio all look different (hint: they use different toolkits!)
3) Why does every other Windows apps (Winamp, Windows Media Player, Ephpod, etc, etc) use their own weird-looking skin?
4) Why do the buttons on every single installer (Wise, InstallShield, MSI) all look different?
Re:unified desktop (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the more insistant and vocal themes heard in the desktop debate is that that Unix desktop needs to be like Windows. It is said that multiple widget toolkits, inconsistant dialogs, and other evidences of a decentralized development model must be removed before the masses will accept a Unix destkop. This cry for uniformity can be especially shrill, almost as if the very survival of a certain free operating system depended upon it. But is the underlying premise true? Is Windows really a consistant and uniform desktop?
The answer is resoundingly negative.
While conducting a quick survey of configuration dialogs under Windows, in an attempt to understand what a newbie user of my software would be familiar with, I discovered that there was no standard procedure for these dialogs. Even configuration dialogs from the same manufacturer varied wildly. By all Slashdot accounts, Windows users must certainly be mentally damaged from their constant exposure to such inconsistant interfaces.
Where is the configuration dialog located for a Windows application? Using the Windows system I use every day at work, I discovered that even this simple item was highly variable. Microsoft Word had two configuration dialogs, "Tools->Customize" and "Tools->Options", while Microsoft Outlook added an additional "Tools->Services". Microsoft WordPad had only one under a completely different menu "View->Options". Moving on to non-Microsoft products, I see that Adobe Reader and Quicktime Player have "Edit->Preferences". But lest you think those are consistant, Adobe Reader has a single dialog, while Quicktime Player has a submenu of three dialogs. Firefox and Roxio Creator Classic follow the WordPad model of placement.
What about the dialog contents themselves? Microsoft Word has modal tabbed dialogs, while Microsoft Outlook has a modeless tabbed dialog without a help button. Adobe Reader and Firefox have modal dialogs using a listbox instead of tabs to separate the pages. Quicktime Player is similar, but uses a combobox instead of a listbox. Some of these dialogs had help buttons while the rest lacked them.
Okay, what about the look and feel? Certainly the Windows platform has a consistant widget set? Sadly, no. Adobe Reader has an almost-but-not-quite Win2K look, that matches neither the Windows Classic nor Luna themes that comes with Windows XP. Roxio Creator Classic has a "brushed plastic" look with odd splitter controls. Quicktime player has, of course, a look and feel straight out of another operating system! Comparing native Microsoft applications only improves matters slightly. Microsoft Word has a completely different toolbar style than Microsoft WordPad! I could continue on to some truly egregious examples of inconsistancy, but I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
I think by now that I have thoroughly debunked the notion that the Windows desktop is uniform and consistant. The question remains though, is the Unix desktop better? The answer is similarly, "no". But since Windows isn't consistant, the urgency of the question is clearly lessoned. Newbies aren't going to be rendered insane by seeing Evolution running alongside Konqueror. They aren't going to go running back to Windows when their distro forgot to include Plastik icons with Mozilla.
Re:I would love to see CCM for X (Score:3, Informative)
I think Owen Taylor is planning to implement this in Pango. It's all but trivial.
Re:Resolution limit (Score:3, Informative)
For window dimensions this is not likely to ever be a problem.
However it is a big problem for graphics. In effect the only way to reliably draw an arbitrary graphic is to do intersection testing and clipping in memory against +/-32767 planes before sending the lines. This is very difficult and expensive (and silly since X has to then do further clipping aganst the actual window area anyway). So most programs don't do this, resulting in