The new X Server developed under the sponsorship of freedesktop.org is aiming at replacing XFree86. Some code will be re-used but the core will be rewritten by Keith Packard and others. The new X server features full support for transparency, and has window-level image compositing among other things. Check out the screenshots (one more added, now there are four shots).
Screenshots from freedesktop.org’s New X Server
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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The linux desktop is going vector really quickly. All of this svg stuff is vector graphics. All of the svg icon themes you see are vector based. Today there are a number of people running vector based icons. The gnome-themes-extras package contains a number of svg icon themes.
The problem right now is that it is all rendered in software. This is where the Cairo project comes in (also doen by Keith). It provides a nice api for drawing vector graphics with an xrender backend. xrender is an x extention to do rendering operations that is designed to be hardware accellerated.
So yes, by the time longhorn comes out linux should have a vector based, hardware accellerated gui to compete. A lot of the artwork is done now, much of the interface is done now, the cairo hardware rendering need work, and the different parts need some assembling. To try cario rendered vector widgets check out: http://gtk-themes.cairographics.org/ .
I think that David Dawes is finally realizing that Xfree86 and him are not the center of the universe. Check it at: http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/forum/2003-November/thread.html
Your post was truly insightful. Thanks.
Has become transparent/lucent !!
Must say that I’m very impressed already with the eyecandy factor of this new Xserver. Speed is a bit of an issue, but hey, it’s an alpha and my laptop sure is not a speedmonster. It didn’t crash, mplayer still works, while not in overlay but that doesn’t matter.
For the segfault: it went away after I set the depth to 32.
Now it’s only a matter of time and this server will become my standard server, of course integration with the Gnome DE would be very appreciated. Mixed with Cairo my guess is that Longhorn will be obsoleted by the time it comes out.
KDE also has screenshots on kde-look.
That’s a lame excuse, if I ever heard one! He’s a GNOME user, what do you expect him to say!!!
>> He’s a GNOME user
Afaik he’s not a DE user at all.
(I believe he used twm and all that)
Can it be used with Nvidia driver?