Novell Desktop 10.

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: Childs

Originally posted by: kamper

Originally posted by: silverpig
My P-M 1.8, 1GB, 9700 Mobility can do all of that quite easily. People have it working well on gf2 series cards. I opend up about 8 windows, made some of them partially transparent, played a partially transparent video, had the windows splayed across 2 faces of the cube and rotated it halfway between faces and it was still at about 4% cpu usage.

What graphics drivers are you using?

I was wondering if ATI even had 3D acceleration. The last time I used Linux only Nvidia cards did. I'll give this a spin tonight.

ATI's had 3d acceleration for quite some time now... years I think.

Oh and the driver version is 8.22.5

 

[cleverhandle]

I finally got around to watching one of the demos...

All I can think of is how many other, actually useful, projects there are in the OSS world, and how much they could use programmers skilled enough to code a desktop like that. What a complete, farking waste of valuable personnel. The only thing in there that looked immediately useful was the Expose-ish task switching, which is already in the pipes on current desktops as it is (if not done already). The whole 3d model does nothing for virtual desktops, nothing for window arrangement, nothing for anything that I can see. Whoopee, now the windows do a little Gumby thing when you move them around. Great. I could keep going, but I think I'd just drive myself into a pit of despair.

Gawd, I like neat techie stuff as much as anyone around here, but make it serve some semblance of a purpose at least...

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: cleverhandle
I finally got around to watching one of the demos...

All I can think of is how many other, actually useful, projects there are in the OSS world, and how much they could use programmers skilled enough to code a desktop like that. What a complete, farking waste of valuable personnel. The only thing in there that looked immediately useful was the Expose-ish task switching, which is already in the pipes on current desktops as it is (if not done already). The whole 3d model does nothing for virtual desktops, nothing for window arrangement, nothing for anything that I can see. Whoopee, now the windows do a little Gumby thing when you move them around. Great. I could keep going, but I think I'd just drive myself into a pit of despair.

Gawd, I like neat techie stuff as much as anyone around here, but make it serve some semblance of a purpose at least...

You didn't pay them to do that, or anything else, so quit your whining. Some of us like the idea of an X system that buffers windows offscreen to aid in the very Expose-ish features that you want (which involve a ton of ugly hacks to implement otherwise). Demos are always going to be excessive, designed to show off and impress, but this technology has "real, practical" use in very important areas such as accessibility (something that most people forget about because it doesn't apply to them). I'm also never against something that will increase the performance of my desktop.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: cleverhandle
I finally got around to watching one of the demos...

All I can think of is how many other, actually useful, projects there are in the OSS world, and how much they could use programmers skilled enough to code a desktop like that. What a complete, farking waste of valuable personnel. The only thing in there that looked immediately useful was the Expose-ish task switching, which is already in the pipes on current desktops as it is (if not done already). The whole 3d model does nothing for virtual desktops, nothing for window arrangement, nothing for anything that I can see. Whoopee, now the windows do a little Gumby thing when you move them around. Great. I could keep going, but I think I'd just drive myself into a pit of despair.

Gawd, I like neat techie stuff as much as anyone around here, but make it serve some semblance of a purpose at least...

If eye candy was the point there are a hell of a lot easier ways of getting it then doing stuff like this.

Saying Novell put lots of money into XGL to get eye candy is like saying that they put lots of money into Mono to get desktop search features for nautilus (via beagle), or that Redhat put a lot of time and effort in LSM and SELinux so that they could demo root logins online.

This is cutting edge software technology to bring X windows into the 21st century. The eye candy is just frosting. Look at the other positive benifits of this stuff before making judgement on it.

 

[kamper]

As a follow up to the discussion about Open Graphics, this was just posted: http://kerneltrap.org/node/6262

Sounds like a product is a long way off but they are still hammering away at it and have a timeframe. Encouraging.

 

[Seeruk]

It looks about 10% useful and 90% fluff to me.

But then I would say the same about just about any desktop as I am a clean and simple kinda guy.

The 10% I liked was the transparency and revolving desktops, apart from that ... meh

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: Seeruk
It looks about 10% useful and 90% fluff to me.

But then I would say the same about just about any desktop as I am a clean and simple kinda guy.

The 10% I liked was the transparency and revolving desktops, apart from that ... meh

What's wrong with having your graphics chip render the desktop instead of the CPU? Kinda makes sense to me... I mean, colour display is "fluff" too if you think about it. We could get along fine in that oldschool green glow.

 

[Seeruk]

Originally posted by: silverpig
What's wrong with having your graphics chip render the desktop instead of the CPU? Kinda makes sense to me... I mean, colour display is "fluff" too if you think about it. We could get along fine in that oldschool green glow.

Your right - please lord strike me down for forgetting something... I'm not worthy of this world

Nothing at all is wrong with it, but wiggly windows?? I've changed my mind on the transparency too. In playing around with it - its more of a hinderance in that you can spend hours getting it just right and then at the end of the day it doesnt actually do anything for you.

I level the same criticism at all the fluffy desktops appearing now, my favourite is still e17 not so much for the candy but the minimal amount of clicking you need to do to get from A to B.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Seeruk

Originally posted by: silverpig
What's wrong with having your graphics chip render the desktop instead of the CPU? Kinda makes sense to me... I mean, colour display is "fluff" too if you think about it. We could get along fine in that oldschool green glow.

Your right - please lord strike me down for forgetting something... I'm not worthy of this world

Nothing at all is wrong with it, but wiggly windows?? I've changed my mind on the transparency too. In playing around with it - its more of a hinderance in that you can spend hours getting it just right and then at the end of the day it doesnt actually do anything for you.

I level the same criticism at all the fluffy desktops appearing now, my favourite is still e17 not so much for the candy but the minimal amount of clicking you need to do to get from A to B.

Look...

e17 is _just_ eye candy. That's it. That's the point behind it and that is all it accomplishes.

I know this is difficult to understand, but XGL fundamentally changes several things about X windows.

For example these videos are just demos. That's all. The Wiggly Windows, the big transparencies.. everything.. This is just to show that it works. That it works, that it is fast and is able to do things on regular everyday 2-3 year old hardware that Microsoft says only is possible to do on very new hardware.

Novell's XGLX and Redhat's AIGLX are mostly just research projects. This is not finished by all means.

By the time all this gets finished and XeGL gets out in the real world..
It will provide Linux a much easier way to get good 3d drivers.
It will remove most of the cruft and hacks that have been piled onto X Windows in the past 20 years or so. This, combined with other things, will reduce code size and complexity considurably, make it easier to develop X windows and make it easier for new developers to work with it.
It will provide fast acceleration and improve hardware utilization.
It will provide acceleration for indirect rendering so that you can have network'd accelerated graphics.

It basicly makes a 1980 style Gui system and makes it 2010+ style technology.

With OS X and Vista all the effects and capabilities will be hard coded into the system more or less. With X Windows everything is modular. XGL stuff benifits KDE just as much as it does Gnome as much as it does anything else. The way the compisition is done and special effects will mature as people get access to these technologies and people experiment and find out what works and what doesn't.

 

[Seeruk]

I understand all of that... but thats NOT what the video is about, and thus not what the topic is about! It was about the desktop features they have implemented and I was saying I can see a use for a couple of things but it is mostly fluff like wiggly windows. i think the same thing about the new Vista interface. It looks great but doesnt actually improve the interface.

A desktop is an interface, nothing more nothing less. Yes it consists of all kinds of technical achievement but the end result with far too many of them is RSI in users, tendonitis in the wrists, eye strains and more.

Eye candy is great for many users, my main worry is my health when using computers. The interface is responsible for about 80% of that beyond external things such as posture, equipment alignment etc.

Thus I like a window manager that is easy on the eye (i.e. not straining to read small text but big chunky icons instead), but most of all my desktop environment must minimise the the clicks, taps and movements required to get to the data, application or process you want to.

E17 does that, Ice also does it pretty well. Let me give you an example.

I want to start an application but my mouse cursor is in the top right corner or the screen. In windows and kde (by default) I would have to move all the way over to a 'start' menu and the navigate around a bunch of menus.
In E17 (&16) and Ice I can just right click whereever my pointer is.

Simple things like that make a huge difference. I use computers 18 hours a day most days and must do these actions hundreds if not thousands of times per day.

Likewise compositing and transparency is actually a very bad thing in health terms. It puts extra strain on the eyes, particularly if misconfigured.

At the moment I dont have RSI or eye strain but I am only 30. Another 30-40 years and I may be a wreck. I have seen people with the tendonitis of the wrists and they are in agony all day every day. They can't even pick their own nose! None of these desktops is doing anything to address that and improve the route between the user and the bytes on the disk.

 

[drag]

how you position your mouse and keyboard and if you provide support for your elbow so that your wrist doesn't rest on the table.. or worse on the edge of the table.. has much much much more to do with RSI then anything to do with your computer's desktop.

 

[Seeruk]

Originally posted by: Seeruk
my main worry is my health when using computers. The interface is responsible for about 80% of that beyond external things such as posture, equipment alignment etc.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Seeruk

Originally posted by: Seeruk
my main worry is my health when using computers. The interface is responsible for about 80% of that beyond external things such as posture, equipment alignment etc.

Well at least you know now that when you go blind from badly designed transparency effects you can use some of the newer accesability features to get by. Other features being made more possible are things like effective zooming effects and magnification.

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: Seeruk
I understand all of that... but thats NOT what the video is about, and thus not what the topic is about! It was about the desktop features they have implemented and I was saying I can see a use for a couple of things but it is mostly fluff like wiggly windows. i think the same thing about the new Vista interface. It looks great but doesnt actually improve the interface.

A desktop is an interface, nothing more nothing less. Yes it consists of all kinds of technical achievement but the end result with far too many of them is RSI in users, tendonitis in the wrists, eye strains and more.

Eye candy is great for many users, my main worry is my health when using computers. The interface is responsible for about 80% of that beyond external things such as posture, equipment alignment etc.

Thus I like a window manager that is easy on the eye (i.e. not straining to read small text but big chunky icons instead), but most of all my desktop environment must minimise the the clicks, taps and movements required to get to the data, application or process you want to.

E17 does that, Ice also does it pretty well. Let me give you an example.

I want to start an application but my mouse cursor is in the top right corner or the screen. In windows and kde (by default) I would have to move all the way over to a 'start' menu and the navigate around a bunch of menus.
In E17 (&16) and Ice I can just right click whereever my pointer is.

Simple things like that make a huge difference. I use computers 18 hours a day most days and must do these actions hundreds if not thousands of times per day.

Likewise compositing and transparency is actually a very bad thing in health terms. It puts extra strain on the eyes, particularly if misconfigured.

At the moment I dont have RSI or eye strain but I am only 30. Another 30-40 years and I may be a wreck. I have seen people with the tendonitis of the wrists and they are in agony all day every day. They can't even pick their own nose! None of these desktops is doing anything to address that and improve the route between the user and the bytes on the disk.

xfce4 does that as well. In fact, I'm quite sure you can get any WM to do it by editing the right click menus. So e17 is not any better in that respect than most of the other wms. Don't you think a handy little app like the expose feature might reduce mouse clicks as well? Just tap F12 and there you go.

The wobbly windows are a toy granted, just like e17.

 

[Seeruk]

Not to take this too far off topic..

But don't you think it's time something the next stage in interface design finally appeared. I mean let's face it the reason Windows really took off with Windows 95 was because of the research that went into the desktop/interface. It made computers accessible and since then almost every major desktop has been based loosely at least on the Windows 95 desktop.

That was over a decade now and all people are doing is refining and tweaking that baseline desktop, yet people use computers in dramatically different ways 10-11 years later.

One idea I have is replacing the mouse with something like the Nintendo Revolution controller. It could be used from any position (and perhaps more importantly more varied positions). But also the way in which the interface is designed & navigated could be in 3 dimensions as opposed to the 2 we are stuck with at the moment.

It isn't totally OT, I am just saying that I am dissapointed that in 10-11 years there has been little/no advance in the basic 2d desktop + start button thinking by any of these companies.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: Seeruk
But also the way in which the interface is designed & navigated could be in 3 dimensions as opposed to the 2 we are stuck with at the moment.

Did you not just criticize the all the work the Xgl guys did to render the desktop in 3d?

Anyway, look no farther than this very forum for ideas on changing the interface in fundamental ways. Some guy just posted a thread trying to get rid of windows (the organizational concept, not the product).

 

[silverpig]

Not to mention there have been 3-d desktop environments put out. They're terrible though, and a 2d design is much better.

 

[Seeruk]

Originally posted by: kamper

Originally posted by: Seeruk
But also the way in which the interface is designed & navigated could be in 3 dimensions as opposed to the 2 we are stuck with at the moment.

Did you not just criticize the all the work the Xgl guys did to render the desktop in 3d?

Anyway, look no farther than this very forum for ideas on changing the interface in fundamental ways. Some guy just posted a thread trying to get rid of windows (the organizational concept, not the product).

It might be rendered in '3d' but it is not a three dimensional interface.

BIG difference

 

[drag]

It is a 3d interface technically. It's just all rendered using 2-d rectangular primatives using a fixed point of view.

If somebody wants to make a desktop were you have to navigate through 3d space all they would have to do is create their own composite/window manager that does that.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: Seeruk

Originally posted by: kamper

Originally posted by: Seeruk
But also the way in which the interface is designed & navigated could be in 3 dimensions as opposed to the 2 we are stuck with at the moment.

Did you not just criticize the all the work the Xgl guys did to render the desktop in 3d?

Anyway, look no farther than this very forum for ideas on changing the interface in fundamental ways. Some guy just posted a thread trying to get rid of windows (the organizational concept, not the product).

It might be rendered in '3d' but it is not a three dimensional interface.

BIG difference

Baby steps, man! Did you expect them to go from 2d rendering to 3d interface principles in one giant leap? Nobody can work on 3d design principles until they have the tools to test their ideas.

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: silverpig
Not to mention there have been 3-d desktop environments put out. They're terrible though, and a 2d design is much better.

*ahem*

 

[Seeruk]

About the development:

My whole point is still... noone, not MS, Not Apple, Not any *nix is developing the UI beyond the 10-15 year old x + y 2d interface, nor for that matter ANYTHING different from a basic Windows 95 desktop!

About the 3D.

I think my concept is lost on you all Noone could possibly have developed a 3d desktop yet because nobody uses a tool that is capable of it. A mouse is only capable of operating in 2 dimensions... X & Y.

That's why I said something like the Nintendo revolution controller needs to be developed 1st. A cordless (ideally), free-form, tool capable of registering input from the user in the 3rd dimension as easily as the mouse does in 2 dimensions.

Let me give you an example of how that would help (thinking out loud here).

The main cause of tendonitis and the other horrible RSI related injuries is the movement in a fixed (and often badly postured) position and with the tendonitis ... PARTICULARY the clicking and double clicking / Typing.

A 3d controller with a true 3d interface would mean drilling down a folder path (typically done as a double click on a series of folders/sub-folders) could be achieved with a simply 'flick forward' with a 3d controller. Typing could technically be a case of writing in the air! Controlling your character in a game would be something that I would have to see... but I am sure will be achieved with the Revolution.

The best things about such a system is

1) You don't have to be sat in a fixed position in front of a desk... you could be lounging on the sofa drinking coffee with your free hand!

2) It spreads all those little movements across all the muscles and tendons througout the upper body and arms, instead of millions of tiny repetitive motions on tiny msucles and tenders in the fingers and wrists.

 

[Seeruk]

An afterthought:

Even better than a revolution-esque controller... a glove you wear and simple handmovements and seperate sensors on the fingers, so actions such as 'pointing' and a 'thumbs-up' could be bound to commands such as 'select' and 'OK' respectively.

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: Seeruk
About the development:

My whole point is still... noone, not MS, Not Apple, Not any *nix is developing the UI beyond the 10-15 year old x + y 2d interface, nor for that matter ANYTHING different from a basic Windows 95 desktop!

About the 3D.

I think my concept is lost on you all Noone could possibly have developed a 3d desktop yet because nobody uses a tool that is capable of it. A mouse is only capable of operating in 2 dimensions... X & Y.

That's why I said something like the Nintendo revolution controller needs to be developed 1st. A cordless (ideally), free-form, tool capable of registering input from the user in the 3rd dimension as easily as the mouse does in 2 dimensions.

Let me give you an example of how that would help (thinking out loud here).

The main cause of tendonitis and the other horrible RSI related injuries is the movement in a fixed (and often badly postured) position and with the tendonitis ... PARTICULARY the clicking and double clicking / Typing.

A 3d controller with a true 3d interface would mean drilling down a folder path (typically done as a double click on a series of folders/sub-folders) could be achieved with a simply 'flick forward' with a 3d controller. Typing could technically be a case of writing in the air! Controlling your character in a game would be something that I would have to see... but I am sure will be achieved with the Revolution.

The best things about such a system is

1) You don't have to be sat in a fixed position in front of a desk... you could be lounging on the sofa drinking coffee with your free hand!

2) It spreads all those little movements across all the muscles and tendons througout the upper body and arms, instead of millions of tiny repetitive motions on tiny msucles and tenders in the fingers and wrists.

Mouse for x,y, scroll for z

It's actually really old too. You can place your icons anywhere in 3d space, rotate around to see different things, put windows in the + or - z direction. Fully 3d. It's a terrible UI though.

 

[Seeruk]

Yeah I am aware of sphereXP

But still its like forcing a 3rd wheel onto a motorbike and calling it a car