A GNOME 2.12 preview
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A GNOME 2.12 preview
Posted Jul 31, 2005 13:58 UTC (Sun) by jg (subscriber, #17537) [Link]
Jonathan,
There is a *major* change in Gnome 2.12: the use of Cairo under GTK+.
This is a fundamental change in the rendering on the screen; our 2D graphics
becomes second to none, and it sets up for higher performance and more eye candy in the future. Finally, we get away from the old X core graphics completely. Mozilla is also making this transition, and mono has always been Cairo based.
So while it makes little visible difference in this release (though various
widgets will look nicer due to anti-aliasing), it is the foundation for the future.
- Jim
A GNOME 2.12 preview
Posted Jul 31, 2005 18:02 UTC (Sun) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link]
I've heard there are significant performance issues with the Cairo code. Is this something that has been addressed or should we expect a bigger, slower GTK+?
A GNOME 2.12 preview
A GNOME 2.12 preview
Posted Jul 31, 2005 20:08 UTC (Sun) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]
Is this going to require a relatively recent graphics card?
I'm still using a G400 ..... good enough?
A GNOME 2.12 preview
Posted Jul 31, 2005 21:05 UTC (Sun) by jg (subscriber, #17537) [Link]
Should be fine. Cairo performance is quite decent now and people should not notice performance problems in general. It just isn't as fast as it will be in the future.
A GNOME 2.12 preview
Posted Aug 1, 2005 5:35 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]
What about when the client and server are different machines? Can Cairo be used in that situation?
A GNOME 2.12 preview
Posted Aug 1, 2005 6:24 UTC (Mon) by hp (guest, #5220) [Link]
With the RENDER extension it should be better in that situation, since old gtk would have pulled down the pixels from the server to the client, composited, and pushed pixels back; compositing can now be done on the server instead, avoiding the round trip. (Performance of networked X11 is usually a function of number of round trip requests.) Cairo automatically uses RENDER or not as appropriate.
None of this drawing work does anything for some of the common stuff that shows up in gtk profiles though, like text measurement. The complexity of Unicode and international font rendering isn't at all easy to make fast. This stuff is a client-side issue not an X server or drawing issue though.
A simple example, most programmers have probably written a word wrap algorithm before - insert a newline at the last whitespace before the wrap column. Maybe a dozen-lines function or something for ASCII, and super fast. But 100% broken in many languages. Welcome to the real world. Ouch. The same thing happens with a lot of text-related operations.
Honestly though, most apps are not bottlenecking on drawing text (or GTK+ in general). In practice the speed of an IMAP server or web page loading/rendering or pulling executables off disk are all much more user-visible issues.
Some of the "snappy feel" people are looking for will be much easier to achieve with new X server features that cause it to retain window contents and avoid the flickery expose event model. This is qualitative change (avoid intermediate redraw states) rather than quantitative (do the redraw as fast as possible).
A GNOME 2.12 preview
Posted Aug 2, 2005 0:34 UTC (Tue) by jonabbey (guest, #2736) [Link]
Having written such a simple word-wrap algorithm as is alluded to, that 'real world' code makes me very scared indeed. I want my mommy.
Cairo?
Posted Aug 1, 2005 8:53 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]
There is a *major* change in Gnome 2.12: the use of Cairo under GTK+.What's "Cairo" in this context, and what makes it better than old X11? I gather you don't mean the Egyptian capital, or the Microsoft codename for some old Windows release... (sorry if this is a stupid question, but I did try to google for a "for dummies" explanation of Cairo with no success).
Cairo?
Posted Aug 1, 2005 9:13 UTC (Mon) by jg (subscriber, #17537) [Link]
see http://www.cairographics.org
A GNOME 2.12 preview
Posted Aug 1, 2005 10:43 UTC (Mon) by mmarkov (guest, #4978) [Link]
\begin{quote}There is a *major* change in Gnome 2.12: the use of Cairo under GTK+.
This is a fundamental change in the rendering on the screen; our 2D graphics
becomes second to none, and it sets up for higher performance and more eye candy in the future. Finally, we get away from the old X core graphics completely.
\end{quote}
Anything analogous to Cairo for KDE -- now or in the near future?
A GNOME 2.12 preview
Posted Aug 1, 2005 11:01 UTC (Mon) by cloose (guest, #5066) [Link]
> Anything analogous to Cairo for KDE -- now or in the near future?
Sure. Qt4 has the paint framework Arthur (http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-arthur.html). This framework can also use different paint engines, like e.g. OpenGL.
A GNOME 2.12 preview
Posted Jul 31, 2005 22:21 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
I've been trying to get to the site all day. No luck. There is never a response from the server. This article has been linked from 3 sites that I visit, and no one has complained that it is unreachable. Is is just me?
A GNOME 2.12 preview
Posted Aug 1, 2005 0:00 UTC (Mon) by TwoTimeGrime (guest, #11688) [Link]
Might be. I was able to get to it with no problem. It loaded quite fast.
A GNOME 2.12 preview
Posted Aug 1, 2005 1:04 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
Thanks. It is just me. I ssh'd to a machine outside my local network, and lynx brings it up just fine.
-Steve
A GNOME 2.12 preview
Posted Aug 1, 2005 3:27 UTC (Mon) by huffd (guest, #10382) [Link]
Those screenshots are gorgeous! I'll probably change from Mozilla to Firefox when Gentoo has the ebuilds ready for this next release in September.
A GNOME 2.12 preview
Posted Aug 1, 2005 11:41 UTC (Mon) by jordi (guest, #14325) [Link]
You mean Epiphany?
Oooh
Posted Aug 1, 2005 14:18 UTC (Mon) by thomask (guest, #17985) [Link]
I read that Cairo supports Quartz as a back-end - does this mean I will be able to run GTK 2.8 appson my Mac without running an X server? I use Inkscape and GIMP atm, and it would be really nice to
see these run natively...
Oooh
Posted Aug 1, 2005 14:23 UTC (Mon) by sandmann (subscriber, #473) [Link]
No, unless someone writes a real OS X backend for gtk+, you won't be. Cairomay provide the rendering primitives, but that's not the hard part of a gtk+ backend.
Oooh
Posted Aug 1, 2005 14:39 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
There is some work going on to support OS X with GTK+. See Hubert Figuere (sp?) blog posts on the topic (http://planet.gnome.org).
Oooh
Posted Aug 2, 2005 19:24 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]
For best chances of cross platform compatability between Linux and 'native' OS X is GNUStep.
GNUStep is based on OpenStep, obviously, the api developed for the NextStep unix OS.
Since OS X's Cocoa is based on OpenStep with it's own extensions it's fairly easy to port a application from OS X Cocoa to Linux GNUStep and visa versa.
Of course it's has it's pitfalls and Apple has it's propriatory stuff that you'd have to worry about (OpenStep by itself is a published standard) but it's a lot easier to go that route then trying to go from GTK to native OS X.
I doubt that your going to get cairo goodness that way though.
Realy the easiest thing to do, is like what I do, which is to get rid of OS X and install Linux on your apple computers. :) (bought it for the ibook, which was a good value at the time, although I realy doubt I'll ever buy another apple product. not because I don't like my ibook, which I do, it's because Intel "Sonoma" Centrino stuff has caught up and surpassed anything that apple has aviable)