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Enlightenment GNOME GUI X

Rasterman Responds To Seth And Havoc 423

Posted by timothy from the give-that-man-some-excess-funding dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Rasterman, of Enlightenment fame, has responded to Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington's blog entries, which were in reference to this previous article. about Next gen X rendering. Raster says: 'Well it seems the XDevConf has produced some interesting blogs and discussion. I'm a bit sad I was not able to attend (no funding at all), as there seems to have begin a lot of discussion and moves in directions we in Enlightenment land have been going for years, and are likely far ahead in. I guess this means we haven't been able to share our experience in this. Maybe next year. Anyway the point is that this has started up some musings from Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington related to this. This is great - finally people are beginning to take seriously what the Enlightenment crowd have been talking about for years.'" (Note: the previous post was about Nickell's post, not the other way around.)
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Rasterman Responds To Seth And Havoc More

Rasterman Responds To Seth And Havoc

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  • for more to the date info (Score:5, Informative)

    by ezekiel683 ( 739858 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @12:51PM (#11757130)
    http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=9791

    has alot of responces from raster on this subject so its worth a read and there also seems to be some progress on the whole debate

  • So where is the response? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @12:53PM (#11757150) Homepage Journal
    The writeup had no link to Rasterman's response. Unless the writeup WAS Rasterman's response, but that seems a bit weak to me. I'd like to know more about what Rasterman felt on these topics. A blog entry with some meat on it, some details about WHAT is "the right direction" and "what we've been saying." If this is all there is, well, (yawn).

    • Re:So where is the response? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Click on the link to Rasterman's web site (over the text "Rasterman"). It's on his main web page.
      • I remember Enlightenment!
        Those were the days...

        xmkmf -a ; make ; make install

        • The Gentoo package database lists e [gentoo.org] and says it's "the e17 window manager" and Enlightenment, with the description "Enlightenment Window Manager" and version 0.16.9999
          <obvious joke goes here>
          Maybe I'll emerge e later.
          It might be a fun dissonance, to have a little shell script that randomly flops between Enlightenment and Ion3 [modeemi.fi], my current WM.
          Because, really, when did Emacs care fig #1 about the WM, much less X? ;)

          • Re:So where is the response? (Score:4, Funny)

            by Jeremiah Cornelius ( 137 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:29PM (#11757569) Homepage Journal
            Ion?

            Does this support multiple levels of alpha-blended transparency and painting of a GL canvas which can be mapped onto arbitrary surfaces?

            • Nah, just supports mananging a few concurrent, graphical applications.
              I run Gnus, ECB, and ERC in separate Emacs instances,
              And Firefox for browsing.
              You just ALT+x to get where you want to go.
              The smell of the under-engineering resembles that of the air in the countryside in Spring, flowers abloom, just after a bit of rain.
              Performance un-suffers as well, anti-staggering under the non-weight of chrome and tailfin involved in the whole contra-design.
              I may want to install E17 anyway, just to re-live the di

        • Re:So where is the response? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by eno2001 ( 527078 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @02:19PM (#11758126) Homepage Journal
          Have you seen E17? It really looks great. I compiled and ran it on a PII dual CPU box and it ran nice and smoothly over SSH tunneled VNC! :) The only problem with it right now is that many major features are missing (it's devel so what can you expect?). You can't iconify apps yet, and there is no complete app panel to launch your apps with. But there are some beautiful animations in the WM and the basic dead panel that put it at the very least on par with Mac OS X.
  • Seth's proposed improvements over the current X11/Xorg server sound very nice, but what about the core speed issue in X. X has come leaps and bounds over the past 5 years or so but still "feels" extremely sluggish compared to a similarly equipped Windows XP machine. I know it's comparing apples to oranges since X is network-based but still...
    Anyone have any ideas if he plans to address performace as well?
    - Cary
    --Fairfax Underground [fairfaxunderground.com]: Where Fairfax County comes out to play

    • Re:Pretty is nice, but performance is better. (Score:5, Informative)

      by 0racle ( 667029 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:03PM (#11757264)
      If X is slow its more then likely your setup and not X its self. Don't belive me? Run Fluxbox instead of Gnome or KDE and see how responsive it becomes. Now run a Gnome or KDE that was compiled for a more sane arch, ie i686 instead of i386 and see how much more responsive it becomes. Now run RDC and XDMCP side by side and see how well the Xprotocol works. X is not slow. I run KDE 3.4b2 on a dual p2 with 768 mb ram with a lot of eye candy turned on, I run an XDMCP session to a Sun box running Solaris 8 and right next to it, XP on a Sempron 2500+. I see no UI responsiveness difference until the systems become busy, and then its often XP that first slows.

      • Re:Pretty is nice, but performance is better. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by diamondsw ( 685967 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:46PM (#11757776)
        Anecdotes != Data

        I can easily counter that on my dual-boot system with Windows XP, Fedora, and a tweaked Gentoo, both Linux distro's are far, far more "sluggish" than Windows is. Oddly enough, what gives Windows a real kick in responsiveness is the I/O subsystem. Running Windows 2000 on a 400Mhz PII laptop was dog slow. Running Windows XP on a 400Mhz PII with SCSI RAID underneath and it flies. Linux/X11 does not on the same hardware, regardless of optimizations, distros, windowing managers, etc. I use this largely as a plaything, and as such have played with a LOT of distros, tweaks, and window managers over time.

        So are you right? Am I right? We don't know. Does anyone have *real* data or studies on this, or just a bunch of anecdotes?
        • "Anecdotes != Data"

          Trying running "x11perf -all" sometime to give you an idea of just how fast an X-server is at executing basic operations.

          Obviously, these don't illustrate what the overall end-user experience is going to be like, but they do show how fast the underlying X-server is working.
        • Which is one of the primary reasons I wanted to move off of windows xp (which is ironic, b/c it is slowly getting better). I didn't feel that a lot of hard drive activity should cause my mouse and (on startup) my task bar to become unresponsive. Why must i wait to move a window on screen b/c the harddrive is overloaded?

          This problem is greatly amplified on my new dell laptop (my work computer). With only a 40k RPM hard disk, just about anything that causes any disk activity results in the computer ignori
        • The Register [theregister.co.uk]

          Good enough? There are plenty of benchmarks that reproduce this, if you want to search for them.

          It really depends on a number of variables. Do you have ext3 for the FS? Maybe some options are slowing things down. Or maybe debug is turned on for ReiserFS. I mean if someone claims that WinXp is sluggish and we find out that it is on a Fat32 FS that has never been defragged, well...

        • Re:Pretty is nice, but performance is better. (Score:4, Informative)

          by jsebrech ( 525647 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @04:35PM (#11759579)
          Running Windows XP on a 400Mhz PII with SCSI RAID underneath and it flies. Linux/X11 does not on the same hardware, regardless of optimizations, distros, windowing managers, etc.

          There are a number of things you have to ensure:

          - you're running a recent kernel, optimized for your hardware
          - you're using an accelerated driver (this makes a HUGE difference). If you have recent hardware, this means running a binary driver which isn't likely to be installed by default.
          - you have dma enabled (you'd be surprised how many linux machines don't have dma turned on for the drives, which results in only a tenth of normal drive performance)
          - you're not loading more software than you have ram for (same rule as windows, run a small enough set of software so it doesn't have to swap in and out parts constantly). This happens less nowadays, but it used to be that a "complete" install would leave a linux system almost unusable because of all the services filling up the ram.

          My personal experience is that X is fast and responsive if it and the linux install it runs on are configured correctly. I have an athlon 700 running kde3 which is extremely responsive. OK, so it's anecdotal evidence yet again, but the fact that people do have responsive X systems does say something about X's potential for performance, right?

          By the way. Don't switch distro's to try to fix problems. Only switch distro's because you like the underlying philosophy of the other distro better. It's my personal experience that any distro can be made to do anything any other distro can be made to do. It may not be as easy, but it can always be done. After all, underneath they're all running the same code.
      • Now, consider that Windows XP is an entire desktop environment, while Fluxbox is more of a mere window manager. That's a point against X if XP is just as fast as a simple window manager.

    • Re:Pretty is nice, but performance is better. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Personaly i have always found the X enviroment to perform a great deal better than the windows enviroment with lesser hardware , the changes he suggests will be wonderfull on the whole.
      May i suggest the sluggishness is perhaps more related to your desktop enviroment (even though i find KDE 3.3 to work fine on computers that windows XP would strugle on)Using blackbox/fluxbox or so on , you could run happily on a rather old machine ..
    • [X] still "feels" extremely sluggish compared to a similarly equipped Windows XP machine.

      In what way? I'm not running very fast hardware (1.2MHz Athlon and a cheap video card) and everything X does is instantaneous.

      Now, there are lots of dog-slow programs out there, but I can't think of anything where I've felt X was a problem. Basicly it feels to me that hardware is well past the point where the X overhead is negligable compared to the `programmer felt he needed to include animated semi-transparent pen

      • Re:Pretty is nice, but performance is better. (Score:5, Informative)

        by ikekrull ( 59661 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:25PM (#11757525) Homepage
        Well, I run an Athlon64 3200+ with accelerated NVidia drivers but I can't drag or resize an opaque window smoothly. I can't do it under WindowMaker, KDE, GNOME or even E17, and the problems are in the X Server

        I haven't used Windows in years, but when i do see it, the thing that stands out is that desktop rendering is noticeably faster and smoother than any X server I have, excepting maybe my SGI O2 running IRIX.

        I also have an iBook running OS X, and while it has problems resizing windows really smoothly (though i can't visibly see repaints like I can under X), everything else feels a lot faster and slicker than XFree86/Xorg etc.

        Now, i'm sure it's not the X protocol that is the problem, but the difficulty in synchronising X windows to the VBI and also in the extremely poor implementation of alpha-blending and the rendering /compositing model currently used.

        • Re:Pretty is nice, but performance is better. (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Well, I run an Athlon64 3200+ with accelerated NVidia drivers but I can't drag or resize an opaque window smoothly.

          I can do that on a P3-600. Seriously. You have a configuration problem.

        • What the other replier said. I can do alpha blending and smooth resizing in *SOFTWARE* on a machine slower than that. You have multiple problems, not the least of which is probably that your desktop isnt accelerated (i believe you need to enable the XRender extension? not sure, not my forte, i followed the instructions in the nvidia README and things 'just worked')

        • Well, I run an Athlon64 3200+ with accelerated NVidia drivers

          So do I. SuSE 9.2, KDE. As an aside, the SuSE 9.2 Professional retail box was one hell of a purchase.

          but I can't drag or resize an opaque window smoothly

          Neither could I, at first, because the drivers SuSE 9.2 has are inadequate. You have to download and install a better driver from the NVidia Web site and install 'em. You won't get the driver through SuSE updates, either, presumably because the driver comes with the "kernel taint" o

    • Speed issue (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Craig Ringer ( 302899 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:28PM (#11757561) Homepage Journal
      Frankly, I don't think there _is_ a speed issue with X11. There are performance issues on XFree86/XOrg with some (many) drivers, AFAIK mostly due to limited developer time and limited access to hardware. The fact that the current software RENDER implementation is not signficantly optimised, and few drivers implement RENDER hardware acceleration, does not help.

      Working on my NVidia equpped box here (GeForce Ti, nvidia drivers, but for 2D 'nv' is almost as good) X is much snappier than I usually find WinXP to be. Turning on RENDER acceleration has helped a lot.

      I'm sure folks will bring up the "because of the network" myth up here, so let's get this straight - any slowness in X is not because of network support. Go ask Keith Packard, I'm pretty sure he's been rather clear on the matter more than once. My personal, very much non-expert understanding is that most performance issues peope experience are due to limited hardware acceleration and inferior drivers.

      If you don't believe me about how much difference the hardware and drivers make, go find an S3 based system, preferably S3 Trio32/S3 Trio64, and compare it to a PCI-based (to keep it fair) NVidia GeForce 4 MX on the same hardware. It's like they're two totally different computers - the change is jaw-dropping. I use thin clients a lot, so I care strongly about video performance and tend to notice these things.

      It's also worth noting that hopefully many of these plans will lead indirectly to performance improvements, by making RENDER acceleration and RENDER optimisation pretty much mandatory.

    • Re:Pretty is nice, but performance is better. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ViXX0r ( 188100 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:52PM (#11757827) Homepage
      X. Is not. Network Based.

      Not on the local machine. For local displays it doesn't use any networking at all. It uses UNIX pipes which are very fast and also DRI (Direct Rendering Interface) to talk directly to the video hardware.

      I wish this myth would disappear. X only uses networking when using it over a network.
    • The irony is that it is the lack of these nice eye-candy features that actually make X feel so slow. The new improvements to X rendering that make the eye candy possible also make X appear faster. double-buffering, synchronized resizes, etc.

      X is already very fast. It's the perception of speed that's critical, though, and X11 (or rather the widget sets and their lack of drawing synchronization) does appear to feel more sluggish even though it is not.

      For example, the GUI feels silky smooth on my powerboo

  • Well (Score:3, Interesting)

    by revividus ( 643168 ) <phil.crissman@gm ... m minus caffeine> on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @12:54PM (#11757170) Homepage

    I read rasterman's post expecting to find whining about how enlightenment isn't getting enough attention, blah, blah, blah....

    Instead I want to go install it when I get home. Weird. I suppose I could try something new... :-)

    • Re:Well (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Oopsz ( 127422 )
      A lot of people don't like enlightenment, because it's "fluffy". What's wrong with a WM that's functional *and* beautiful?

      It's one thing to have a GUI that shows up all my win32 using friends, but when the mac geeks are taken aback at my windowing environment, it's something else entirely.
      • well... e has a tendency to be quite resource-intensive.

        not that kde or gnome can claim better these days.

      • Re:Well (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Seanasy ( 21730 )

        Judging by the videos on Rasterman's site, E17 is neither functional nor beautiful. All I saw was some konfabulator/dashboard style gadgets with some hideous window decorations, a cool moving background that would be an absolute nightmare to have going while one works and some other useless eyecandy.

        The technology behind all that might be interesting but it'll need someone who doesn't know the words 'gee whiz' to make an efficient, usable environment out of it.

        ... but when the mac geeks are taken aback a

  • Clear as mud (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @12:57PM (#11757204)
    Note: the previous post was about Nickell's post, not the other way around.

    Ah, thanks for qualifying this. Now it is about as clear as a galaxy full of dark matter.
  • i had no idea all the stuff going on with Enlightenment (haven't used it for years), but after reading what Rasterman had to say, i think i'll begin checking Enlightenment out again. Does it play well with Fedora?
    • ...out of control. That is beautiful. Yeah, yeah, on my for-fun desktop only, but hey, that really is beautiful.

    • Re:Had no idea. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Enlightenment is the poster child for losing your following due to simply not releasing often enough to be considered relevant. Enlightenment was huge back in the day and while I'm sure Rasterman and the rest of the E developers are happy to just hack away with no thought of being popular they shouldn't be surprised when other people don't consider them relevant on the scene anymore.
      • The anonymous coward pointed out
        Enlightenment is the poster child for losing your following due to simply not releasing often enough to be considered relevant.
        Of course, it's obligatory for me to warn everyone that Microsoft Longhorn is making a darn good attempt to overtake this achievement. Give MS enough time and everyone will look upon enlightenment's delays as trivial. ;-)
    • The OSNews [osnews.com] story has a link [nus.edu.sg] to a FC2 yum repo in one of the coments, but I haven't found a source repo for those packages (I'm on PPC, so I need to rebuild the packages :().

  • What? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Petter3 ( 532365 )
    Rasterman, of Enlightenment fame, has responded to Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington's blog entries, which were in reference to this previous article about Next gen X rendering. The previous post was about Nickell's post, not the other way around.

    It's not enough that people don't read the articles? Now Slashdot is actively discouraging them from reading the summaries?

  • You'r reading it out of order! (Score:5, Funny)

    by deft ( 253558 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:02PM (#11757261) Homepage
    Anyone else think this article sounded a bit more superhero than it turned out to be?

    "Rasterman Responds To Seth And Havoc"

    RasterMan, defender of good finally reengages his age old enemies Seth, and his evil master Havoc.

  • Text mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by augustz ( 18082 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:03PM (#11757270)
    Tuesday, 22 February 2005
    Enlightenment the experimental toolkit

    Well it seems the XDevConf has produced some interesting blogs and discussion. I'm a bit sad I was not able to attend (no funding at all), as there seems to have begin a lot of discussion and moves in directions we in Enlightenment land have been going for years, and are likely far ahead in. I guess this means we haven't been able to share our experience in this. Maybe next year. Anyway the point is that this has started up some musings from Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington related to this. This is great - finally people are beginning to take seriously what the Enlightenment crowd have been talking about for years.

    What I'll go into is some of the things Seth and Havoc talk about that we have already done and are well under way or very mature. Things we have advocated for years and have already solved - quite optimally. Our designs are forward-looking and just WAITING for drivers to catch up and stop "sucking". I could write essays about the many ways to address this issue alone (XRender), but I won't go there this time. I've been there before.

    First let me talk about Seth's blog. He discusses "Next-Generation Rendering For the Free Desktop". This is great. this is just what we need... oh wait. it's just what we've been DOING for years! :) He mentions "A sophisticated drawing layer" (read his blog for the full text). We have that - Evas. it can accelerate via OpenGL, it's got a FAST software renderer. It can render to the Linux Framebuffer. It can render to memory. It can render using DirectFB. It can render using *GASP* ... Cairo! It can display in Qtopia. We can add new engines for new targets with little effort. Evas scales down to rendering at usable speeds on embedded devices (100-600Mhz ARM CPU's, limited RAM etc.). He discusses a toolkit that aggressively takes advantage of this - we have been working on EWL and Edje. Edje is a lower layer theme/layout system, with EWL being a full widget set on top of this, giving you whiz-bang themes with widget layout built on top of an Evas canvas with everything punting down to the rendering layer at the bottom there. We are doing our own Window Manager - and the day Xrender stops sucking, we will add compositing to it too - re-using all the layers we already have to do this. We have a low level acceleration mechanism (OpenGL) but its too unstable for use IMHO. This is a problem that needs fixing and is something that needs to be addressed.

    Now he goes on to say what this will enable: "Toolkit themes that draw with layer blending effects" - Done. EWL, Evas, Edje. "Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly and animated clouds of smoke when you click on them". OK - we don't have the smoke - but we have all the animation, glinting in the light, fading, glowing, sliding, etc. etc. etc. We have an entire engine devoted to just this (Edje), a theme description language, compiler, scripting engine, compressed theme format usable "live" without installation etc. He goes on to talk of "Alpha transparency whenever you want" - Done. Evas. Live window thumbnails - XRender has to improve something WICKED for this to be sane. :) Hundreds of snowflakes driving down the screen... E17 has a toy module for just this... and flames to burn them up as they hit the bottom of the screen. All with glorious alpha blending. He speaks of animated background desktops with things like grass blowing in the breeze - We do that already in E17. The desktop BG is an Edje file - and thus is capable of all the animation and effects Edje and Evas offer. In fact take a look at the following 2 video files (they are jerky because xvidcap is jerky and thats just how it is - in real life they are smooth as a babies bottom - you just have to see these things "live" to believe it. Also note - this has NO hardware acceleration. I am hoping one day to have acceleration available that is good enough for production use).

    files/e17_movie-02.avi
    files/e17_mov

  • stunning (Score:5, Informative)

    by gimpimp ( 218741 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:06PM (#11757312) Homepage
    the vids on his site are amazing! the theme he's got on there is ugly as sin, but seeing through that and looking at the tech behined the whole thing, and you see what the future could be.

    all the nice effects that mac and longhorn will be doing next year could be tied into xorg/gnome within 6 months.

    all rasters stuff is on freedesktop.org, so it's all open.

    in a perfect world, someone like novell would hire raster to work with the gnome xorg devs. get evas+cairo into the desktop stack, and have gnome 2.12 running with some amazing eyecandy.

  • I got a message from the Rasterman (Score:3, Funny)

    by sulli ( 195030 ) * on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:12PM (#11757389) Journal
    I'm happy, hope you're happy too...

  • looks like rasterman should be a bit pro-active (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    about letting other developers know that he and the project exists.

    I mean to most people his next-gen enlightenment desktop shell is going to come out around the same time that Duke Nukem Forever game comes out.

    Maybe, I don't know, be nice and try to get the attention of other developers. I understand that they are doing cool stuff, and tried it out myself a couple months ago.

    but I get the impression that enlightenment just likes operating out of a vaccum.
    • That's exactly how I feel. I used to use E16 back when I used GNOME 1.x, but I always felt like the E development process was a black box. Eventually I moved to GNOME 2.x (where E16 didn't work so well), and later to Xfce, and it's like it's all been very quiet.

      The E community seems very closed. That's not to say they aren't welcoming of new members, just that they don't reach out. At all. They don't appear to participate in any of Freedesktop's [freedesktop.org] activities, and tend to keep to themselves, plodding al

  • E17 in the Gnome Desktop Environment (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PineHall ( 206441 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:26PM (#11757536)
    E17 is a window manager. Can it replace metacity and run in the Gnome Desktop Environment?

  • fame? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:26PM (#11757540)
    More like infamy - at least to anyone that's followed E's development for any significant period of time.

    Get something working, then throw it out and start over. Repeat constantly until any semblance to the original working copy is destroyed and all their dedicated beta (alpha/cvs) users are alienated to the point of not even using the "stable" (beta) E release.

    That said, the Enlightenment team has turned out some amazing work (imlib2, etc.), and it's a shame to see the recycling destruction that takes place. If they were to be lest "artistic" and concentrate more on getting something working for the masses "out the door", E would still be an incredible and highly-advanced wm. We'd likely also have a slew of 3rd party apps built with imlib2 (et al), all on top of technology which would blow away gtk and qt. It's really too bad nobody forked the project and took what was good from E as they went along to create something perminant.

  • Enlightenment support (Score:5, Insightful)

    by freelunch ( 258011 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:30PM (#11757584)
    Last Fall, I had a serious focus bug in Enlightenment (e16) that would lock my mouse to a particular region of the screen and require X server restarts. It would usually happen at the worst time, when I was working fast (busy!).

    I worked with e-team member Kim Woelders on the problem and he produced a couple of patches after I sent him some good reproducible test cases. We exchanged a total of 39 email messages and it was finally fixed. I'd usually have a patch within 24 hours of sending him a test case.

    All of that while they are busy trying to get e17 out. The work that the team does is amazing and I am very grateful.

    To say that I am a fan is an understatement!

  • my favorite part... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pohl ( 872 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:32PM (#11757599) Homepage
    The videos are very nice. I'd love to see X11 modernized in this way (so long as the right abstractions are put into the right layers). My favorite part about this story, though, is how Rasterman's post jaws on about how all of this stuff is already done...that sentiment juxtaposed against the first video is hilarious:

    About --> Enlightenment...

    ...and a dialog box pops up that says "version 0.16.999.001". I've never used E, so maybe the version number isn't funny in Rasterman's world...but it's funny in mine.

  • flames will abound (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hEpen ( 96597 )

    but this is why i switched to mac os x. one, i had the cash to drop on a powerbook. and two, i love the beautification that apple decided to do to the desktop.

    when i use linux i use enlightenment because of the same reason. when it comes down to it, i surf, read email, listen to music, and use terminals to connect to the boxes i work on. so any OS will do.

    that given, i want my sh!t to look good. i want my apps to work happily together like the brady bunch. and they should look better than than the

  • Where's the usability? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TuringTest ( 533084 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:33PM (#11757615) Journal
    Ok, I know that the Enlightment project is more about creating a graphic toolkit that a complete environment for end user. But having the technology doesn't mean that you could use it.

    For what I've seen the window manager "experience" is far away from something pleasable, after the Wow factor is over. I've never been a fan of wallpaper drop-down menus, in WM nor in other "1st generation" window managers (those that have been on Linux for a long, long time without major usability revisions). Just how many times does he open a two level menu just to check/uncheck the gadgets "edit" mode?

    Also I remember that the E desktop had to be configured through hand-editing the text files. Although they promise that "It will provide nicely integrated GUI elements for managing your desktop elements, both files and windows", if this elements are as annoying to use as the dropdown menu then the environment will not have a good workflow.

    It's great to have a wonderful platform to build upon. But until something that I can use is actually built, I'm not downloading this.
    • Enlightenment's objetive is not to be a gnome/kde equivalent, but a set of graphics libraries and a window manager - never a "complete desktop" like gnome or kde are.
      • Enlightenment's objetive is not to be a gnome/kde equivalent, but a set of graphics libraries and a window manager - never a "complete desktop" like gnome or kde are.

        And that's why I'm not using it, and why it's a different beast than the promised next generation graphic engines of G'n'K. Those i will use when/if they are sometime ready, because I want an integrated desktop environment more than I want a beautiful bells and whistles presentation. I already can use Flash for that, thanks.
  • someone can put torrents of the videos?

  • the circle is complete (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SQLz ( 564901 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:37PM (#11757658) Homepage Journal
    Rasterman left Redhat because he felt noone there really followed his vision of an X desktop. Here we are years later and we've come full circle. Now, many (if not most) users in the community are looking for highly customizable desktop eyecandy and Gnome, KDE, and Xorg are all out there trying to deliver on what Rasterman was doing 3 years ago.
  • As suggested in this previous comment [slashdot.org]...

    What about starting from an API that's already got OpenGL bindings and acceleration, and using GNUstep instead of inventing a new library?

  • ...copy of Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month so he can figure out why the code he wrote years ago isn't being used.

    Hint: Get the payroll sheet of an established software product company. Count up the number of programmers on the sheet. Also ask the programmers how much of their time is spent typing code. Put your findings into the context of the overall company. Solve for X.

  • But isnt Rasterman the guy that wrote UltraHLE?

  • Ignorant questions (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wonkavader ( 605434 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @01:53PM (#11757835)
    I' reading these posts, and I'm confused, probably because they're addressing different issues than I'm focused on when I think of X. And because I don't know enough about X.

    I think the problem with X is not features, and libraries on top of it, but rather that the basic core concept in an X display is a bitmap.

    The problems with this are: slow communications, and lack of scalability on different displays. The classic cure for this was display Postscript, which had problems of A. Copyright, B. Bloat, C. Large blocks files of code to do small things, D. Arcane syntax.

    There has to be a better way. But what I'm seeing here is all applications and libraries for use by applications on top of the bitmap based rendering. There are some things mentioned which I recall being replacements for this engine, but certainly Enlightentment DR17 is all on top of the X bitmap system, right?

    Any movement on chucking that in favor of a bitmap independant system?
  • some demo videos from mirrordot:
    here [mirrordot.com] and here [mirrordot.com]

    Does anyone know whether there are actual DR17 packages downloadable other than building it CVS?

  • the cathedral and the bazaar (Score:5, Insightful)

    by joeytsai ( 49613 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @02:11PM (#11758051) Homepage
    First of all, did I just read a story that gave all the background to Rasterman's response, but left out the actual response itself? Nice.

    I've always liked the Enlightenment project, and I try to keep up-to-date with what's going on (which is not easy), but it seems pretty clear to me that it will not be the future of the Linux desktop.

    E is not really a valid option for the OSS world - I wouldn't be surprised if more people were using XFce or Rox than E at this point. Sure, Linux itself has proven that if something new and amazing comes around and blows everything away by a large margin it may have a *hope* of shifting the momentum, but as great as E is, I doubt it is that impressive.

    The reason why the framework Seth+Havoc describe will win over the E stack is because it is integrative, whereas E is not. When the next-generation X rendering system is in place, it will be available to everyone who uses those extensions. Probably by the time Damage + Composite are enabled by default on X, the latest KDE + gnome desktops will have support for them. And all the applications in those respective desktops will quickly (if not instantly) gain those advantages. Remember when the same thing happened with anti-aliased fonts a few years ago?

    Yes, you can get the E magic right now, but you have to go through E. As long as they remain the sole gatekeepers, you can expect them to have the same extremely limited influence they have now. At this point in the game, I seriously doubt they can beat the inertia from the other desktops. Honestly, if you're developing a new application, are you going to develop for the mature and distributed kde or gnome desktop environments, or will you use E, which is available now with some ephemeral advantages but some serious disadvantages?

    It's also true that by using E you're not committed to using _only_ E, but then, what's the point? If you use E + some random GTK application, you're not going to get the consistent graphical features until GTK itself gets those features... but at that point all gnome applications will have them.

    The example of the Cathedral and the Bazaar is a good metaphor for these differing stacks. It seems to me the E project has always been fiercly exclusive in the way it does things - the whole Enlightenment Foundation Libraries are the best example of reinventing the wheel with E technologies. But the cost they've paid is limited deployment, slower releases, less interest and a rather narrow development strategy. Certainly that may suite some people fine. However, with that in mind I don't know how reasonable it is for Raster to be calling sour grapes.
  • He's completely correct about E and all the cool stuff it does NOW, and will do. The problem is that the project lives its entire life on the CVS and dev-list. They need a PR person on the dev-team that will let people in on what's going on.

  • eye candy isn't the main purpose of a desktop (Score:3, Informative)

    by idlake ( 850372 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @02:28PM (#11758221)
    I know this is hard to understand for some, but eye candy isn't the primary purpose of a desktop, usability is. A desktop using just black-and-white pixels can be far more usable than one with shadows, transparency, and all those other features.

    Also, people should remember that neither Apple nor Rasterman invented features such as the use of translucency, blurring, shadows, etc.--they go back many years in the academic literature as visual clues.

    Furthermore, support for translucency itself has been discussed in the X community pretty much since the day X11 was released, and the reason for not adding it has been a high cost/benefit ratio. It's only now that hardware has gotten cheap and good enough that many people can use this, and that toolkits are starting to use it, and that people have the software engineering side under control that people are getting around to adding this feature to X11. From a practical point of view, that's probably about the right time.

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