FVWM-Crystal 3.0.4: Speed and Transparency 180
michuk writes "PolishLinux.org has published a review of FVWM-Crystal 3.0.4: "FVWM-Crystal is an eye-candy, functional and ultra-fast desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX, based on FVWM. Crystal can be used even on very old machines, thus it is a noticeable alternative to popular desktop choices like XFCE or Fluxbox.""
Sure... (Score:2)
Sure, it can be used on older machines, but what will the performance costs be? Is it going to be prohibitive to the actual functionality of the system (which, in UNIX, is what most users are using it for)?
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For the record, I don't use either. On OS X, I fill the Dock and have it expand, and that's good enough. On Linux, I use a commandline, and make reasonably short commands for anything I need to run.
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Coral Cache (Score:5, Informative)
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CHris Mattern
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Oops (Score:5, Funny)
As opposed to their webserver...
the 'f' was for feeble (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody? (Score:2)
And if no one knew back then, why do i remember it today? 10 years is not that long ago. If one cant remember that far back, there is a problem.
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Re: WNT (Score:5, Insightful)
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Er, did they get /.ed? (Score:1)
Looking forward to when the page is back up^^
Original sites! (Score:5, Informative)
Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications (Score:5, Insightful)
FVWM with Nautilus? When I use nautilus in another environment (window manager, whatever), it always starts slower than it does in Gnome (I know, I know, preload gnome-stuff and all that, but if you have to do that, what's the point?). Once nautilus is open, it still behaves sluggish and ackward. And it's not just nautilus. I have the same issue with konqueror, firefox, music apps, k3b, and more. A lightweight desktop is fast if I just want to login and look at your wallpaper, but once I try to get something done, I have the same old issues.
I can't quite describe the problem, but even after the tremendous improvements that have been made to the Linux desktop in the past few years, it still feels... slow. I'm not trying to troll here. I love Linux, and I wish it all the success in the world, but it just doesn't feel as snappy to me as windows 2000/XP. Seems like lost mouse-clicks and slow window redraws are a large part of the problem. Perhaps the problem lies with X, or with my own warped sense of perception... who knows?
Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications (Score:4, Insightful)
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I don't usually find GTK to be slow. Some applications that use it are slow, but others are very fast (e.g. XMMS). So I don't think it's the toolkit.
``It's a great library but they need to concentrate I think on two main things: speed and appearance.''
What's wrong with GTK's appearance? Ok, the default theme is uglier than Windows, but you can theme it to your heart's content. Lots of themes to choose from;
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this doesnt happen in windows, dialog boxes are part of the applicaion, unlike a mdi window it can move outside of the confines of the application height/width, but stay at the level for the applic
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In other words, GTK is a great UI library except it's slow and looks bad :). But no, I don't think that GTK is the problem. I have a gtk-gnutella instance running in a 200MHz box, accessed over XVNC, and it
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So that Gnome applications are portable wherever Gnome VFS exists, and gain the benefit of working with whatever GnomeVFS works with?
I like how my desktop works pretty well over SFTP/SMB/FTP (and I guess WebDAV but I've never used that) without me caring what protocol the bits are going over. Gnome is a framework in additon to being a desktop.
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Ah, I see. It's a bit like Java, but not as well designed nor as efficent.
Which is why it's so slow. There is no problem that can't be solved by adding a lay
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Linux fans love to point out how "bloated" Windows as become, and how greatly major Windows apps have suffered from feature-creep. And they're right. But I don't see a lot of di
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It isn't, ever. The faster processors become, the more overhead various desktop environments add. And since programs require these toolkits and libraries to run, you can't really opt out.
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True. In other words, software expands to consume all available resources. And that's pretty much always been the case. But with aggregate processing speed about to make some substantial increases in the next decade (multicore, Cell
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In that case all we need to do is add a layer of redirection in order to speed up all the other ones ;-)
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The desktop doesn't "work over FTP" in the same way that, for instance, you can tunnel your X session over SSH. Basically, there's a layer that allows any resource that can be addressed by a URL to be opened as a file pointer by a KDE app.
This is nice. Suppose you want to update the .htacc
Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications (Score:5, Insightful)
Well it just so happens that gut feeling, despite being the most popular tool, is almost totally useless when applied to performance measurement in software.
Seriously, I solve performance issues in a range of applications on an almost daily basis as part of my job. After a few years, you stop being surprised at exactly how little correlation there is between your gut feeling of what is causing slowdown and what really is.
Measurement is the only useful approach to performance. I've said it many times before, and many greater programmers than me said it long before that.
A couple of quotes:
"Measurement is a crucial component of performance improvement since reasoning and intuition are fallible guides and must be supplemented with tools like timing commands and profilers." - Kernighan and Pike
"You cannot tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so do not try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is." - Rob Pike
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And what would they know about programming? I'm waiting until I hear it from Bill Ga
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If you don't believe me, get a 200 MHz computer, run a GTK+ 1.2 app from back then (e.g. X-chat), then run the same app that has been ported to GTK+ 2.0. You [i]will[/i] notice a difference!
About MacOS X, I wouldn't be surpr
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You mean there's a price to be paid for having anti-aliased text, real unicode support, and using resolution-independant vectors to draw the widgets and icons? Say it ain't so!
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This means that for my workflow:
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BTW I do all this on a MacBook Pro w/ 2GB Ram and all hooked up to a 30in. ACD (so the GPU is pretty well taxed to it's limits on rendering the screen).
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In conclusion, you're an idiot.
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I can't help but believe that there is a LOT of redundant activity going on there, that could be avoided if we identify what
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The one thing that is really problematic is web browsi
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Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications (Score:5, Funny)
From the slashdot submission:
thus it is a noticeable alternative to popular desktop choices like XFCE or Fluxbox.
This must be a definition of popular with which I am unfamilar
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I prefer using the older FreeBSD system with half the processing power.
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I've been using FVWM for about a year now, and it's absolutely amazing at creating a desktop environment that increases your productivity. Since it's so flexible, I suspect the advantages are not limited to someone who uses their desktop like I do, but for virtually anyone.
Some of the key features that help me include
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http://fvwm-crystal.org/screenshots/quakeconsole.j pg [fvwm-crystal.org]
It's that transparent terminal at the top. When
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A lot of the problem can be eliminated by choosing the right apps: aterm rather than the default GNOME and KDE ones; Abiword rather than OOo.
It is a shame, however, that the default desktop and apps that most new linux users experience are so slow.
Seems like lost mouse-clicks and slow window redraws are a large part of the problem. Perhaps the problem lies with X...
X is not slow. X was written to run on the machines of 25 years ago, and it's super fast on modern hardware. It's just some of the apps th
"machines of 25 years ago" means slow (Score:2)
Back then, you didn't have very much RAM to deal with and (see above) dealing with it was cheap. Screen resolutions were small. If you had 32 kB of video RAM you were happy! CGA didn't even have that much.
Back then, expectations were lower too.
Now, you want to run this on moder
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Indeed, it seems that whenever someone goes and investigates this (which happens somewhat regularly), it turns out X is very capable of high performance - but it's the apps (and often the toolkits) that don't achieve that performance. Of course, another way of putting that is saying that it's too bloody hard to write an app or toolkit for X so that it performs well.
Also, I think (but that information might be outdated) that X also does _some_ unnecessary copying of image data, which could
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That may be true if there's a lot of switching between kernel space and user space, but why would that be the case?
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2. Context switching between applications or whatever and the X server. Context switching is handled in the kernel. A userspace switch is probably a good order of magnitude slower than a kernel switch. X generates a lot of round-trip traffic, though I guess that depends on toolkit implementers as much
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Sure, I guess so, but a switch is a switch. You could implement the same strategy in kernel space and save even more time.
I use FreeNX for my remote desktop stuff, but I've never seen those libraries used on a local machine as a replacement for the standard X libraries when doing local work. Regardless, it would be nice to see these next-generation X libraries implement some round-trip re
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GNOME can be fairly fast (Score:2)
would want icons buried underneath all their apps. (or wallpaper
for that matter -- do you run apps or do you just stare at the
desktop and wank?)
Depending on your system, one of these commands should kill nautilus:
gconftool -t bool
gconftool2 -t bool
Next, ban all k* and q* apps. You can use the ldd command to
see if an app is using the Qt libraries. I
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Perhaps gnome-session is useless. I guess it saves state at logout. I think it also does the startup though, so it's probably needed for GNOME apps in general.
Life without a window manager sucks. Metacity isn't bad. It does focus-follows-mouse (w/o autoraise of course) and generally doesn't annoy me. It's been years since I had time to waste screwing with config files. (back in 1994 I used the C preprocessor to create config files for 3 window managers on several different systems, so yes I certainly
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On this dual boot Windows/SuSE box I find Linux to be just as fast as Windows. Unlike Windows I can run an intense graphical prog in one desktop and the other is still usable. Booting Windows give the impression of being faster as the desktop appears sooner. But you have to wait until it loads its bits in the backround. I tried a few tweaks
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I basically followed lots of 'how to speed up Linux' tips on the web. A lot of which are mutually contradictory. Split the disk up into seperate partitions swap,
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fvwm-crystal doesn't require or neccesarily need nautilus. You can use rox-filer to generate desktop icons if you'd like just fine - and in fact the author reccomends that. If you can do without desktop icons altogeather, you can run it without rox-filer or Nautilus, or run on
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This may indicate that your P4 laptop is getting bogged down in too many context switches. X clients tend to cause many of these: client sends request -> switch to server -> handle request -> switch to client, repeat a few hundred times and you've got the contents of one window drawn. Context switches cause quite some trashing on x86, especially on the P4 with its long pipelines (long pipeline means lo
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Seems to me it lies at your side, because lost events and slow redraw is something I experience frequently in Windows 2000, and never in Linux. And I regularly use an old 180 MHz PC with Linux.
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We have had quite different experiences. I have used both Windows (2000/xp), and Linux (a variety of distros) on multiple computers, from a PII with 256 mb ram to an Athlon XP 2500 with a gig of ram, and every time I have found Windows to be noticeably snappier. Applications start up faster, the windows move more smoothly, and the mouse-clicks seem more... reliable.
I'm not trying to preach that everyone should ditch Linux and run Windows. "Genuine advantage" and DRM hassle
Windows UI is responsive on old 120mhz box (Score:2)
By "swirl test" I mean: open a browser to full screen, open another window on top of the browser, quickly swirl the window opened on top of the browser. If I get tracing etc, it fails the test.
NT4.0 easily passes the swirl test. Even on a 120mhz box with a 4mb video card.
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I think GTK is the culprit in most cases. In most GTK apps, you can see a dialog box being painted, even on 1Ghz machine. That's just inexcusable.
FVWM-Crystal is nice, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Fvwm-Crystal is really nice, it shows how powerful and flexible Fvwm can be while still being light and fast. But its main drawback is that when something goes wrong, you are screwed unless you know Fvwm very well, and this is not something easy to achieve (for those who don't know Fvwm, just look at the man page [fvwm.org].
Also, while we are on the subject of Fvwm, check out Metisse [insitu.lri.fr], a nice experimental Fvwm-based OpenGL desktop. I'm not sure if it's still actively maintened though. It would be a nice thing too if they ported it to Xgl.
Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
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not awesome, in any year (Score:2)
Skins: a poor substitute for sane defaults and being able to adjust the important things.
Many years ago, Windows 3.1 got this right. You could adjust the thickness of a window border. Today this ability is absent from the Linux desktops. You have to switch themes. Of course, at best only a few nasty-looking themes will have the thickness you want. If you want 10-pixel borders (near-blind with a 30" 2560x1600 display) you're just ou
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Of course, that would mean I have to ditch the GTK apps to save memory. Maybe I can replace Gimp with Krita. Firefox would be missed.
Then there's also a sore spot: years ago, back when Qt wasn't available under the GPL, the KDE developers took GPL code from other people and linked it against Qt. They then had the nerve to say that this was OK. Things still aren't nice; the LGPL (needed for interoperability with MPL, old 4-clause BSD, CDDL, Apache, etc.) is a much nicer license than GPL. There's been qu
Very like able theme (Score:2)
Desktop or Window Manager (Score:5, Informative)
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As an avid FVWM 1.24 user... (Score:2)
I've been running the same binary since about 1997, so far, I really haven't found anything it doesn't do. But it IS a little ugly.
I didn't upgrade to FVWM-2 because its configuration files weren't compatible... How are they for 3?
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I made the switch to FVWM 2 through a lot of other window managers. I held on to the 1.x series 'til enlightenment DR13 ( I think), then gnome/sawmill was working enough to use, then after a few years went back to FVWM. I like 2.x much better - my current config doesn't do a whole lot 1.x doesn't do, but there's a trick or two I pull that I'm pretty sure 1.x wouldn't let me get away with.
One question though - if you're runni
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> still linked with libc5, or were you an early glibc convert?
Nah, I'm an early GNU/Solaris user. The binary was built with Solaris 2.5.1 -- and Sun is MUCH better about backwards binary compatibilty than the Linux folks...
BTW, when I say GNU/Solaris, I really do mean that in a fairly Stallmanesque, not-tounge-in-cheek manner. I use the Solaris kernel, X server and solibs, but nearly everything else has been replaced by GNU software. It
Eye candy? Says who? (Score:2)
Every screenshot on that page is pretty damn ugly..
Never mind the WM... (Score:2)
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Some users prefer a slightly more appealing graphical environment than Icewm.
Either way, don't be so cranky. Remember, it's all about freedom of choice.
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Just need to learn how to edit your
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I feed my computer instructions by telepathy and recieve them the same way.
myspace profiles give me a headache.
Sort of... (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_deskto
Right now it only compares Gnome, KDE, and xfe, and then it really only lists somewhat superficial differences. If it were fleshed out, I think it could be quite handy.
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