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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Regarding KDE 4
From:       Luciano Montanaro <mikelima () cirulla ! net>
Date:       2004-07-03 11:03:44
Message-ID: 200407031303.45152.mikelima () cirulla ! net
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On Saturday 03 July 2004 10:06, Zack Rusin wrote:
> On Friday 02 July 2004 23:27, Damien Uern wrote:
> > Unfortunately the problem with IO-Slaves is that they work for KDE
> > applications only. It would be better to use LUFS and actually have a
> > fish:// mount point on the system so that any old app can use it. The
> > problem comes with cross-platform capabilities. fish:// works great
> > on my Solaris box at University, but if it depended on LUFS it
> > obviously wouldn't. Perhaps optional LUFS support at
> > compile-time/runtime would be needed.
>
> We already have it. fuse-kio
>
> > One of the other cool things coming with QT4 is Cairo support. It
>
> It is not certain Qt 4 will have Cairo Aurthur backend.
>

I have read as much in the Trolltech Qt teaser article. It is mentioned 
as a possibility. If/when Cairo takes ground, it will surely be a possibility,
however, since the initial targetted backend seem to include X11 and OpenGL,
between the ones that can be of interest to KDE.

> > should be possible to have some cool animations and effects (and true
> > translucency) because of the ability to render with OpenGL as the
> > backend.
>
> That's just plain wrong.
> 1) Translucency has nothing to do with Cairo or OpenGL.
> 2) Qt 4 will have support for translucency.
> 3) Cairo with Glitz backend doesn't expose animation and we can't depend
> on one backned therefore those "cool animations" would have to deal
> without OpenGL in its main rendering.
>

I'm not sure I follow you here: desktop level translucency support can be 
achieved only if all the underlying system support it -- so if X11 does not,
we would end up with the hacks that can be seen nowadays.
So, the Compose and Damage extensions are needed to handle the translucent
window compositing. And X11 will probably need OpenGL capable hardware (and 
lots video RAM) to compose the translucent windows on the screen each time 
the transparent area is damaged.

And about the animation, again, what is the problem? It's just a matter of 
programming it. Unless you are referring to those warping effect when 
minimizing windows, which could be unpractical without 3d acceleration.

> > Even without OpenGL support, with new features going into
> > Xorg, rendering will hopefully be better with no tearing/slow
> > redraws, etc...
>
> Who said X redraws are slow? In fact, as it is - Cairo is slow. It's
> very slow. The number of drivers accelerating Render is very limited.
> The number of drivers with decent OpenGL acceleration to handle the
> Glitz backend is also very small.

Hopefully the situation will improve, however. Render acceleration should be
finally in the xorg CVS for Radeon drivers. Using Render directly, or using 
Cairo, in the end does matter much. 
While I don't particularly care for the special effects, I think being finally
able to use antialiased graphics primitives would be quite welcome by many.

>
> I'm sure you wanted to be helpful and thanks for the interest but you're
> spreading misinformations so please watch it.
>
> Zack

Luciano
 
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