Pete's Open Source Journal - Linux and the "eye candy" war

Kombatant

My newest Journal entry is online, and it tackles a popular subject lately: Desktop eye candy. Here is a small part to get you started:

The past two weeks have been almost monopolised by Windows Vista, and the release of the first Beta of the successor to Windows XP. Vista promises many things that will modernise the way users are doing their tasks, and most of all, a whole new desktop experience due to Aero, which will enable advance effects like transparencies without burdening the CPU and other transitional effects. Apple users have been boasting about such effects for ages, especially since the release of MacOS X, and they claim Microsoft is late to the party. Where does that leave Linux though? That's the whole reason behind this article - to investigate whether Linux's leading desktops have the ability to follow suit, or if the war is over before it has even begun.

Read the editorial

Zardon

Some of the window effects put me in mind of MacOSx.... very cool, but I must be one of the few people who likes a plain operating system, all that distracts me.

temeteus82

wow, all those in old 3d card and itell's integrated chip :O
I must test how they work on my rig

germanjulian

looks really cool.... mhhhh but like zardon said... why?

when I move a window I want to move a window!? not have some fancy effect. when I open a menu in a program I don’t LOOK THOUGH IT to see what’s behind it I just want to press some text to do something in the program...

most of this stuff is totally useless, however I do love the multiple desktops though

quazi

You aren't everyone. I personally like transparacy a great deal, and while the other effects aren't as necessary, they are nice to have.

Y2Stu

Is it me or are people more intrested in the eye candy then whats underneath it all. To me Eye Candy is all nice, but not really needed!

bug77

Well, eye-candy is a money-maker these days, so i guess is a must for Linux too. But this isn't what Linux needs to improve... (I'm thinking of installing/unistalling programs in Linux, but that's hardly Linux' fault)

sircave

As far as eye candy goes; I think it is nice to be able to work efficiently and effectively without system crashes, hangups and slowdowns. Eye candy (bells and whistles) adds something to the character of an operating system, whether it is a windoze system or Linux driven. Macs, I think, have always had eye candy or better looking graphics, if I can say that instead and have always boasted better performance than the Micro$uck OS with an ease of use over Linux. (But isn't the Mac OS 10 software Linux based?) I don't wish to start a war of words over this topic, just throwing my hat into the arena. I personally like eye candy on my machine. And it still gets the job done.

ReDGuiTaR

The point is : MacOsX run very smooth and it s packed with some great GUI effect ... will vista do the same ??? i dont think so .... if it compromise OS stability and performance then i dont want it !

Mort_Cinder

i cant play the movie demos, i tried with opera and firefox. can i see them somewhere else?

btw, nice read Kombatant

JustaGuy

Well, there's a lot being done right now.

On the infrastructure level, there's EXA, a new acceleration model for X.org, which at least NVidia has already promised to support. It's 2D acceleration, but it will hopefully bring full translucency support without X server crashes.

On the 3D front, there is some work being done on Xgl/Xegl, an OpenGL-based X server which will allow for 3D-accelerated desktops. There was some article a while ago on how this was good even if desktops don't use 3D features, basically it had to do with the fact that graphics cards are 3D-oriented today and 3D acceleration will always be many times faster than 2D acceleration because of it, even if it's just for 2D stuff.

On a more "desktop" level, there is work being done both in the Gnome area (the videos in the article) and the KDE area.

And in a sense of integrating these new possibilities of eye-candy with the working environment, there is some great movement in KDE, namely the Plasma project, which will be part of KDE4 next year. The idea is to integrate the Desktop (which was already enriched with things like SuperKaramba), the Panels (including tray and taskbar) and the "3rd Level", which is like running applications. What will this integration bring us? The ability to have universal applets (time, weather, news, CPU monitoring, whatever), that can be placed on the desktop, on a panel, on a window above others, etc.! All of them with nice eye-candy, of course! There's not much to show yet, but they're working on it.

Exciting times