Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 70 posts

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#21

Post by watersb »

When my main computer was Linux laptop, I used xplanet as my desktop background. World clock, basic weather..

This was in 2003. It would get lots of interest when I was working in public places.

Which is why, somewhere over Greenland, a flight attendant came by and very quietly said to me, “I noticed you work on outer space stuff. We just got word over radio that the Space Shuttle blew up.” :-(

Very strange that the memory of that interaction would come to me about 8 hours after a more robust reentry vehicle splashed down in Florida.

http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#22

Post by glouwbug »

berkut wrote: post #18
cosmotic wrote: post #4

I love the focus on reducing CPU, GPU, and battery consumption... but it's still going to be distracting.

Doesn't the example video show all four cores mostly hovering at around 40-50% CPU usage (with occasional dips to 10-20%)? What else was the machine doing at the time?

Heh, recording. My thinkpad is a little too slow.

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#27

Post by ASalazarMX »

watersb wrote: post #21

When my main computer was Linux laptop, I used xplanet as my desktop background. World clock, basic weather.. This was in 2003. It would get lots of interest when I was working in public places. Which is why, somewhere over Greenland, a flight attendant came by and very quietly said to me, “I noticed you work on outer space stuff. We just got word over radio that the Space Shuttle blew up.” :-( Very strange that the…

That must have felt very tragic and awkward.

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#28

Post by totetsu »

unlimit wrote: post #19
umvi wrote: post #17

I used to care about my desktop background. But as I've gotten older I find the only time I see it is when I close every window, and sometimes I can go for weeks without closing every window. So now I just leave it as the default because I look at it <1% of the time anyway

Yup, its ctrl-alt-t the moment DE loads.

I played around with transparent terminals over tranquil underwater videos for a bit. It was nice, but needed a bit too much resource.

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#29

Post by mrweasel »

watersb wrote: post #21

When my main computer was Linux laptop, I used xplanet as my desktop background. World clock, basic weather.. This was in 2003. It would get lots of interest when I was working in public places. Which is why, somewhere over Greenland, a flight attendant came by and very quietly said to me, “I noticed you work on outer space stuff. We just got word over radio that the Space Shuttle blew up.” :-( Very strange that the…

Xplanet is the only animated wallpaper I've even seen used. Most people would try it back in the early 2000 and then come to the conclusion that it wasn't worth the CPU cycles after a few minutes.

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#30

Post by platz »

h2odragon wrote: post #12

most of xscreensaver's hacks will use the root window if you ask them too. I'm using GLava [1] to put an audio spectrograph up on one side of my desktop, i run it with windowed games and transparency and so on and its never more than a 5% of CPU that I've ever seen. [1] https://github.com/jarcode-foss/glava no link for xscreensaver, jwz doesn't like hacker news

xscreensaver is nice when you eliminate all the "busy" modes and then turn down all the sliders on each mode you have left so that it moves very slowly.

the only thing i haven't figured out is how to get the fonts working again.

Post reply on HN