Re: I'm new + Design Ideas

On Sat, 2004-06-19 at 07:58, Matt C. wrote:
> I was thinking about what it would take to replace X when I came across Y.
> I read the original paper by Mark Thomas and viewed his PPT brief and I was
> very impressed.  After following the progress of GGI, Berlin/Fresco,
> DirectFB for a few years I came to the conclusion that they're all doomed
> because they don't provide a PRAGMATIC approach to replacing X.  OTOH I see
> a lot of potential for Y.

Hi and welcome ;-)

> 1.  The obsession with a 3D desktop is utterly absurd.  It seems like
> everyone is doing it these days.  WinFX, Project Looking Glass and now
> DirectFB.  WHY WHY WHY???  All it does is increase dependencies (need
> opengl), bloats the codebase, reduces portability, and makes things
> unnecessarily complex.  Eye candy is cool, but a 3D desktop demands *way*
> too much while giving *way* too little.  The ability to rotate and twist a
> G. damned window is cool for the first week but after that everyone will be
> sick of it and turn it off.

I think you are getting the wrong idea here. Most people want SDL (and
OpenGL) support because it moves the whole handling of the graphical
aspect of the GUI away from the CPU, and onto the GPU, where it should
be in these days of high-level graphics cards. It comes with many useful
features (ie, dragging windows should go seamlessly, where it doesn't
now if your CPU is under a bit of load; switching between windows won't
slow you down; ...) There is the occassional extra feature like native
(full) transparency that can be (ab)used, but further as that, most
people don't think of any more features. The (happy?) few that dream of
such things as rotating and twisting windows or maybe whole desktops
aren't the people that Y developers have in mind (I think :-)).

> I really think there are only three important targets:  (1) FBDev, (2) *one*
> high level library such as SDL, and (3) native low-level drivers.  Anything
> beyond these is a WASTE OF TIME and just increases project complexity.

AFAIK, the main target of Y still is SDL and FBDev (through SDL). It's
goal however is to provide an as simple as possible API so anyone can
write a module for his or her driver / library and plug it in.

> 3.  Real credibility comes when we have native drivers.  Does anyone know
> how difficult it would be to "copy" the XFree86 vesa svga drivers and
> possibly the nv driver?  I'm not that good at low-level programming - even
> if you gave me a whole bookshelf of hardware specs I don't think I could do
> it.  Is it possible to recruit talented people to do this work?  All it
> takes is one or two people who know their shit.  For example I remember a
> few years ago when the linux USB project was moving at a snail's pace - then
> suddenly Linus Torvalds himself came in and wrote a whole working USB
> codebase in about three days to replace the old, buggy codebase that had
> taken someone else two years to write.  What we need is a "Torvalds event"
> to get things off the ground with regards to graphics drivers.

Well then, go send old Linus a mail allready ;-)

--
Regards,
Mathy Vanvoorden