I know that here are some who care for linux. I just installed the Ubuntu Dapper Drake Flight 4. It's great! The boot time is a lot shorter, gnome 2.14... but the best thing is Xgl!!

Click the images for original size

In the background you see some videos arranged by that exposé clone. (If you don't know it: It makes all windows smaller and aranges them so you can see them all at once). Than there is that new task switcher with live thumbnails - even videos are playing in the switcher.


That is the "cube" - if you switch desktops You can also see the half-transparent window-borders.


To see everything in motion, just watch this video from Novell:
http://freedesktop.org/%7edavidr/xgl-demo1.xvid.avi

and here the install manual for Ubuntu Dapper Drake:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=131267


I like it

Thats pretty neat.

If I ever have a PC solely for web surfing, and multimedia it'll probably be a linux.

As it stands, I game on this thing and need all the Windows I can get.

Another picture of the exposé clone:



You should see the windows flying over my desktop Watch the movie, it's worth it

How intensive is this, processor and GPU-wise? Cause it looks really pretty, but I run Kubuntu on my aging laptop, not really a powerful platform.

I'll upgrade to Dapper when it's released, I'm sure. Though I honestly don't use my laptop for anything other than e-mail and writing code for all my CS classes, so I guess it isn't as important to have fancy effects.

Dapper doesn't have xgl installed by default.

If you have a compatible video card it should work. Any nVidia Geforce, newer Radeons... and than it's faster than without since it is hardware accelerated.
I have an athlon64 3000+ 1gb ram and a Geforce FX5900 - no problem at all. I heard someone had installed it on a pc with 256MB Ram and Geforce2 - and it worked well!


Redhat is working on an alternative that works with older videocards, but I don't really know much about it.

Looks like a lot of bells and whistles that might eventually become useful.

You can also see the giant "gimmick" logo on the side.

I really question the sanity of people who overcustomize their desktops. I mean, some of them seem remotely useful, while others are OBVIOUSLY a gigantic gimmick to make *nux nerds feel original and cooler than the mainstream kids. It's a classic goths vs preps scenario. I'm the kid who just goes to school and goes home.

Expose is quite usefull. The rest is kind of useless yeah, and I will probably turn most of it off. But still it is hardware accelerated, it is faster. That's not just a gimmick.

While for me a lot of those effects are useless, they help a beginner. If you see how the window jumps into the taskbar, you will get the idea of it faster. It's the same thing with the cube. I am allready used to work with four virtual desktops. For a beginner it makes more sense now - the cube is a visualization of the four desktops that makes it more understandable for people who usually live in a a real 3D world. The zoom Option cann be very usefull to people with bad vision... and so on. Everything is still in a very early stage of developement, who knows what ideas are yet to come.

Still, it's much faster now. And that's not a gimmick

I don't use XGL, but I use transparency. I it set up so that the window gets translucent if I move it. I thoght of it also as a gimmick first, but it's usefull to see the window beneath the current one, ie to see how far something has progressed. I eeven catch myself sometimes trying to slightly move a window in OSX or Windows to see what's under it...

Are they planning on making a KDE version of this like Kubuntu? Looks pretty cool.

400th post. :em321:

You should google around a bit, it should already work with KDE. Just not KDEs window manager.

I'm upgrading to dapper right now. It'll prolly break my system n I'll have to go through the whole fixng ARHGGH process again but you enticed me :p

OSX does the nifty cube thing when you switch users too. Pointless, yeah. But pretty to watch? Hell yes.

I think the mplayer stuff is nice, I could really find that in handy

if i wasnt so lazy, id be tempted to try it

Have you ever done it? It's such an extreme feeling of smoothness and control it's not even funny.

So what's the deal then? Is it gnome, KDE, or what? I've been thinking about formatting, dual booting linux, but this might determine which flavor I go.

So hot.

Ok, so, um, I set stuff up and did a dist-upgrade and everything (incredibly, after xserver for some reason NOT BEING INSTALLED) seems to work fine .. except /dev/input/mice/ is gone? For that matter, /dev/input/ is gone entirely. Any help?

(I haven't even begun to attempt xgl because I need to get gnome working again .. xserver balks at the "omg core pointer not there")

Do you use devfs or udev?
Anyway I think in one of the two it's /dev/psaux for whatever reason. Can't check now, cause I'm at school.

I use udev

/dev/psaux isn't there either. It's not a serial mouse (it's a ps/2 mouse), so I'm totally at a loss at where the heck the device could be at.

I'm not that good at device management on linux, so: is there some way I could "reinstall" (or reconfigure) my mouse? I've already run dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg countless times to no avail (and it doesn't really address the mice either)

Hmmm, look for your udev-rules file (for me it's /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules) and search for mouse.
My setup looks like this:


Also, what kernel-version do you have?

Dj Yoshi, it's gnome. I think there will be something for KDE, too.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]So what's the deal then? Is it gnome, KDE, or what? I've been thinking about formatting, dual booting linux, but this might determine which flavor I go.[/QUOTE]KDE is more usable (especially for a Windows user), but it has an unfavorable license condition for commercial software. As a result, the major commercial distributions almost universally embrace Gnome now, even though it's inferior. You can get KDE to work with Compiz but there isn't a KDE-native solution yet.

Xgl, Compiz and Ubuntu Dapper Drake are still early-beta. This is by no means suitable for a main desktop yet. If you want a Linux desktop with this fanciness you should wait for a stable build, or you'll get frustrated with it and reinstall Windows after a couple of hours.

Jon'C, let's not start a gnome/kde flamewar here. I used KDE, too, and now I am using Gnome. I like parts of gnome better, but I have KDE installed, too, since I like a lot of KDE programms. So before XGL I used Kompose, than I use klipper, amarok, krusader, sometimes konqueror, I used katapult, but I think the normal "launch programm" dialog from gnome is better for me.

I don't think KDE/Gnome makes such a big difference. Just mix it I like the gnome-panel better, but than I like some KDE stuff.

And about that Xgl thing, it's pretty stable. But if you are new to linux you probably shouldn't begin with it. A lot of little things don't work yet, there are a lot of small bugs. I still have my breezy installed, and if I want to do something I boot into it. But while chatting and surfing I am on dapper and test things.

here another more normal xgl screenshot:

Okay.

I'm not starting a flamewar, I'm stating a fact. KDE is technically superior to Gnome from a software development viewpoint. The tools are better and the UI toolkit is an absolute joy to work with.

Gnome is overly-simplified to the point where it impairs usability for almost everything. KDE is also easier for new users to pick up and much more can be done with the provided graphical tools.

Gnome, in spite of the team's claims to the contrary, doesn't adhere to any form of sensible user interface guidelines. Their entire UI design is haphazard and clumsy. For instance, they include a menubar at the top of the screen like MacOS, but they don't understand why MacOS has the menubar at the top - because UI elements should be as static as possible.
Gnome's menubar is dysfunctional and does not serve any real purpose. Each application also provides its own menubar so you end up with two on the screen at all times. Not only is this confusing to users - Windows and Mac users alike - but it's also a monsterously inefficient use of screen real estate.

Additionally, the taskbar at the bottom of the screen is very clumsy. It's only necessary because the Gnome team couldn't figure out how to implement the MacOS menu bar properly.

And even worse is their total lack of even basic comprehension of user interface design. Important system-wide controls should use a corner pixel because, statistically, it presents a larger target to the user. Gnome's "Show desktop" button and the Gnome menu do not appear to use it. This profoundly slows down inexperienced users.

Politically, Gnome sucks for two reasons: First off, it only exists to compete against KDE. The original Gnome team members planned on making a GPLed version of Qt, but they couldn't figure out how to do it. So instead they made a copy using a UI toolkit designed for a graphics editor. hurr.
Secondly, the Gnome team selectively excludes usability patches and refuses to implement features arbitrarily. Usually they cover it up with comments like "THIS WILL MAKE GNOME HARDER TO USE" but that's never the case. The truth, I think, is that the Gnome programmers don't have a damn clue how to implement certain features, so they lie about it.

Don't get me wrong: KDE is not perfect. It's just taking the right path to becoming perfect. Gnome isn't. It's taken mammoth contributions from Mark Shuttleworth and Novell just to get it to the point where it is today.

Yeah so much about the theory, I converted some persons to Linux and I usually tolld them to try both. KDE and Gnome. And XFCE which I used for quite some time. I sometimes show them fluxbox and icewm, too. And so far most of them stayed with gnome. Ok, I don't "converted" so many that we could use the number as a statistic (about 10).

I really like the panels, since I got used to the top panel and the bottom panel I configured KDE the same way when I used it. (And I do use it sometimes). And I really dislike it how OSX does it. I want the menus at my window. Perhaps just a bad habbit, but I like it this way.

And yeah, I heard about this stuff with the "it's to complicated for users" exuse. Perhaps I will leave gnome some time... but right now it works very good, and the way I want it to.

These where the arguments why I started with KDE when I was playing with Gentoo, than I installed ubuntu and than kubuntu, since then I use gnome. It works ...

The cube thing is cool, but I don't know if would be helpful overall. 2D isn't that bad.

I have to agree with Jon on this one. He is spot on.

That does look nifty though. I have Composite working on my machine, so KDE makes all of the windows transparent, the windows fade in and out, and everything has a nice dropshadow. It looks nice, but serves no real purpose.

Mine basically looks like that.

Argh, this is really frustrating. I tried running mdetect and it didn't come up with anything.

Ok, finally got everything (including xgl) working.

Nice stuff.

edit: wait, a couple questions.
1) how do you zoom?
2) is there a simpler way to drag a window (like you'd normally do) to another workspace than to have to click on it and do ctrl+alt+arrow keys? (I.E. why can't I drag windows from workspace to workspace using the workspaces boxes :confused:)