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Burn My Windows

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Re: Burn My Windows

#91

I actually kind of want to use GNOME just for this now. Call me crazy but little novelties like this are part of what make computers fun.

FWIW, KWin is easily extensible with effects like that and some of them are even available by default.

Re: Burn My Windows

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then after I spent a day getting it all working I'd be staring at my computer and it wouldn't take more than an hour or two to think "Ok, that's cool but I want to play a game" or something else that I couldn't do in linux. Hah, for me, this was when I started getting deep into WINE and also some of the games available for Linux (SuperTux, that one game where you shoot a ball and it sticks to other balls and if eno…

I did the same for sure, played every native linux game there was but at the time most of the game I played were rough under wine. CS: Source, TF2, L4D, and WoW were all pretty hard to get reliably running especially compared to their windows performance (note, this was 2007-2009 range). I still remember a youtube video showing WoW running on Wine and they had Compiz so you could see WoW running then they switched (u…

Heh, my time with Linux was before then, I think - but only by a couple of years. I do recall having some fun experimenting with StarCraft and NFS: Hot Pursuit (the og 1998 version, not the 2010 remake) under Wine, though.

Re: Burn My Windows

#94
post #86

I wonder if it's possible to do things like this with Windows or MacOS. I love the idea of cool effects like this (even if the first thing I did after OSX introduced the genie effect was to turn it off—nowadays the hardware is fast enough for it to not be annoying and the split second of the window shrinking away is a nice visual cue as to what's happened especially if one accidentally hides the window via cmd-H).

macOS has gotten a lot less fun, starting with X. I remember no end of UI-customization utilities for pre-X Macs, some of which were really powerful, like Kaleidoscope. I loved being able to make the system look like an NeXT box (there was even an Irix theme) or design my own UI entirely. Even Apple briefly considered the idea of building theme support right into the OS.

But they didn’t, and the few quirky things that OS X did, like the puff-of-smoke effect, have been quietly removed. I hate how sterile Apple’s products have gotten. Sure, they’re beautiful, but they don’t have the kind of character the old ones did.

I wish something like Kaleidoscope (or Burn My Windows) existed for Macs.

Re: Burn My Windows

#95

Compiz was probably the single most impactful event for desktop linux of the mid 2000's. Not that it itself made much of a difference, but the ripples affect many areas we take for granted today. A few reasons: - it put linux ahead of windows and mac in terms of appearance; - it brought many new users and most were a good mix technical and enthusiasts; - it showed the advantages of modular software; - many plugins we…

What does “mid 2000's” mean? I don’t mean to be dense, I just can’t figure it out.

Re: Burn My Windows

#96

Compiz was probably the single most impactful event for desktop linux of the mid 2000's. Not that it itself made much of a difference, but the ripples affect many areas we take for granted today. A few reasons: - it put linux ahead of windows and mac in terms of appearance; - it brought many new users and most were a good mix technical and enthusiasts; - it showed the advantages of modular software; - many plugins we…

What does “mid 2000's” mean? I don’t mean to be dense, I just can’t figure it out.

Years 2003(ish) to 2008(ish).

Re: Burn My Windows

#97

Compiz was probably the single most impactful event for desktop linux of the mid 2000's. Not that it itself made much of a difference, but the ripples affect many areas we take for granted today. A few reasons: - it put linux ahead of windows and mac in terms of appearance; - it brought many new users and most were a good mix technical and enthusiasts; - it showed the advantages of modular software; - many plugins we…

Bunch of rose-tinted hogwash, this. > It pioneered useful things like selecting an area of the screen and saving it directly to a file Pioneered? This was a standard feature on Macs since January 1997. > It also showed how important compositing was on the desktop. No, that would be the Quartz and Quartz Extreme compositors released with Mac OSX 10.0-10.2 years prior. Compiz in the mid 2000s was a mixture of catching…

I'll have to agree with this. Compiz was great at drawing curious people in but I'd argue that Compiz helped many people write off Linux. It definitely made Windows XP look outdated but after you scratch the surface and adopt Linux, you discover a world of hurt whether it be bad drivers that break your desktop and throw you to a different run level, poor interoperability between the different components or just the general loss of trust when something catastrophic happens like the stupid USB stack corrupting your drive when you copy a simple file (yes this happened to me a few times over the years).

Compiz resulted in tons of Youtube videos showing how cool it is but it was a gimmick. An OS is much more than cool looking visualizations and to that end during the time it was introduced, Linux was less stable and so people come for the looks and then left because its Linux.

I still want to believe that Linux will become the king because we have lost so many freedoms over the years. As a result, every year I install a clean copy of Ubuntu on to my PC, start using it and then stop when I discover some serious bug. After that I put it back on the shelf and wait until next year. Maybe next year it will be better. This whole journey began during the Compiz era.

Re: Burn My Windows

#98

Compiz was probably the single most impactful event for desktop linux of the mid 2000's. Not that it itself made much of a difference, but the ripples affect many areas we take for granted today. A few reasons: - it put linux ahead of windows and mac in terms of appearance; - it brought many new users and most were a good mix technical and enthusiasts; - it showed the advantages of modular software; - many plugins we…

The way I remember it, I never managed to get the original Compiz to work right, the Beryl fork worked out-of-the-box with no hacking around, and then Compiz Fusion (when Beryl was merged back into Compiz) lost like 95%+ of what Beryl could do.

Re: Burn My Windows

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bunch of rose-tinted hogwash, this. > It pioneered useful things like selecting an area of the screen and saving it directly to a file Pioneered? This was a standard feature on Macs since January 1997. > It also showed how important compositing was on the desktop. No, that would be the Quartz and Quartz Extreme compositors released with Mac OSX 10.0-10.2 years prior. Compiz in the mid 2000s was a mixture of catching…

Also the composited desktop Aero shipped in Windows Vista in late 2006, the same year as the initial release of Compiz. Aero was originally demoed at WinHEC 2003, for whatever that is worth. I don’t know how much these different compositing window managers inspired each other. To me it seems like there is some convergent evolution. Compositing window managers are obviously superior (no redrawing when moving windows).…

> Also the composited desktop Aero shipped in Windows Vista in late 2006, the same year as the initial release of Compiz.

Opposite end of the year though since Compiz was released at the start of 2006. Compiz had seen significant development over that year (unlike Windows that only ships big graphical updates in new OS releases). So much so that by the time Vista was out it had already forked a mature competitor: Beryl.

Plus Compiz wasn’t the first compositing Window on Linux either. Just arguably the best in that era.

> I don’t know how much these different compositing window managers inspired each other. To me it seems like there is some convergent evolution.

Technology almost always works that way. But it’s fair to note that Compiz did feel miles ahead of the competition at the time. Which I think is entirely down to its module system. Meaning anyone could build their own effects and not just wait for their OS developers to release a new service pack.

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