Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 18, 2011 5:09 UTC (Tue) by geuder (guest, #62854)
In reply to: Timer slack for slacker developers by jcm
Parent article: Timer slack for slacker developers

> In X11, applications receive Expose events every time a window configuration event happens or a window is partially or completely covered or uncovered.

Traditionally yes. However, I believe to remember that at least one existing compositing window manager does not offer this nice functionality. So the application will update its window even when not visible.

Disclaimer: I don't remember the details. And if I did, I would probably be hindered by an NDA to get more detailed.

Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 18, 2011 5:20 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (8 responses)

Fortunately I explicitly don't care about compositing window managers :)

Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 18, 2011 9:31 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (7 responses)

Unfortunately, you live in a world where most people do.

Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 18, 2011 15:01 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (6 responses)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002TYEPWO/ref=dm_dp_trk...

I've decided there are plenty of things I enjoy about living in the present, but X11 is an area where I'm going to force a return to the 80s. I want a network transparent non-3D desktop that just works. I used to care about pretty window managers and all that nonsense, now I just want to get stuff done with my computer and have it otherwise left alone.

Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 18, 2011 16:08 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

Quite so. The pretty stuff is very pretty but every new bit of it seems to break something old that Just Worked until now, because nobody uses network transparency / nobody cares about power consumption / nobody cares about video playback / nobody cares about focus-follows-mouse / nobody cares about any older X extensions / ...

(OK, that *was* excessively cynical.)

Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 18, 2011 17:08 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (2 responses)

Can be summarized as "I want a UNIX workstation and not a pretty desktop". I don't mean to sound offensive but I actively do not want any of that other stuff. I just want a 1980s style X11 workstation that works exactly as it always did, with X forwarding just working, and none of this 3D stuff. Sure, having extensions to play games is nice and all, but I don't need to rotate my desktop on a cube or have wobbly windows. I used to think I do, but that's before I realized I'd rather have a super boring UI that is set in stone. I want to do something and it always works just like it always did.

Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 18, 2011 23:16 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I have similar goals, but I'd like Wayland so that I could (do what is essentially) moving *windows* between X servers instead of having windows rooted in the $DISPLAY they started with. The xpra tool can sort of do it, but it's still rooted to some other display and AFAICT doesn't really give the full power of, say, XMonad (happy to be wrong though) over the xpra windows. Combine this with per-application freeze and thaw that came up a few weeks ago that works between different machines and I can migrate a running system to another machine :) .

Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 20, 2011 22:30 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I'd describe that as "I want a Unix workstation and not *just* a pretty desktop". The pretty is all right, but only if it doesn't break other stuff on its way. "Pretty" is less important than "works".

(But I know we are weird this way. Emacs versus vi is one thing, but most people would look at both of those and run screaming back to their pretty Eclipse. Actually, no, most people would run screaming back to Word, which is neither pretty nor functional...)

80's X - was: Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 18, 2011 21:08 UTC (Tue) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (1 responses)

I think the modern spelling of "network transparent" is "HTML5". However I find that xterm<->tmux provides a very usable 80's style windowing environment over a simple ssh connection.
Oh wait ... I don't think we had ssh in the 80's :-)

80's X - was: Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 18, 2011 22:12 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]

Yea but...HTML5 is the example folks give when told that Linux as a consumer OS doesn't have a stable platform for third party applications. They say "oh, but in the future...HTML5...hand wavy!" and all that. Conveniently forgetting that this was the future for iPhone right before Apple had to about-face and offer real apps. HTML5 and friends might be the future, but that future is further away than most think it is.

It's true we didn't have ssh in the 80s. Nor did we have Xinerama and lots of other things I do like, all of which are iterative improvements on what went before :)

Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 18, 2011 9:32 UTC (Tue) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, it's not that easy. Your window may be covered, except that the user presses Alt-Tab and expects to see current content (clocks, download managers, ). Or it may be covered by something that's almost, but not quite, opaque.

That's not the problem, though. The problem is that you can't depend on every program to get this right, but, on the other hand, you do need some way for a program to tell the kernel that when it says 0.2sec it MEANS 0.2sec and not something random that may be roughly of the same order of magnitude. Or not.

How exactly to do that is the kernel people's problem. New scheduler class, new kind of timer, whatever.

Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 29, 2011 18:50 UTC (Sat) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

If the Window-switcher knows how to tell the application that it's "exposed" again, Alt-Tab shouldn't be a problem, I suppose?