3D based desktop?

[Black]

well i suggest beryl over aero because i did a bench mark a work, the same computer vista sat at 11% with 650 mb of ram used with aero turned on and 400 mb of ram used with aero turned off (same cpu %) -- this was on a pentium 4 mind you with 2 GB of ram.

that *same* pc ran beryl/compiz at 0-1% cpu and 350 mb of ram used.
the linux/beryl implementation was ridiculously less hungry.

Well, on the other side the quality of effects provided by compiz/beril is nowhere near the quality of aero. It looks like before applying any animation compiz/beril downgrade window texture quality. Also compiz/beril is not as well integrated into the OS as aero, its just an compositing framework which applies effects on application window texture (i.e. adding shadows, full window transparency) as well as takes care of drawing windows decorations. Aero is tightly integrated into the os i.e. you can create window which will have controls with partly opaque areas (Windows Media Player 11 - compare Aero Classic and Aero Glass versions). To support this with compiz/beril you need a way to connect application and compiz/beril which is not currently present.

[Switchboy]

Compiz is not userfriedly.

What where they thinking when they developed te function that when you move yor mouse tot the edge tthen your desktop changes into a gigantic cube. that you can move around. I dont want that to happen until i pres a key combo. Als the effects of wibbleing a window when u stretch a border is irritating. I want to stretch the window not make it animate. All the effects are overdone. They way aero does animation and little preview windows when you hover your mouse is just way better. Also the sidebar stolen from MAC OS is neatly intergrated and very usefull when you use it properly on a widescreen.

[Floyd]

Well, on the other side the quality of effects provided by compiz/beril is nowhere near the quality of aero. It looks like before applying any animation compiz/beril downgrade window texture quality. Also compiz/beril is not as well integrated into the OS as aero, its just an compositing framework which applies effects on application window texture (i.e. adding shadows, full window transparency) as well as takes care of drawing windows decorations. Aero is tightly integrated into the os i.e. you can create window which will have controls with partly opaque areas (Windows Media Player 11 - compare Aero Classic and Aero Glass versions). To support this with compiz/beril you need a way to connect application and compiz/beril which is not currently present.

that would be fine if true--but if you go to gnome-look.org you can find themes that run beryl that are nearly identical to aero (including the border shadows). and so what if it's not integrated into the OS (the desktop still is 3d accelerated like vista's and requires less system requirements--isn't speed and efficiency in a GUI a good thing?). in vista they actually took the GUI out of the kernel and made it less integrated--that's actually a good thing as it leads to more stability. beryl doesn't interfere with opengl, uses far less system resources and produces similar effects if set up properly.

i'm not saying just compile beryl, but you could integrate beryl-like interface to reactos explorer. then you'd have native support.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:GnomeVista.png

i have used both systems. i used vista business for 2 months until vista crashed a couple of times trying to connect to a few network drives (that's pretty sad actually) then ubuntu linux for about 1 month so far after that (at work). i have used ubuntu at my previous job for 6+ months and for the last 1 month with beryl with vista themes. frankly, the people in my office couldn't tell a difference between the two systems. it wasn't until they went to use it that they noticed nautilus wasn't explorer (well until i showed them the multiple desktops and cube rotation effects). so far i think they were more impressed with beryl than aero. i personally liked my experience with beryl more because it was more customizable and there was noticeably less disk read/writes with ubuntu than with vista (though this is not necessarily a result of beryl, but it still affects the quality of the experience).

[Floyd]

Compiz is not userfriedly.

What where they thinking when they developed te function that when you move yor mouse tot the edge tthen your desktop changes into a gigantic cube. that you can move around. I dont want that to happen until i pres a key combo. Als the effects of wibbleing a window when u stretch a border is irritating. I want to stretch the window not make it animate. All the effects are overdone. They way aero does animation and little preview windows when you hover your mouse is just way better. Also the sidebar stolen from MAC OS is neatly intergrated and very usefull when you use it properly on a widescreen.

you should use the beryl manager which is installed when you install the package (even has it's own menu in ubuntu--not sure about other distros), all those things are options and plugins. you can turn on and off just about any aspect of it. i turned off the cube personally, but it's a neat effect, just like i turned off the wobble windows but changed the maximize/minimize to the genie effect. here's the wiki article (section on plugins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryl_%28w ... 29#Plugins ) and the main article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryl_%28window_manager%29
and even a screenshot mimicking aero: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:GnomeVista.png

beryl also does the windows preview (and i think it did it before vista was RTM); as far as stealing the bar from macs, what do you think vista did? all they did was rename "widgets" to "gadgets"--and to top it off, they even charge you for the pleasure! (3rd party sidebars were available for xp long before Longhorn was renamed to Vista). even the vista page on wikipedia notes its similarities to Dashboard and Konfabulator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SideBar

MS says they started using the sidebar internally only in 2000, even if this were true, they didn't release it until 2006 with the vista/longhorn release candidates (and it was known to have a memory leak associated with it)--the first publically available sidebar program that i used was in 2003 and Y'z may be older than that. one could argue that NeXT's wharf bar is the first sidebar/dock which would make the originator steve jobs circa 1993.

about the only original thing in the vista interface is Flip 3D; and even then there is a japanese shell for xp you can download which paints windows on to opengl polys and you can arbitrarily place them on the desktop. i actually prefer flip 3d's fixed POV in favor of the shell program i downloaded but the point remains, microsoft didn't invent any of the wheels in aero. here's a link about it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madotate

[.aart3k]

integrated or not, linux is hoghly modular system and even basic graphical system (read here as xorg) is not tightly integrated in system. its an advantage imho.

you can still write applications that'll have some kind of compositing based effects (look at all newest dock-imitating programs for kde), you cannot simply compare developing under graphical linux desktop and windows.
and in the end: compiz and beryl are more more more more much custimizable than aero, and you can make it you-friendly if you only want and know how to do it.

also beryl and compiz discussion here is in wrong place, i dont know even beryl plugins could be used again in some kind of compositor in ros

[Floyd]

integrated or not, linux is hoghly modular system and even basic graphical system (read here as xorg) is not tightly integrated in system. its an advantage imho.

i agree--it is an advantage. that's why even MS took the GUI out of the kernel. they said modern hardware is such that the GUI can be taken out of the kernel without a performance hit. and it has the upshot of if the GUI crashes, the system can still run.

also beryl and compiz discussion here is in wrong place, i dont know even beryl plugins could be used again in some kind of compositor in ros

ha! you're the one that started the thread about beryl

anyway, my post was just to say that if we used its source code to fork something for reactos or reactos explorer, it would be a good thing in my opinion. it would produce aero-like eye candy and it would probably use less resources but since aero uses directx and beryl uses opengl they'd probably favor a reactx implementation just because that's how windows does it (still i would favor an openGL implementation for no other reasons than it could be put to use for another project perhaps in other OS or OS related projects and because i have a fondness for openGL).

[Kizzume]

The biggest thing for me is image tearing. I can't stand it. It interferes in being able to read text when it's scrolling, it makes video clips look like crap--it just looks awful.

I don't really care about eye candy--I don't need or want any special animations--I just want vsync and it'd be nice if when I move a window around that it doesn't take up processeing time on the CPU.

I guess I also like font rendering to be better than Gnome or KDE--I don't like using an OS that handles graphics like Win95, and that's how I have felt about all the available Linux GUI's until XGL. Win2K and XP handles desktop graphics a night and day's difference from their predecessors (they can actually move windows smoothly, have a smooth-moving mouse pointer, and have much less tearing).

For those who can't tell the difference between something with tearing and bad framerates and something that moves smoothly with no tearing, then congratulations--you'd probably be happy with a text-based OS.

[mf]

For those who can't tell the difference between something with tearing and bad framerates and something that moves smoothly with no tearing, then congratulations--you'd probably be happy with a text-based OS.

You might like Aero with all the effects turned off. Aero actually makes all the window redraw problems disappear, so you'll never have tearing while dragging large windows (> 1600x1200). The minimal Aero setup is:
[x] Enable desktop composition
[x] Use visual styles on windows and buttons

I do however recommend these as well:
[x] Show window contents while dragging
[x] Smooth edges of screen fonts

Because how can you enjoy a composited desktop when you don't get to see window contents while dragging? And font smoothing is just easier on the eyes.

You can leave everything else unchecked. I find it a bit strange that only ticking desktop composition does not actually enable desktop composition, but that you have to enable visual styles as well in order to get a 3D desktop.

[Kizzume]

Yeah, but there's no way to get Aero without Vista, and I'm definitely not willing to fork out the type of money they want for a version with Aero--in addition to compatibility issues and DRM garbage that Vista offers.

I was mainly referring to it for ReactOS--if they were able to move the processesing of the desktop graphics to the GPU and eliminate tearing, it would increase productivity, it would be easier on the main CPU.

[Alkali]

The Toy'd project looks far mor promising as far as a 3d desktop for widows. http://www.toyd.org. Best of all, they are already developing for windows so no work from the reactos team is needed.

More info: http://forum.beryl-project.org/viewtopi ... =41&t=2540

Videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKtxa5ilW2Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDRUKMm425w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGJGfNWkS4Y

[.aart3k]

as you can read on the website toyd is built on some kind of non-microsoft api for managing windows, reactos could run it but it's unusable as source code for possible ros dwm implementations, aoof-wm uses gdi as system native graphics library and afaik Vista gives access to gdi only as emulated by dwm

[Kizzume]

That toyd project looks interesting. Very interesting.

[oiaohm]

Some misconceptions.

Yes there is a direct graphical system in linux. Just not very much uses it. Reason ATI and NVIDIA are a little hard to get drivers to have 3d on it. http://www.directfb.org

KDE 4 plained for release before end of year(2007). Operates either X11 or Directfb on linux. Applications don't even need a single line of code changes or anything in there binarys to be used on either.

Beryl is now being merged back into Compiz. Compiz has quality controls.

KDE 4 also has some builtin 3d effects and will run on windows. By the looks of it many options will be on the market of cross platform windows managers.

KDE 4 will be more secure and faster on linux compared to current X11 offerings when in directfb mode.

Things are geting twisted around this year. So I would say wait and see.

[Phobos]

it is possible to get aero's looks (transparencies, visual style..) without Vista, using something like: http://www.vongehlen.dyndns.org/Dustin/ ... index.html (even if it's still buggy, for the beta 2, animations are also going to be part of the program)... it works in XP, so I guess it would eventually work in ROS too
however, not all funcionality can be achieved in XP, because of the DWM (for the live thumbails, and other things)... but once again, I guess it could be implemented later in ROS hehe

[Reacter]

Why not just go simple? With a few techniques, you can make any desktop look good, not just a 3D one. I have a computer, for example, that uses Win31 and the thing looks great. I also have a system that looks like LCARS, that is the system that I think looks the greatest. Windows Vista really kills the Dell Inspiron 1000 with 1G 256MB ram and 2.2 GHz processor, but that may be because of the fact that the memory is shared. That is also the system I am (very slowly) typing this post on.