Hawaii Desktop Stable Released, Powered By Qt 5.2 & Wayland 137
An anonymous reader writes "The Maui OS Project has made their first stable release of the Hawaii Desktop. Hawaii is still catching up with GNOME, Xfce, and KDE in terms of features, but it's written from scratch atop next-generation open-source technologies. In particular, Hawaii 0.2.0 is powered by the brand new Qt 5.2 tool-kit and runs natively on Wayland's Weston 1.3 compositor. Hawaii 0.2.0 carries all standard Linux desktop features but more advanced desktop functionality is planned while focusing around a Wayland design and eventually their own Green Island Compositor."
"next generation" my ass! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:"next generation" my ass! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"next generation" my ass! (Score:4, Funny)
Sadly, web monkeys really do believe this even if the parent is joking (and one really, really hopes they are joking).
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I imagine that if there were anything else, you'd be using it.
[John]
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Why would you use C# to replace Javascript? I can possibly see it as a replacement for Java though. Are you misunderstanding the difference between the two?
[John]
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I might consider using C# as a back end replacement for php assuming it has support to access a database like mysql but certainly not as a client side replacement for javascript. C# is a Microsoft scripting language that's equivalent to things like Perl, Python, and PHP. It would be something I'd use if I were more familiar with programming Windows type applications. Since I'm a Unix admin, I'm more likely to use Perl for general scripting and PHP for my backend work on websites simply because it's what I'm
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java would do as an alternative also. not quite sure why it's gone out of fashion .
Because Sun blew the design of the class libraries. The language and its APIs are too expensive to learn and manage, and the JRE requires too much processor specific tuning to run effectively everywhere, so the language, Java, sucks for clean development, it is security through obfescation, and dicy performance in many places.
Sun sold it to the corporate glass houses because it was clunky and hard to learn. If you don't believe me, look at acm.jar, the alternative interface for the top level cousole. Tha
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Because most of the alternatives to Javascript suck more.
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The problem is what QT isn't web scale [youtube.com]!
Re:"next generation" my ass! (Score:4, Funny)
Why would QuickTime need to be web scale?
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Waiting for it to mature (Score:5, Funny)
I'll check it out when Hawaii reaches 0.5.0, and it better have the theme song play when I log in.
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Yeah they haven't even got screenshots yet.
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Yeah, but if you give it one wrongly typed command you get voted off the island by the lolcats and your terminal session is terminated.
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No qemu or vmware support because drivers. No nvidia support except for nouveau which is not happy on my cards. Hopefully 0.5.0 will have these features as well ;)
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"Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"
Network Transparency ... solved (Score:2)
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RDP is not the same as network transparency. It is the opposite of the network transparency.
With X you can run side by side on the same physical screen applications from the different servers.
Anyway. I think that Wayland is similar to tablets: it is targeted at consumers, not power users or engineers.
Who knows, by the time the Wayland matures FreeBSD might improve hardware support and finally run well on new hardware. Not only that would mean I get to keep the X but I also would get much better audio
Re:Network Transparency ... solved (Score:5, Funny)
sed s/sed/said/
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Personally I think we should save the "Wayland is better than X at everything" stuff until it HAS been implemented. Not doing so makes me associate Wayland with some of the more clueless idiot fanboys on this site no matter what the current merits of Wayland are.
Re:Network Transparency ... solved (Score:5, Interesting)
" You have no idea what "network transparency" really means."
No... you don't.
Me*: Network transparency means that applications can render graphics to a local terminal or over a network with zero changes in code path and zero need to know anything about the underlying rendering model. Therefore, any remotely modern version of X.org is by definition not network transparent since every since modern local rendering technique such as DRI and compositing is completely incompatible with the fallback socket-based path that is used for networking remote X programs. Consequently, modern X is not network transparent and people who can't understand that just because it is still possible to send X pixmaps over a network socket in a kludgy manner does not mean X is "transparent" should maybe do some research on how X actually works instead of hurling insults.
Modern X-remoting is effectively pushing pixmaps over a socket in an inefficient manner. It is fundamentally different than the modern composited rendering path that effectively bypasses 99.9% of the original X server and is where Wayland is going. Additionally, if X were so beautifully perfect at network transparency then using it over a WAN connection wouldn't be one of the leading causes of suicide in network administrators and proxies like NX would never have come into existence.
Where "Me" includes the X.org developers including Keith Packard BTW.
You: "I MADE PRETTY PICTURES GO OVAR INTARNETS!! DARR!! NETWORK TRANSPARENT! SINCE SOME TYPES OF RDP ONLY TRANSFER DESKTOPS NOT INVIDUAL WINDOWS RDP NOT NETWORK TRANSPARENT!! DAR!!! X DEVELOPERS ARE STOOPID AND DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT X!!! DAR!!"
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Network transparency means that applications can render graphics to a local terminal or over a network with zero changes in code path and zero need to know anything about the underlying rendering model. Therefore, any remotely modern version of X.org is by definition not network transparent since every since modern local rendering technique such as DRI and compositing is completely incompatible with the fallback socket-based path that is used for networking
remote X programs.
No, you are confusing various things. DRI and compositing are different concepts. XRender is perfectly network transparent. OpenGL can also be used over the network via GLX. DRI allows direct access to graphics hardware and is not network transparent, but this is an optimization for local use.
Consequently, modern X is not network transparent and people who can't understand that just because it is still possible to send X pixmaps over a network socket in a kludgy manner does not mean X is "transparent" should maybe do some research on how X actually works instead of hurling insults.
glass house, stones, etc.
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Thanks. I'll check it out.
Couple of quick questions, if you would allow.
From the description it seem to require special RDP server (FreeRDP 1.0). Is that so? Or would it work with the plane Win7 remote desktop service? (Fastest for me to test.) (I'm not sure that our RHEL boxes have the RDP service at all.)
Does it support several connections/applications in parallel? The normal Windows RDP allows only one connection, kicking out previous connection is necessary.
Re:Way behind! (Score:5, Interesting)
X works on my operating system.
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> Other than network transparency, what exactly of value does X do that Wayland doesn't?
How about multiple displays? This is a handy feature for when one of your apps (Steam) like to take over your entire screen.
Wayland either needs to support the old way of doing things or have a new way of doing things that's a suitable replacement. Sandboxing apps written by developers with a single user OS mindset would not be a bad genuine "killer feature".
"Gets rid of that vile thing called X" is not a killer featu
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Yeah right, just look how abysmal it performs:
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/ [valvesoftware.com]
Left 4 Dead 2 on Windows 7 with Direct3D drivers, we get 270.6 FPS as
OpenGL implementation on Windows. Left 4 Dead 2 is now running at 303.4 FPS
Left 4 Dead 2 is running at 315 FPS on Linux.
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That's mostly proving that OpenGL is fast. Which it is. You know one of the major reasons *why* OpenGL is fast? Because it practically bypasses your X server in order to get anything done.
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Right. The X doesn't do much. It is also not slow for what it does. So why replace it?
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Decades of backwards and forwards compatibility. The real question is: What does Wayland offer?
And yes, I think it is stupid to design in 2013 a display protocol which is not network transparent at its core. In a world where internet is finally everywhere, and X (if embraced) would allow to move a game from smartphone to TV when coming home. Or a text window from notebook to tablet for discussion around a table, or .... And no, RDP does not cut it.
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Decades of backwards and forwards compatibility. The real question is: What does Wayland offer?
And yes, I think it is stupid to design in 2013 a display protocol which is not network transparent at its core. In a world where internet is finally everywhere, and X (if embraced) would allow to move a game from smartphone to TV when coming home. Or a text window from notebook to tablet for discussion around a table, or .... And no, RDP does not cut it.
But by that standard X is not network transparent at its core. Anyone using X on a desktop (GTK, QT apps) will be using the SHM, Randr, XVideo, XInput2 etc extensions which means that after start-up a typical application is not using much of the core protocol. When you try to use one of these applications over a network the toolkits fall back to using the core X protocol just to blast lots of large pixmaps down the wire, because the core X11 protocol graphics is so outdated it just can't handle alpha blendi
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Turning off my techie and programmer sides for a moment, what I do know as a user is that, regardless of whether or not the things I run are causing any of those to be invoked, all the X apps I run are indeed pragmatically absolutely network transparent. If I run gedit or kate remotely on the LAN, it is just as re
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That's X culture i.e. Unix culture more than it is X itself. If they were genuinely implementing using X you wouldn't be happy. What you are happy about is they care to make remote work well. I don't think that's going away. With a separation of protocols so that Unix developers have an explicit: local, LAN and WAN solution it will be much easier than having a LAN solution and then throwing a local solution on top and trying to get that to work and then some gimmicks to make WAN work....
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Monolithic instead of modular is not necessarily sane it just looks better in block diagrams. The original proposal for Wayland (one toolkit, one unalterable window manager, linux only by design) is not really what I would call sane but it has developed into a more modular idea and become more sane - a bit like X really :)
This keeps getting repeated but seems to be a misrepresentation of Kieth Packa
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But by that standard X is not network transparent at its core. Anyone using X on a desktop (GTK, QT apps) will be using the SHM, Randr, XVideo, XInput2 etc extensions which means that after start-up a typical application is not using much of the core protocol.
That X11 had been designed to be extensible is one of its strength. That there is special support to make all overhead go away for local client does not seem to be something bad to me. As you correctly point out: this is transparent to most applications:
When you try to use one of these applications over a network the toolkits fall back to using the core X protocol just to blast lots of large pixmaps down the wire, because the core X11 protocol graphics is so outdated it just can't handle alpha blending, properly hinted fonts and so on.
You seem to be confused. X has been extended for example with XRender which supports alpha blending. But this has nothing to do with network transparency, XRender is perfectly network transparent.
How is that different from RDP, except that RDP was designed and heavily optimized for that use case (and yes, RDP can send individual windows, not just the whole desktop).
The important part is to realize that showing graphics remote
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X doesn't allow that. X has frequent round trips. Which means over a WAN it is a very high latency protocol. The fixes for that have been to semi-shatter "network transparency". X can only work well on a mid latency setup, a LAN, the environment it evolved to handle. So no, X wouldn't allow
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In a world where internet is finally everywhere, and X (if embraced) would allow to move a game from smartphone to TV when coming home. Or a text window from notebook to tablet for discussion around a table, or .
X doesn't allow that. X has frequent round trips. Which means over a WAN it is a very high latency protocol. The fixes for that have been to semi-shatter "network transparency".
X allows that. You have to hack in at the client side, because no toolkit bothers to implement moving windows from screen to the others, but I did it for some of my applications. The same is true for roundtrips. The protocol is asynchronous, but toolkits use it in a synchronous way.
X can only work well on a mid latency setup, a LAN, the environment it evolved to handle. So no, X wouldn't allow you to do those things.
Worse it doesn't even allow you to do those things locally, Because one of the areas X also sucks at is complex graphics like TV and graphics and games.
What is wrong with OpenGL?
And that's because you can't share video buffers with applications buffers because it is client / server.
You mean DRI does not exist?
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I use CUDA for HPC. I also use X over the network everyday. Please don't educate me about bandwidth. Your point seems to be that sending OpenGL over the network is not a good idea and that it is better to send the rendering result. This is certainly true for many 3D applications such as games. Guess what. Both can be done with the X protocol. No need to break compatibility.
Another? (Score:1)
Another Desktop??? Can't we focus on getting ONE right?
The Right Desktop is.... (Score:4, Informative)
Another Desktop??? Can't we focus on getting ONE right?
If only Windows 8 users had that option; how many would have taken it? I have moved from a full time Gnome User(Driven away by Gnome Shell) to KDE(Great Applications\Themeing....Poor Desktop) to XFCE(Like Gnome 2 at its best, with some cravats/advantages).
The bottom line is there may not be One right, maybe many rights and many wrongs. Android is a great Phone OS but I would not like to use it full time as my Desktop...but to have access to its large catalogue of touchscreen games on GNU/Linux I would kill for, and there is no reason they can't run in a tradition WIMP environment.
Re: The Right Desktop is.... (Score:2)
Some cravats?
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I guess when he rated the desktops it was a tie.
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Another Desktop??? Can't we focus on getting ONE right?
Define 'right' for all users.
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The Common Desktop Environment obviously :)
I think Sun/Oracle don't even use that themselves now.
Boring WIMP (Score:2)
No its good old fashioned WIMP. The menu button shows large icons which is rubbish, but this is definitely a Desktop not a tablet interface.
They have pictures and everything.
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Click the first link, screenshots halfway down the page.
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Try this:
http://www.maui-project.org/ [maui-project.org]
What I'm not seeing immediately is what package manager they are using in their distro - is this Debian based, or Arch or what?
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They get it (Score:5, Interesting)
They have a main webpage with a clean design, and they explain what they do and why anyone in the target audience should care, without falling prey to corporate-speak. That alone bests more than 90% of previous desktop environments, yet is the bare minimum than any user-facing project should have. Plus, the FAQ and About pages actually explain their motivations rather than a few obscure technical details.
That "operating system, a suite of software that makes your computer run" made me shed tears of joy.
However you don't get it (Score:2)
The Judge threw that rubbish out in Microsoft vs Netscape and went with the textbook definition instead. It looks like the "beige box is the hard drive" crowd have won.
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That definition is not intended to win trials here, nor to be used in any technical context. Their choice of words means that their target audience is not the stereotypical Slashdot crowd.
It implies that we can install this environment to our families, and still hope to use it ourselves. Some of us believe it's a good thing, that the people who think "the beige box is the hard drive" can use computers. But not many developers know how to make a computer that they can use; making software easy to use is much
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Fair enough - so wrong makes you very happy for some reason. It don't get it. Why go for the weasel version invented to try to win a court case?
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Because it conveys the right message for the people hearing it. That's why MS used it -it's a very good definition for someone who doesn't program computers for a living. MS tried to derail the trail by dumbing down the tech details, which shouldn't have been done at the Court. This doesn't mean that hiding tech details is always wrong.
End users don't get any direct benefit from the OS- it's a tool for the developers, so users don't require any detail about it's inner working; they literally don't need
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s/trail/trial/ /know how an OS works /
s/know how an OS
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Sort of. I wouldn't call it a lie but, as it's true that all modern applications (the only parts of the computer the user interacts with) depend on the operating system to work.
No dice Eliza :) (Score:2)
Screenshots? (Score:4)
Re:Screenshots? (Score:5, Informative)
There are a few screenshots available on the Maui Project site: http://www.maui-project.org/#showcase [maui-project.org]
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No problem bro, I got you covered.
Hawaii Desktop images [bing.com]
Bad Marketing for Adaptation (Score:1, Insightful)
If they want people to try their they should atleast include an ISO. Sadly no ISO is available, so why will people waste time compiling the thing ?
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You mean like the image you get by going to their home page and clicking the download link [maui-project.org]?
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Is there a joke I am not getting? There is a download button on the front page that takes you right to a link for the Live ISO, along with instructions for how to burn the CD, if for some reason you want to be last century and not just use a USB flash image.
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Others have pointed out the existence of a download link, so allow me to point out that the project is at release 0.2. If you aren't willing to compile something at that release level, you should probably stay away from it.
Whats new here? (Score:2)
Why is it news that someone created yet another Linux distro with yet another permutation of packages? Why is it impressive that Hawaii "features a dynamic, flicker free and fast system"?
The summary mentions that theres potentially a new DE here, why are there no details on it?
Wayland hasn't died yet? (Score:2)
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And what track is this?
Please watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 [youtube.com] before you comment on Wayland.
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Cannot be run on VirtualBox (Score:2)
More like 66%...Yes Really? (Score:1)
Awesome. Another splinter in the already fractured 1% of PCs running Linux. That's how you win the market over.
You have not been paying attention. Linux installs outweigh windows 3 Times. Apple and Microsoft are giving the computing market away.
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Don't think it's fair to count Android devices as Linux, given that it's a very closed platform and doesn't have any of the basic functionality that most of us expect from a desktop operating system.
Though given the direction Microsoft and Apple seem to want to go with their desktop systems... maybe in a couple of years it'll be a fair comparison. :)
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servers sir don't need desktops ! and there we have high penetration, unfortunately companies are starting to right gui only installers for linux, we the server geeks don't want a damn desktop on our servers. we want to squeeze as much performance as we can out of the hardware !
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That, and it seems like the biggest headaches (but not all of them, systemd how I hate thee) are desktop related.
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For who?
For me the year of the Linux desktop was around 2000. (Red Hat 4.2) This was largely because of license changes by MS, but that was the year I switched over to Linux. My wife was already on Apple. Her year of the Linux desktop was around 2007. Because of changes in the Apple licensing, which meant that I no longer felt willing to do support work on an Apple system. And also because the music score editing programs on Linux had reached a bare minimum of acceptability. (She's still quite unsat