We have heard a lot lately about projects aimed at bringing all that eye candy of operating systems such as OS X to the Linux world. Projects such as Xgl, Enlightenment, and others have given us a glimpse of what's coming, but what can you do to enjoy a taste of some of the future… today?
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2005-07-04
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2005-07-01
3D desktop switcher, transparancy and gDesklets. No mention of GTK/QT themes, window manager themes, icon sets etc. That can all get horribly complicated, especially if you want a level of consitency. Neither gDesklets nor Karamba seem to want to work particularly well for me, not that I really want all that clutter. Nice to have transparancy explained (a bit) anyway.
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e17 here too on Gentoo. It's rough around the edges (my build is about 6 weeks old, so it may be less so today), but still very usable and just beautiful to stare at.
I can sort of see where this "desktop shell" thing is going and it absolutely ROCKS! I hope more developers start writing apps with these libraries as well. May even take a shot at it myself.
Thank you Rasterman, et al, for all your efforts. For me, e17 really hits the nail on the head. Minimal, usable, useful and beautiful.
Member since:2005-07-06
Indeed, e17 is already here in a reasonable form, and perfectly usable (http://get-e.org). I have a few problems now and then as new features are added to cvs then debugged later, but overall it works fine, and of course looks flash. All the girls I've showed it to were impressed as well. Everytime I get around to updating my working copy I find some cool new stuff to play with. It totally wastes all my free time (>_<)
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All these OS X eye candy articles miss the point completely: the thing where OS X is _way_ better than Linux is not eye candy. enlightenment had all that stuff years before OS X, caramelized, with extra sugar on top.
The great thing about OS X is _consistency_. I can press my favourite shortcut in _any_ OS X application, and it will work (well, provided the function makes sense :-) ). And, if it doesn't, that's not just "aw, shucks", it's a bug. Interestingly, that holds true even for the open source projects on OS X.
BTW, that's also why people loved BeOS: the programmers had a similar attitude there.
Well, to conclude, I really hope that projects like freedesktop.org continue to work hard at increasing consistency between the toolkits.
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> Consistency between the toolkits? Well, then what's the point of having different toolkits? Aren't
> they SUPPOSED to be different to offer different things?
Let me try to explain this through an analogy...
In an ideal world, we would all speak the same language. This was the goal of Esperanto and is even a tenet of the Bahai faith.
However, different people have different languages and there is no way they will relinquish them; they're a part of the identity. Likewise, certain users like apps with a given toolkit for various reasons, and developers like developing on a given framework for various reasons. Hence the need for interoperability.
I might be a Dioula from the Ivory Coast. I speak Bambara. Let's say I have a friend who is a Baoule, and prefers to speak his native Baoule. But we both speak French. By sharing in common certain features, toolkits can interoperate comfortably while retaining their unique characteristics (and therefore remaining desirable to the users who favour them).
IceWM supports the little tray applet for Rhythmbox (because of a new common protocol) now because of these efforts. I could not imagine this happening years ago.
--
La guerre rend les hommes si betes
Plus betes que les betes
Les missiles sont munis de tetes
Humanite court a sa pert
Member since:
2005-07-08
"I'd rather have the most minimalistic GUI possible so that I can get some work done rather than ooh and ah about how pretty all the frivolous claptrap is."
That's great for you. WTF is the point of posting this in a thread about linux eye candy? To prove that you are uber-31337? To belittle people who *like* eyecandy? Why not embrace the fact that with Linux you absolutely have a choice? Or were you just trolling?
Member since:2005-07-06
uber-31337 sounds right.
People feel the need to comment in every story they have a thought on, even if it's trolling or not constructive at all.
It's like all the MS stories that anti-MS peopl feel the need to comment in, even if the story is about something GOOD MS is doing/did. Or the Opera stories Firefox fanboys comment on, or the other way around.
I REALLY wish there was a way to tag a rating, instead of just -1/+1. Like Off-topic, trolling, whatever. Kinda like Slashdot, but more simple.
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My Linux Desktop already looks awesome: http://www.realistanew.com/desktop.png
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A while back, I was emailing some of the developers of uuu, http://www.unununium.org ,
an experimental non-OS. Some of them were pointing to the "feel" (as in "look and feel"), of the ion window manager, http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/ , as an example of good usability. Perhaps with all this talk about making your desktop "look awesome", we should also talk about making it "function awesome" as well.
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http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201379376/ref=pd_sxp...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/humane/
Evolving an interface that's broken at its core is a no win situation. Please look at the book.
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You have a good point here. But, unfortunatelly, since Jeff Raskin died his project has been dead. And I am not sure if he had a right vision how to kill WIMP interface. As far as I remember he wanted to go back to some kind of command line.
And I also know that Enlightment, transparency, 3D desktops, eyecandy are not the answers. They are just another variant of a bad GUI.
Paople are talking about MacOSX, but under the skin it is nothing new and revolutionary. It is just a more consistent and more beautiful bad GUI.
Cheers
Member since:2005-07-06
> And I also know that Enlightment, transparency, 3D desktops, eyecandy are not the answers. They are just another variant of a bad GUI.
I don't think Enlightenment,transparency and eyecandy at least have anything to do with bad GUIs.
Enlightenment 17 doesn't dictate your interface to you.
You don't have to have lots of transparency.
Enlightenment's edje library will bring what is as far as I know unprecendented themability to window managers.
See http://www.enlightenment.org for more.
Although I understand that edge is not as mature as other parts of e17 yet - the version numbers for edje at http://enlightenment.freedesktop.org/ are still 0.5's
RE[3]: Quit evolving from a inhumane interface people.
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Well you know what not many of us do know where to look at all. and I've seen wonderful things done with fluxbox, openbox, wmaker and such so how about we all share our sources of where we get this stuff.
It Should be all centralized honestly nothing worse then spending a week trying to find the exact element you're looking for.
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2005-07-06
For those who don't know, enlightenment_remote is an ipc tool being built for e17. As anonmynous mentioned it's not pretty - all totally command line at the moment, but that's because it's still in development :-) There will be pretty configuration GUIs for all of this once the guts have been completed.
The only thing that has to be manually configured via file editing at the moment is files listing icons (like those that appear in the ibar), but maybe that also got a GUI config tool recently... It wasn't exactly computer science though, just a matter of inserting the icon filename into a ".order" file in a directory corresponding to the application. Definitely worth it to get a preview of e17!
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"What's the point... just buy a Mac. The author of that article is just trying ot duplicate a Mac, and does it poorely."
If you really think that, you simply don't understand linux or people who use it. I'm typing this on my Powermac, running Panther so I'm no hater, but if my mac disappeared tomorrow, all I'd really miss is safari. For many people, Macs are a) stifling, and b) extremely overpriced. For many people, linux is just as useful as OS X, far less expensive, and far less restrictive.
Member since:2005-07-06
longhorn already has a composite engine ? are you retarded or what ? longhorn is not a product, longhorn is a future product. longhorn is vapourware. the betas going around have not got composite engines in them, the only compositing was seen in a VIDEO microsoft released.
Linux has xcompmgr and composite extensions right NOW, in fact, my version of kde 3.4 has had xcompmgr running on it since I installed it months ago, and this is a release version, not a demo, not a beta version, and most definately, NOT vapourware
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Cool down, zombie. Jef Raskin , ok? You get it now? I am neither american or englishman, so misspelling (oh, do you say misspelling?) is something that happens to me all the time.
I didn't write Jef Raskin name correctly and your conclusion is that:
1) I 'pretend to care about his work'
2) I don't have 'the courtesy to spell his name right'
Really? You brain-damaged, arrogant little prick. Spelled correctly this time?
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I believe Aza, Jef's son is still contributing with around 9 other developers that were working on it previously with Jef. Aza himself is a very intelligent person and probably learned quite a bit from his father about the goals of the project. The project page just isn't being updated anymore with the changing specs & news for the public to see. The project is probably going at a slower pace with Jef gone but that's to be expected. He projected before his death 18 months for a 1.0 release. I don't know how much timing has changed now?
