Fedora's OpenGL Composite Desktop

An anonymous reader writes "First we had Novell's XGL and Compiz technology, which allows for OpenGL-based composite rendering on the Linux desktop. Now Fedora has created the Advanced Indirect GL X project, which aims for similar desktop effects but with a simpler implementation. Sure, at the end of the day it's just eye candy, but make no mistake - the Linux desktop is due for a massive shake-up!"

"Just eyecandy"

I spend upwards of 10 hours a day staring at a computer screen; what I'm looking at had better be aesthetically pleasing.

It *does* serve a purpose - it makes my day that little bit more enjoyable. Decorating your house serves no real purpose (unless you're trying to sell it), but most people want something a little nicer than bare walls. People decorate their cubicles and offices - a photo here, a plant there.

I don't see why a desktop should be any different.

Re:"Just eyecandy"

Work's work. If you could dictate the asthetics of your work environment, I bet you'd have quite a different set of coworkers.

Re:"Just eyecandy"

Advantages of an OpenGL desktop:

• Zooming in on any part of the desktop while still being able to interact with it (for the visually impared, this is HUGE)
  
• Hardware support beomes much simpler.
  
• Window manager interaction involves less CPU
  
• SVG rendering can go straight to OpenGL for better rendering performance
  
• Support for alpha blending (for PNG, anti-aliasing, gimp, etc.) is much lower overhead and easier to support universally
  

What about X11 acceleration?

How does this relate to the ongoing accelerated X11 efforts?

Comparison to Novell's XGL effort

From the FAQ, How is this different than XGL?

"XGL is a different X server. This is a more incremental change which is slated to become part of Xorg. We don't believe that replacing the entire X server is the right path, and that improving it incrementally is a better way to modernize it. After talking to people at xdevconf, it felt like much of the upstream Xorg community shares this view. You can search Adam Jackson's notes [freedesktop.org] for "large work for Xgl" to get the blow-by-blow or NVidia's presentation from XDevConf 2006 [nvidia.com] on using the existing model.

We've been working on the AIGLX code for a some time with the community, which is in direct contrast with the way that XGL was developed. XGL spent the last few months of its development behind closed doors and was dropped on the community as a finished solution. Unfortunately, it wasn't peer reviewed during its development process, and its architecture doesn't sit well with a lot of people.

The other question is Wait, can I use compiz? The answer there is a theoretical yes, although no one has actually gotten it to work. We love compiz and we think it's great stuff and is well polished, but it's often confused with the underlying architecture of XGL. Much like the code that we've added to metacity, compiz is a composite manager. With a bit of work, it should be possible to get compiz working on this X server. There's an excellent post from Soren [gnome.org] on the topic of compiz vs. metacity."

OpenGL a big win

Having increased OpenGL support for Linux and gathering development support for advanced graphics toolkits will be a big win for Linux desktop. Having a sexy and slick interface has helped make OSX very popular. Sexy graphics for Linux will open new possibilities for interfaces, data display, games, and more.

Let us pay homage to Silicon Graphics, the originators of OpenGL. They may not live out the year.

Screenshots

How can they talk about graphics advances without screenshots? I believe the term used these days is "TTIWWP".

-Jesse

Re:Screenshots

How can they talk about graphics advances without screenshots? I believe the term used these days is "TTIWWP".

They can get away with not giving you screen shots because they give [gnome.org] you [gnome.org] movies [gnome.org]

Not again

I'm not liking where this is headed. Now we've got Xgl, Aigl and whatever Luminocity used.

Why couldn't they just standardize on Xgl? It works *today*. Aigl doesn't even support my nvidia card right now.

Re:Not again

Your nVidia video card doesn't support Aigl, you mean. It's missing an extension that nVidia is adding in the next driver release. This is hardly a show-stopper. Indeed, from the article, nVidia seems to believe this is the way to go.

-Erwos

Re:Not again

The underlying foundation of XGL is exactly what a compositing window system needs --- a generic OpenGL stack that unifies control of the GPU into a single multclient-aware driver. Yes, it complicates the driver. The driver needs to properly handle and schedule multiple rendering clients, it must manage do good memory management and video memory virtualization, and it must properly handle synchronization of rendering. However, handling these things properly is The Right Solution. Aiglx just perpetuates the driver sharing lunacy that exists now, which is something that OS X and Vista will get rid off.

Re:Not again

Please visit http://developer.nvidia.com/object/xdevconf_2006_p resentations.html [nvidia.com] and check out NVIDIA's presentation: "Using the Existing
XFree86/X.Org Loadable Driver Framework to Achieve a Composited X Desktop":

In this paper, we make the case for using the existing XFree86/X.Org DDX loadable driver framework to achieve a production-quality composited X desktop, as opposed to the X-on-OpenGL model. While the X-on-OpenGL model demonstrates what the graphics hardware is capable of, everything that the X-on-OpenGL model can achieve is equally possible with the current framework. Furthermore, the current framework offers flexibility to driver developers to expose vendor-specific features that may not be possible through the X-on-OpenGL model.

video card support?

I'm as excited as the next guy about new sexy UI for linux.... and certainly apple's rather posh desktop has helped them out..... but how excited should we be when clearly only a small number of video adapters currently work ? ~~~ Video card status Here is the current status as far as we know. We also intend to release driver updates in the yum repository as we get those cards to work. If your card isn't supported, come back later to see if we've added support. Note that this support status only affects new functionality; everything should work as well as it did before with the compositing manager disabled. Success and failure updates to this page are welcome. Known Working ATI: Radeon 7000 through 9250 (r100 and r200 generations) Intel: i830 through i945 Occasionally / Possibly working Intel: i810. Should work but not tested. 3dfx: voodoo3 through voodoo5. Might need NV_texture_rectangle emulation. Known to not work ATI: Radeon 9500 through X850 (r300 and r400 generations). Some issues with rectangular textures may be fixed in new DRM CVS, need to verify. ATI: Rage 128. Looks like driver locking issue. ATI: Mach64. No DRM support in Fedora, still insecure. Matrox: MGA G200 to G550. Needs at least a driver update to fix DRI locking. PCI cards probably have other issues as well. nVidia: Any. No open DRI driver. Closed driver support coming soon though. 3dfx: Voodoo 1 and 2. No DRI driver. ATI: Radeon 8500 through X850 with the closed fglrx driver. Uses an ancient version of the DRI driver API that can't work with the new driver loader. No ETA on closed driver support. Anything without a free 3d driver. Unknown status via, s3 savage, sis. No intrinsic reason why these wouldn't work, as far as we know, but no one has tested them yet. ~~~

Interesting applications

It'll certainly be interesting to see effects like those of 3dDesk [sourceforge.net] the norm, rather than the exception. Also, if anyone else has played with it they might have noticed that it essentially works with lowish-res images of the desktop rather than the windows and icons themselves - you can notice it in some of the modes, there's a definite switch between the desktop itself, and the image of the desktop (in both directions). Having something fully integrated will open up many new possibilities... ...and on the same note, it's a challenge to designers to use them in a truly worthwhile way. While I agree with that eye candy does make a difference, it can also make a difference in a bad way when clueless designers turn to snazzy effects to make up for lack of basic competence (viz. many many webpages). It's the difference between

"Let's make improvements to X - ooh, that new 3D stuff could help with that"

and

"Wow, that 3D stuff sure is snazzy! We'd best think up a way to get it into our next release."

Now I'm certainly not saying that this is bad news, far from it in fact, but I can imagine there'll be temptation there to use it at any cost (especially once it starts making its way into competing projects). Hopefully interface designers will embrace the new possibilites open to them and give us some genuinely useful/nice improvements.

How about actually letting us use Scaled Windows

I am absolutely irate with respect this project and XGL and even expose on the mac. Heaven forbid they let use scale a window and keep it scaled. I don't mean resize, I mean zoom in and out of ONE window. Imagine how useful that will be for tiled window managers, if we can scale windows we don't need to worry about the app handling resizing right.

DEVELOPERS PLEASE STOP WORRYING ABOUT THE EYE CANDY AND THINK ABOUT FUNCTIONALITY.

3 dimensional color-shifting fonts for xterm!

hmmm.....would that nessessarily be a good thing?

A practical use for a 3D Accelerator!

Other than playing games & 3D apps that a small fraction of users use having a Open GL-accelerated desktop makes having a 3D card more than a luxury.

Further Clarification

The article mentions that XGL made some architectural decisions that some people disagree with, and that AIGLX is a more "incremental" design. Does this mean that AIGLX is Yet Another Extension Bolted On to X?

Unfortunately, although I've picked apart many XFree86 device drivers, I don't know very much about the architecture of X and X servers. Could someone give a thumbnail sketch of the issues at stake, and the tradeoffs?

Schwab

A good step, but not the end game...

A good step, but not the end game...

The project has a good concept model, not to destroy XWindows with a rewrite; however, this will considerably limit any real advancement into a comprehensive environment.

I see this as more of a test bed, and partial stepping stone; however there are many issues not being addressed that just need to be ripped apart and rethought out, and this CAN be done without destroying the existing environments.

Part of the problem of Bringing any 3D GPU functions to the desktop is the nature of Video cards, and they are designed to operate in a 2d accelerated mode and a full 3d accelerated mode, with both aspects of the cards not mixing normally.

What this leads to is an environment that mimics the 2D acceleration features in the 3D mode, and turns the Video card into 3D mode full time.

Strangely, what will help this push for full time 3D utilization or cross utilization is work being done at company people really don't like, Microsoft.

Microsoft is pushing both ATI and NVidia to move their Driver technology to allow for overlapping of the two operational modes, and also adding in virtualization of the GPU RAM space - the WDDM/LDDM that will ship with Vista, as it will be the first consumer OS that has a full time 3D accelerated accessible UI environment active.

Also by virtualizing the GPU RAM, Vista drivers (WDDM) are pushing the cards to pull off some interesting tricks, like pushing to System RAM lower priority applications Video, without out of memory considerations - Just like Virtual Memory on Hard Drive did years and years ago, and leaving a full 3D environment and 'appearance' of GPU RAM continually available to applications no matter how many remain active.

Video RAM of the old days was basically having enough RAM to display the resolution and depth for the screen you were displaying, but in the 3D world, GPU RAM is filled with textures, etc - so this mixing and virtualization process has been a long time coming, and surprisingly, Microsoft if the company helping NVidia and ATI get it working at the driver level.

Now for the good news, Microsoft has been generous to ATI and NVidia in the driver development process and in doing so has given both companies a lot of information and technology they would not of had access to from the multi-app OS environment viewpoint.

So all the cool new functions of the WDDM that is being developed for Vista should eventually flow back through both NVidia and ATI and their own driver technologies for supporting these concepts in other OS environments.

However, as I started out and still believe, this technology from the article, and even going full OpenGL desktop is not a complete answer. A full OpenGl desktop will be problematic when you want to run a 'windowed' version of Quake in for example, as the applicaiton will be expecting to have full control of the OpenGL/GPU and not expecting the first priority to be going to the Desktop Environment.

So to get to the full OpenGL desktop is going to break a lot of existing 3D applications in the *nix/OpenGL world, or a technology to bridge this is going to have to come about. A technology that maybe sucks info from ATI and NVidia and Microsoft even to emulate what Vista is pulling off.

Why not different backgrounds for workspaces?

One nice eye-candy and which would be usefull too, would be to be able to have different backgrounds for each of my workspaces. Why has this never been implemented? CDE has this! I read about all these efforts to implement complex eye-candy, but simply having different backgrounds for each workspace would, I believe, relatively easy to implement. I am using Gnome here.

Wanted to see the demo movies

But they are in ogg format. Didn't even know there was a ogg video format. As long as the Linux world continues to alienate those using Windows, I don't care about it.

I.e. Make the vides in WMV or even just avi or divx format and then let all the billions of PC users see what they are missing and possibly want to move over to Linux, instead of just catering to the millions of linux users that happen to use OGG. Its like preaching to the choir, they already heard that sermon thousands of times.

WMP plays ogg in 2 1/2 easy steps

http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/ [illiminable.com]

# Uninstall any previous version of these filters.(This is important!) Go to add remove programs, remove oggcodecs
# Make sure media player or any directshow applications are closed.
# Run the installer.

Then Windows Media Player or any other directshow application (eg. BSPlayer) will be able to play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, Ogg Theora, Ogg FLAC and native FLAC."

You're welcome.

The "eye candy" mentality

Having watched the movies, I am greatly unimpressed. The reason the Mac UI works so well is that its eyecandy is a method of subtly including information that might otherwise be lost. For instance, when you minimize a window in MacOS (if I remember correctly), it slides down to a nice little parking place on the dock. In the first movie, the minimized document shrinks down in a nifty animation but shows no relationship between it and the button at the top of the screen. The second movie solves this problem (so why even have the first) but is slow (can you imagine minimizing eight windows? What a mess!).

Similarly, in the third example -- what information is being given to the user by fading the menus? I'm not sure what it is; instead, it just looks messier, and therefore less useful.

A side note: I knew this whole "No! Vorbis is the format! OGG is just the container" idea would bite me on the ass some day, and it looks like today's the day. I clicked on the movie links only to have my Winamp playlist destroyed. Even worse, Winamp didn't even know how to play the file. Is there a solution to this absurd problem?

Everything

as a developer, I want to be able to write one application, and have it run on all three systems. Its great that they are integrating opengl more and more into linux, as long as they normalize it such that it can be used by an API transparently (Ex. SWT/LWJGL for java, which i use.. and it works really well). If they dont, it wont be that useful because no one will be inclned to take advantage of it... Unless they arent lazy, (me) or they have a big room with a lot of developer monkeys constantly implementing different application/interfaces for different platforms.

Goose for the gander

It's amazing that when Vista has new eye candy its bad but when Linux has it it's good!?

Re:Goose for the gander

Vista's eye candy has tremendous system requirements. On X, if you can offload window operations to an OpenGL compositor, you save a significant number of CPU cycles.

Yes, there is a difference. Take a look at your system. Turn off NVIDIA's custom render accel, and watch X's CPU usage while moving windows around, or resizing, or scrolling.

Install XGL, or this new Fedora thing.

Play a video on X, run a background compilation process, and then resize your video window. It'll stutter like mad. Try the same thing on XGL; its fluid. Watch all the fluid animations, and watch what happens to your CPU usage. With any accelerated video card (even ancient POS like Intel's i810, or Radeon 7500+, or older low-end Geforce) you'll see negligble CPU impact.

Contrast that with Vista's requirements for the full "Aeroglass" experience. You can do the same thing on XGL at a far, far lower cost of system resources.

One approach makes your computer faster. The other requires a faster computer. Understand?

Yay! Er.. Boo! Er... Yay!

Cool! Now Linux desktops can be as annoying as Windows XP.

No, wait.

Cool! Now Linux desktops can compete with Windows XP.

No, wait... ...how am I supposed to feel about this again???

Competition done right

Now we're seeing FOSS' killer application -- mix and match modularity. Obviously RH needs to respond to Novel's efforts or potentially lose market/mind share. Because the different approaches are built on a truely open platform, you don't have to ditch your current environment from the hardware on up in order to get the solution that is right for you. Competition to fill niches exposed by open API's works. Anyone can play. (And of course there's also the fact that someone can come along and distill the best of serveral solutions into a derivative FOSS work.) There's something quite satisfying about that, particularly in relation to much of the rest of the modern world.

Xgl Already Better than Mac and Vista

I don't mean to troll, but what the heck is wrong with the Fedora-type people that they think incrementally improving the X server is a good idea? I've looked into the source and its full of 30-year old code. The 'best practices' for a 0.1 MIPS machine is just cruft on a 1000 MIPS one.

The xgl people are actually rewriting the X server from scratch to use opengl. That is a much, much better idea, and it shows with what they can *already* do:

* virtual desktops on a cube
* popup effect for menus
* "gummi-bear" window effect when moving, sticks to other windows / side of screen
* translucenty
* gl screensaver on root window
* shadows
* fading
* magnification
* apple-style expose (show all windows non-overlapping)
* accellerated 3d games (quake) and movies
* make non-responsive windows go grey
etc

You can see the video at:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-Ja nuary/011922.html [freedesktop.org]
(click link for the movie)

This is I think using an existing Xserver to give an opengl window, which can be running a software opengl for unsupported cards, and then their xgl server using that as the opengl backend until the drivers are ready. Which basically means people will be able to get the eye candy slowly on computers and force nvidia/ati/intel to support the server with a driver. Eventually xgl gets a native opengl driver for you hardware and runs as a 'normal' X server (only without all the crap from 30 years of evolution).

Re:Xgl Already Better than Mac and Vista

XGL isn't a rewrite of the server. It's a rewrite of the DDX (device-dependent) portion. That's probably the best part of the server to rewrite though, given the DIX (device-independent) is relatively clean code. XGL doesn't get rid of X's cruftiest part, though, which is xlib. XCB is ready to be a replacement, but GNOME won't be able to move to it until 3.x, because Xlib is implicitly a part of the GDK ABI.

That said, I wouldn't say XGL is better than OS X yet. OS X can do the effects you listed, it just doesn't do a lot of them for asthetic reasons. Technically, I'd argue OS X's approach is superior to XGL's, since Quartz 2D Extreme uses a direct-rendering model as opposed to XGL's indirect model. Additionally, the fact that the compositor is seperate from the window server in XGL makes synchronization a much bigger PITA than in OS X. On the other hand, the indirect model allows the X server to access the geometry stream, which allows some effects the direct-rendering model doesn't. Technical merits aside, OS X still wins because its already a stable, mature, and widely used technology. It'll be awhile before XGL is as mature as Quartz (especially at the driver layer --- DRI is really not ready for XGL yet), and before GNOME/KDE apps use vector graphics as widely as OS X apps do.

Re:Xgl Already Better than Mac and Vista

That's disappointing news that they are not rewriting the whole thing, but only the hardware-dependent code. I hope you are on crack saying that the rest is "relatively clean" (maybe relative to the device-dependent X code???).

Some of the cruft:
* using the value of a constant in a comment (/* XLFG length is 255 */)
* form feeds (ctrl-l) in the code
* magic macros with many lines of hidden code side effects (BRESINCRPGON for example)... to avoid slowdowns on cpu-drawn lines and paths. Nobody does this anymore. It's all accellerated and anyway they use static inline (see linux kernel).
* massive argument lists (XRenderCompositeDoublePoly takes 12 arguments)
* massive #define of symbols, and thus massive switch statements (not in a table someplace!). try searching programs/xkbprint/psgeom.c for XK_ISO_Prev_Group_Lock.
* symbols artificially limited to 32 characters long because compilers back then were dumb.
* supid implementation decisions, for example inserting a 'fake' client request should be a one-liner (ala requests.addFirst(fakeRequest) but instead is 64 lines because it actually puts the data into the stream being read from the client.

I mean seriously, you just open up *any* file in the Xserver and it's just crap. I don't mean to diss the developers because a) it's a somewhat large undertaking and b) they didn't have the advantages of hindsight and c) they were using slow hardware. Still, I bet the NeWS server was much better despite being made about the same time. Hopefully the device-dependent part will be done well enough that the Xserver can be rewritten in something modern (Java, ObjectiveC, even C++).

Non-Metacity WMs?

Hopefully this will be something other WMs outside of Metacity will be able to take advantage of as well. Since until there's some decent working edge flipping in Metacity, I'll stick with Enlightenment.

Why features that most users want are pulled out (due to the opinions of a few) when they can just be turned off by those that don't like it I don't understand.

Choices and To Choose

If it was a mandatory thing I'm pretty sure there are many users who will find it useless and resource monster to use. That is the case with Windows operating system. You can't choose what technology and what you want on your desktop.

However this is Linux and here's where choices exist everytime. If you find it useless, just don't install/use it. If you need that eye candy, go for it, it's there for you to have fun.

That's why Free Software existed, people will have whatever they wanted not whatever vendor wanted. And its seen that Free Software is successfull in this aim admirably.

Won't this action dilute the whole project ?

Why should Red Hat go and start a seperate project to achieve more or less the same effects ? Can't they work with the XGL project team and improve on the existing code ? What good will re-inventing the wheel or duplicating the code help achieve? Reading about this takes me back to the 80s when the UNIX OS was severely fractured with applications working on one Unix flavor not running on another flavor of Unix. Even though Red Hat is doing a good thing, it is actually taking a step back by forking the project.

Vector Desktop? Please?

I haven't heard anything in quite some time about efforts to make a completely vector-based desktop, to work with high-dpi displays and the like. I want fully scalable widgets, hell, fully scalable applications. What ever happened to that? Or to using SVG icons for everything, with the possibility of having parameters in them, so that your trash bin would actually appear x% full instead of 'empty' or 'full'?

Resolution independent toolkits and window manager

If the open source desktops want to really steal a march on the Mac and Windows platforms we should design and build an entirely resolution independent environment.

If all UI elements were made from vector graphics you would just be able to set a level of 'zoom' on your display and choose to balance the amount of information on the screen with the sharpness of it's rendering.

Being able to dynamically change the level of zoom and manipulate relative window sizes would have the potential to make Mac OS X look like Windows 3.1.

Why have zoom tools in the applications when it could be in the OS and for every application?

Gui Desktop

Microsoft tied to the corperate desktop can't offer the heaviest of gui's

OsX and Aero Glass are raising the bar for consumer level graphics.

Back in the day I was running win2k and I saw Enlightenment it motivated me to dual boot Linux.

The interface wasn't the easiest but the Gui alone influenced me to try it out.

Linux could easily have the best Gui out there and since it doesn't have to be tied to the corperate ideals of colour co-ordination they Linux could be doing some really unique stuff.

Linux having the best GUI would be a not insignificant step towards linux making space for itself on the home and education desktop.

Not impressed

I've been running Xgl and Compiz on Ubuntu and I have to say, the Novell guys are way out in front of Fedora for this, Xgl is ready for primetime and runs nearly flawlessly for me. This looks more like sour grapes over Novell holding onto Xgl until nearly the last minute before opening it up to the community. While I don't agree with how Novell developed this, it's hard to argue with the product.

Dual Monitors

Will this support having more than one monitor? Every time I hear about new eye candy for Linux (I've tried composite and XGL), there's no support for dual monitors. It seems like everything cool breaks TwinView and Xinerama.

Yeah,

But can it make my computer look as good as Windows 3.11?

What about sub-pixel font smoothing?

I stare at text on the screen all day, and I really like small, smooth, sharp fonts. Small fonts that are just anti-aliased look blurry to me. But with sub-pixel font smoothing on an LCD, I am a happy camper.

All these 3D desktops (Linux and Vista) that allow smooth magnification/shrinking of windows or 3d transforms on windows can't possibly allow sub-pixel font smoothing to work right (as far as I can see). The best they can do is something like anti-aliasing, I would guess. I hope I am wrong.

Personally, if I have to choose between smooth sharp small fonts or 3D eye candy, I think I will stick with the nice fonts, thank you.

One up Novell?

My take on this is Redhat doesn't like that Novell got all the press and kudos for Xgl and is trying to get mindshare back.

Reasons for my viewpoint:

1) I prefer Redhat over Suse. (This isn't an ego post about me, so hear me out.) I use both, but of the two I like Redhat better. I've had bad luck with Suse and Novell seems to be having trouble turning into an opensource/Linux company. We use Groupwise at work and evolution and Suse and have problems. So given a choice I'll take Redhat since I've had good luck with them. However, after reading about Novell's Xgl contributions and checking them out, my impressions of Novell have greatly improved. I'm definitely much more open minded now about them than before. Redhat has always had the reputation for commercial distros that give back to the community. Now with Novell's contributions, Redhat has contribution competition (if that makes any sense.) They are no longer THE company when it comes to good charma in the community. Another company has given back a HUGE contribution and a VERY visible one at that. Now if a person who has stated his biad towards Redhat has now given second thoughts to Novell, what is a person who has no bias or preference either way likely to think.

2. They're not contributing to Xgl, but rather they came up with their own way and specifically stated is is different than Xgl.

3. Make specific points about doing it 'upstream', which resurrects the flame wars on the xorg mailing list about in-house vs inet cvs development.

4. Specifically mention how their approach is better than Novell's and how Novell's 'doesn't sit well with a lot of people.'

My humble opinion. Don't get me wrong, I still like Redhat but in this case I think this is more for PR good than community good.

Halt the damn presses!!

We need to nip this in the bud right here. My understanding is that this approach will still allow the same eyecandy but will lose the only REAL feature of XGL. A hardware accelerated desktop. Some of you like the eyecandy and transparent windows. That must be nice for you. The rest of us want a snappy and responsive desktop. XGL delivers that by hardware accelerating the entire xserver.

If my understanding is incorrect then by all means, enlighten me. If not, then please stop with differing standards and approaches and embrace the fully functional system in existance today.

P.S. Nvidia will use what they have to. They support this approach because it requires the less work on their part than XGL and therefore costs less money. Therefore, their opinion should be ignored and only the interests of the USERS should be considered.

ray traced window frames

Back before the turn of the century, when 100MHz was an unimaginably fast speed for a PC (probably late 1980's), I remember sitting in a meeting discussing rendering window decorations (frames, title bars, buttons etc) with drop shadows, and I suggested, sarcastically, why not raytrace [wikipedia.org] all the window decorations. People wrinkled their brows and laughed nervously.

XGL the future? Already here!

Yes, I'm using XGL, right at this very moment. I'm running a Ubuntu beta release, DapperFlight4, to which compiz and XGL have been isntalled. The forum post on how to get it installed is here: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=13126 7 [ubuntuforums.org]

It has also been reported to be working under Breezy Bager, but I'm not sure.

And let me say, it's damn slick. Not everything is working (or at least not enabled by default), such as trasnparency, and the top and bottom of the desktop cube are simply white. I'll try to figure out if they're broken or disabled. But what is working, is everything else.

Performance isn't the best. Theres some lagginess to DVDs, but only minor, and even less then expected when doing a wobbly-window move.

As a plug for Ubuntu, this is by far the best distro I have played with. Every other time I have tried to get myself to Linux I ran into unmovable road blocks. This thing, (a damn BETA release!) boots up first try with all hardware detected and running (even my Dell-supplied Broadcom wireless NIC). Then, I go install the nVidia 3D driver and an experimental windower and stuff works perfectly. Honestly, I don't think it could get much better than this.

Re:There go the distros again..

Making incompatible forks, each one trying to be different from another insetead of collaboring to rush development of unified tools.

What part of "This is code that was done entirely upstream in concert with the rest of the X community." do you not understand?

Re:Are we wasting our efforts?

allowing any user to load and install any application or hardware accessory

Isn't that part of the reason Windows is so insecure? Any user can install an application (when using default setup, as most people use), so the exploits can do more than screw with the user's home directory.

Re:There go the distros again..

Did you even RTFA? All the work was done upstream. Nothing's there that's Fedora specific.

-Erwos

Re:There go the distros again..

Blah. Is that so? How comes then the first the world hears of AIGLX was on OSNews, but I've been reading about XGL on the Xorg mailing lists and development forums for literally years. Red Hat may claim they've been luvvy duvvy community huggers over this, but I've been watching the developments in X very carefully indeed and XDevConf 2006 (!) is the first mention I saw of it.

Let's see. The GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension was developed jointly by David Reveman and some guys from nVidia, according to the credits on the spec. So not Red Hat. Reveman and Matthias Hopf have been everywhere on the X/Mesa mailing lists developing Xgl. The discussion and debate on the xorg list was all about Xgl and whether it should be the main focus instead of Exa. People who don't seem to be associated with any corp like David Airlie and Jon Smirl have been working on Xgl. The plan had seemed to be to move various parts of the driver code to do with initializing the cards into the kernel, use EGL as a simple GL interface that Xgl then ran on top of, with Xglx being a short term hack until that work was completed.

Now Red Hat appear, apparently with the backing of nVidia, saying that actually this plan - which had been discussed for ages - is a bad one, and they have a brilliant new plan. Oh and by the way Evil Novell have been hoarding code and not working with the community.

So when did this AIGLX work appear in CVS then? I don't recall reading about any such branch. Let's find out [freedesktop.org] shall we? Hmm, looks like it was committed in a massive checkin about a month ago. Did Kristian just magic this out of thin air one afternoon? I rather hope not.

So anyway, my point is that from my perspective what Red Hat are saying appears to be the exact inverse of the truth. Novell have been far more visible in the X community doing this sort of work than Red Hat have, they've done a lot of the upstream Mesa work necessary for it to be efficient, they've been demoing it at conferences and so on. And now Red Hat is here trying to claim they went off and did their own thing, with no real evidence to back it up.

And it's not just Red Hat, somehow Novell went off and created an entirely new window manager as they were testing what Xgl could do instead of extending an existing one. Oops! Bah. Huge, massive communications failure at best. Blatant NIH at worst.

Re:There go the distros again..

How is this an incompatible fork? According to the website, they're working with upstream X development to make this a part of or at least easily added to the regular X distribution. It's just that only FC5 has things setup just right so far.

-matthew

Re:Are we wasting our efforts?

Um, how about you stop telling other people what "we" (who is this we you speak of anyways) should be doing. Why dont you go get started on that and stop setting priorities for OTHER people

Re:There go the distros again..

I agree with above reactions to your question, and also you must understand that years ago it was do it all yourself or get a distro, they are the ones that made the platform Linux, the kernel is just the corepart.

So give them a break and time to merge their tech together, b.t.w. a lot of merging is being done through opendesktop.org last 2 years.

After years of relative standstill we saw a lot movement last 2 years. (especially since SCO reminded the world that Linux was worth a lot!)

Re:Are we wasting our efforts?

Why would I want to work on Active Directory compatibility? Why should I care about the "casual office user"? For that matter, why should I care about Linux being a mainstream option for the corporate desktop?

These things are boring to work on and don't benefit me at all. If you think they're important, perhaps you could work on them or hire somone to work on them. In the meantime, I'll be working on things that are relevent to me, e.g. eye-candy and development tools.

The concept of a unified Linux community is an illusion largely created by the GPL. It's really just a bunch of different organizations and people with diverging aims that all happen to be working with the same OS.

Re:There go the distros again..

While the article mentions that it was all upstream, I'll take a second to point out that it might not actually be in the individual distro's interest to always be the same as everyone else. If you offer something that's different and it catches on, you've differentiated yourself from the pack. That leads to increased market share and higher revenues. From a developer/user point of view, it's not a good idea. However, from a business standpoint, selling more and increasing your bottom line is eventually going to take precedent. The community mentality will only go so far for so long I think. I don't see Debian or Gentoo doing something like this, but I definitely see Novell, Red Hat, or even IBM eventually trying to do something to impress the shareholders. It's just human nature.

Re:Are we wasting our efforts?

Any application? So it doesn't require a tech to install cygwin? Also, can a regular user (without admin privileges) install software without jumping through hoops?

As far as hardware goes, the Linux model is actually easier than Windows. If a piece of hardware is supported in Linux, it's easier to install than in Windows. There are problems with drivers, but that may be more in terms of getting specifications than in writing drivers. Also, to what extent is programming fungible? Are the people working on the GUI the best ones for writing drivers?

one problem: viruses and malware

If Linux allowed anyone to install anything without having to think first, then you'd get what windows has: tons of viruses and malware. If it is easy to dupe people, then people will be duped. Unfortunately, this is the catch-22 for linux: how to achieve an install base like Windows while maintaining a Macintosh-like affinity with hackers, so that the user base won't get attacked.

Re:Are we wasting our efforts?

"Allowing any user to load and install any application or hardware accessory" is one of the pitfalls of Windows. Why would Linux want to adopt that flawed idea? I think Windows could benefit from adopting the mentality of asking for an admin password only when needed. (Before someone points it out, I know that the problem WRT Windows is more the fault of the applications than the OS, but MS apps are guilty too.) As far a the eye candy factor being the last issue, again look at the success of Windows. Do you think they got everything right and worried last about how it looked? I don't think so. To non-/.'s to use Linux, it's going to have to look pretty, and minimize the CLI need. I think Ubuntu has gone a long way toward this, but there's still a lot of work ahead, judging by my wife's reaction to it (she's definately a non-/.).

MOD PARENT UP

Holy crap are you sooooooooooooo right. MOD PARENT UP!!!

But do we want Linux to be mainstream? Or I should say, do Linux users/developers want Linux to be mainstream? I read some of the other responses to your posts (trolls...) and some of them make good points. Insecurity is bred by ease of use. Yet when I gave Linux a go two years ago I found it quite difficult to use (adding a hard drive, for example) and just plain awkward. I don't think it's *bad*, per se, but I think about my Mom, when I suggested getting a Dell to replace her current 7 year old computer, asking if she'll be able to shop online. She asked me that after I told her she could browse the web... :\

Not all users are like that, but if you want Linux to be mainstream, simple install, simple hardware addition, all need to be there.

But I reiterate, do you all *want* Linux to be mainstream?

...better than ATI

Well, I've used three laptops with ATI mobile chipsets and none of them have worked properly. Two AMD64, one Pentium-M. On the other hand, my own laptop with an NVidia-based GFX card has worked fine. I'm wondering what made Fedora move towards RedHat as opposed to NVidia... although perhaps it's just that the full open-source ATI drivers (reverse-engineered) have been better than the NVidia ones.

Re:Will ATI finally get FOSS friendly??

Nvidia is far from perfect, but they do a lot better than ATI when it comes to binary drivers and support.

Not sure why you are having a problem. I am using a 6200 on a x86_64(Intel in this case) system with the binary drivers, nvidia-glx-1.0.8178. I have a x86_64(Athlon X2) system at hoem with a 6600 using the binary drivers too.

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 6200 TurboCache(TM) (rev a1)

Re:From the FAQ, We Read...

Chances are, you care because it's pretty and pleasing to the eyes. If not, move along.

I don't see why your post refers to the question about how it affects application developers if you haven't written a line of code since GWBASIC. That tells me than anything to do with application development doesn't matter to you at all, anyway.

Re:Are we wasting our efforts?

What we need is a concerted effort from our worldwide developers to create better interoperability with Microsoft's Active Directory structure and better hardware compatibility.

Umm, that implies that you would have Linux desktops and Windows servers (for Active Directory). That seems like a rather improbable and inappropriate combination. Novell's eDirectory woudl be a much better choice of directories. Novell has been doing the directory thing for more than 15 years. eDirectory will even run on Linux and Novell already has significant integration (ConsoleOne, Groupwise, etc).

Trying to play catch up with a company like Microsoft is just a losing battle. Nobody wants to run a system that only aims to be compatable with another. IBM tried that with OS/2. One of its biggest features was that it was a "better Windows than Windows." Be that as it may, most people would just ask themselves, "Why don't I just run Windows?"

What's also missing is the "zero-user" configurability that Windows has, allowing any user to load and install any application or hardware accessory without needing to be a hardware tech. Linux need to be engineereed to be "smarter" for the casual office user.

Actually it is the other way around. Linux has "zero-user configurablity." That means regular users can't install hardware or software at will. Windows is (by default) open to all kinds of user initiated configuration changes. In a properly managed office environment, users are not permitted to install hardware or software at will.

-matthew

Re:Will ATI finally get FOSS friendly??

It's not that ATI is getting OSS friendly, it's that the Xorg radeon driver works for those cards. As you may have seen, cards above the 9250 are not supported, as they still have to deal with the drivers that ATI releases in-house, closed-source.

Re:From the FAQ, We Read...

Maybe you didn't read the question well: Q. How does this affect application developers?

Re:Ogg?

When I ran Windows I used to use oggcodecs: http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/ [illiminable.com].

Re:Are we wasting our efforts?

You are right, we should forbid X developers from working on X until your issues are solved.

What we should do is grab the X developers ( which some are volunteers, which are giving this away for free ) and force them to work on a Microsoft Active Directory clone. Given the extensive experience X developers have in directory service, forcing them to work on it is a no brainer.

What should happen is that all development on linux should stall until we get your issues solved. People with no interest whatsoever in Active Directory should be forced to work on it. This of course should include Gnome, KDE, and all of GNU products.

Also, Microsoft Active Directory is TOP priority, nobody in their house can do anything usefull without it. And it is well known that 87% of the desktop computers are using Active Directory.

so I agree, STOP WORKING ON X, YOU ARE KILLING LINUX

Re:Are we wasting our efforts?

What's also missing is the "zero-user" configurability that Windows has

Just because Windows tends to be easier to configure than Unix/Linux/BSD, doesn't mean that it has "zero-user" configurability. If you buy an OEM machine with an OEM Windows, then you don't need to configure it. But anything else and you're going to have to occasionally put on your "tech" hat.

already happening.

This is already happening.

Look at Ubuntu. I can take the install cd, and get a blank desktop up and running with no configuration. It will be able to get online, browse the web, and do word processing.

You can even install software without console (apt-get).

I managed to get my wife to run Ubuntu for several weeks without complaint. She ended up switching back to windows only because she had to use illustrator, photoshop, etc. This was before I started using Crossover Office, which runs these programs on Linux with few issues.

Re:Will ATI finally get FOSS friendly??

Yeah, you're better off with nVidia. I've had nothing but extremely bad experiences with my X800.

I'm not saying nVidia is doing a great job or anything, but it's a bit better than ATI.

Re:Will ATI finally get FOSS friendly??

You're looking to ATI for better support on Linux? BWAHAHAHA! Thanks, I needed a laugh. I really did. You just made my day!

Re:Are we wasting our efforts?

What we need is a concerted effort from our worldwide developers to create better interoperability with Microsoft's Active Directory structure ...

No thanks.

Re:Will ATI finally get FOSS friendly??

NO NO NO

Did you know: X1x00 series of ATI cards don't have drivers yet (3 months after release!) and won't for the next 3 months?

Did you know: ATI driver's performance on Linux is ~ 1/5th driver performance on Windows?

Did you know: ATI's DRI driver is based upon outdated docs ATI released along time ago with all the performance stuff torn out (no pixel shaders, for example).

At least Nvidia's closed source driver tends to work. Have you tried the latest nvidia drivers? They do list support for your NX6200 [tweakers.net]. Perhaps try sending them a bug report, or posting on NVNews.net's forums (official Nvidia Linux support forums).

Nvidias drivers are closed source, but they are 98% feature complete with Windows. ATI's drivers suck, both the open and closed source ones.

Re:Are we wasting our efforts?

What's also missing is the "zero-user" configurability that Windows has, allowing any user to load and install any application or hardware accessory without needing to be a hardware tech. Linux need to be engineereed to be "smarter" for the casual office user.

Gark. I see this raised again and again here. GNU/Linux isn't aimed at Windows Users specifically! A surprising ammount of people seem to think that this the whole point of GNU/Linux! It's not! Simply trying to beat Windows isn't the point. The point is to write a good Operating System, and we're sustaining ourselves fine as it is. FOSS doesn't have much to gain from attracting "casual" users who have no interest in learning how _we_ do things.

The Free Unixes really aren't competing with anyone. It's getting done because it should be done, not to beat anyone else.

Re:Are we wasting our efforts?

Your post assumes the same either/or logic that people use when they talk about "why are we doing X when there is still world hunger to solve?" It's not as if the Linux community is a single monolithic group that only works on a single problem at a time. The reality is that the people who are interested in Active Directory will work on that in parallel with the people who are interested in OpenGL acceleration. Trying to force people who are interested in volunteering for X to work on Y because Y is "more important" would only alienate them, so neither X nor Y would get done.

Re:Are we wasting our efforts?

While I agree with some points you raise, I don't think that it's the 'ability to install any piece of hardware' that is really holding people back. Or rather, it's not holding anyone back who's really a candidate for switching. There are always going to be people who have one little dongle or something that's never going to work with Linux, that will give them the excuse to stay with what's familiar.

I think having a good, centralized HCL for each distribution is the biggest missing "feature" right now -- with most distributions, it's difficult for me to figure out and purchase hardware that's guaranteed to be compatible. It doesn't necessarily have to be what I already own. Even RHEL, which you'd think would be the best around, is pretty weak.

Software installation is what Linux (at least the debian based distros, I don't use anything else) do right. You want this new "Foo" thing that your friend just told you about? "sudo apt-get install foo" I could teach my mother to do that, provided the sources.list file was set up correctly. Or there are lots of great graphical package managers. This is how software OUGHT to work: one place where you get and install software. No downloading anything from manufacturers sites, no compiling, no keeping executable files in weird places (unless you know how to choose the path and really want it). Everything is signed, dependencies are automatically fixed (which allows for efficient shared library use), the user is prompted for configuration options as required.

The apt system is one of the biggest things that Linux has going for it, to replace that with the Windows like "anyone can install any software and install it anywhere they want" is a mistake.

Re:Building (obsolete) OpenGL into desktop core?!

There are already ass-loads of games that are Direct3D only. But most good developers keep a couple code-paths, so things like Doom3 and so on can all be ported to Linux/OSX/whatever with minimal fuss. Besides, Apple moving to faster hardware and their increasing adoption rates will do nothing but make the OpenGL market more attractive to game developers who want to target users across platforms.

Re:Building (obsolete) OpenGL into desktop core?!

No, but it means that Nvidia and ATI should consider cross-licensing with Transgaming.

ATI/Nvidia fund Transgaming's Direct3D on Linux development, and Transgaming directly contributes code to both Wine and a libdirect3d. This would allow ATI/Nvidia to keep a firm grasp on both OpenGL (which they have now) and a firm grasp on Direct3D (which Microsoft is doing its damndest to take away from them).

Re:There go the distros again..

OH WHY can't they work together on the underlying front??

Because the People's Liberation Front of Underlying (or is it the Underlying People's Liberation Front) is far superior to the just the plain Underlying Front. Jeez, some people.

Re:There go the distros again..

I am currently on FC4, and I know of no "Fedora Control Center", unless you are refering to system-config-*

Re:Are we wasting our efforts?

Obviously, you haven't installed a current version of Linux, or used a current version of Knoppix. I run Fedora, CentOS and Kubuntu, and with all three, my desktop and laptop hardware "just works". Digikam recognizes both of my digital cameras when I connect them, unlike Windows, driver installation is not required. Same for my flatbed scanner and all the various USB storage devices, including my USB DVD burner. Speaking of DVDs, I recently installed Windows MCE 2005 for a friend, and would you believe, it won't play encrypted DVDs out of the box? She had to purchase a $20 codec! At least with Linux, all you do use yum or apt to install libdvdcss. I switched four years ago, and never looked back.

Re:Building (obsolete) OpenGL into desktop core?!

When Microsoft took the DirectX route instead of implementing more of OpenGL (they had a poor implementation in Windows NT), it was because they wanted to control over the APIs. This is the route they've taken time and again.

With success I might add. So DirectX is the predominant API for games development (and covers more than just graphics), but OpenGL has a very good standing in professional 3D work. You know, like CGI, 3D animation, and stuff. You know, Shrek. And guess which OS is the more dominant in those environments?

Don't worry, OpenGL isn't going away anytime soon.

Re:Are we wasting our efforts?

Lately, every time I see a new linux "feature" (or whatever) announcement on /.
some asshole tries to be smart and says "Linux never will make the desktop because is lacking on blah blah blah..."

Well, I have news for you, the only ones that wants "Linux on the desktop" are RH/Novell/etc...
The average Linux user could not care less about Joe Sixpack and Grandma using linux, windows or OSX.

And this are the same people that are running linux at the desktop 24x7 NOW, and don't care about Linux taking over the world. They just want Linux to improve, as it has been doing since I can remember.

So, next time some news about Linux appears on /. , please STFU

Btw, my Mom and little brother are using linux and they dont even know the difference.
Could they have installed it and configured it?, probably not, but they probably can't install windows anyway...

Re:Are we wasting our efforts?

to create better interoperability with Microsoft's Active Directory structure

You forgot to add "in my humble opinion".

You have a point, though.