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Burn My Windows

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Re: Burn My Windows

#101

Post by laumars »

nebula8804 wrote: post #97
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #70

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…

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 It definitely made Windows XP look outdated but after you scratch the surface and adopt Linux, you discover a world of hurt whether it be bad drivers that break your desktop and throw you to a different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 g…

I switched to Linux full time before Compiz took off and did so for exactly the reasons you cited the other platforms were superior: Linux was more stable, easier to reason with (as it was doing less magic behind the scenes), components worked better with each other since POSIX is designed for interoperability.

Driver support was patchy at times, but then it wasn’t exactly easy on OSX (Apple: “if we don’t support you then you’re shit out of luck”) nor Windows (Microsoft: “we support everything. Albeit you’d have to manually find those drivers yourself so if your system doesn’t boot or network access fails then you’re shit out of luck”) either. At least Linux shipped 99% of what you needed on the install CD.

For that reason, I’d almost always switch to Linux if ever I needed to debug a hardware problem in Windows or OSX. Though that’s less of an issue these days because I haven’t run Windows in ~15yrs and if you have a hardware problem on a modern MBP then you’re shit out of luck so there’s little point trying to debug it yourself.

Re: Burn My Windows

#103

Post by dyingkneepad »

StillBored wrote: post #56

This is cool, but the fact that its written in JS tells me just about everything I need to know about gnome... JS has its place, using it for systems programming isn't one of them IMHO, since I prefer to have the core of my computation stack slim and fast. I can almost forgive the electron apps their piggyness given the desire to build cross platform, but gnome? Yah, no thanks.

I don't care what language is used, my problem with Gnome extensions is that after I install them, one of these things will happen:

a) after a minor apt-get update the extension will stop working

b) the extension will leak memory and after a few days of uptime my desktop will be unusable

That's why I'm still running Cinnamon. Gnome extensions are a thing created to deflect the biggest criticisms towards Gnome's questionable direction, yet they are a second-class citizen and never really work well enough to be acceptable.

Re: Burn My Windows

#104

Post by marcodiego »

nebula8804 wrote: post #97
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #70

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…

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 g…

> An OS is much more than cool looking visualizations [...]

At the time it was easy to hear people complaining about how ugly linux was. Compiz helped a lot in that front. We were used to people saying "you can't do that on linux" and then things quickly changed to us saying "you can't do that on your OS".

Let's not fake it: linux is still far from being a diamond of UI design or consistency, but well, competition has its own problems too. The point is: things improved a lot and that event at that time in history made things improve a bit faster. To the point that almost two decades later something like this gets to the front page of hacker news and is filled by comments of people with fond memories of the time.

> This whole journey began during the Compiz era.

Another evidence of the impact it had.

Re: Burn My Windows

#105

Post by laumars »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #70
marcodiego wrote: post #26

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…

Quartz looked nothing like Compiz. Comparing the two and saying Quartz was better massively misses the point of what Compiz was and what the OP discussed.

If you want to argue that most of Compiz effects were overused and tacky then that’s a different issue; also an entirely subjective one.

Re: Burn My Windows

#106

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

leephillips wrote: post #95
marcodiego wrote: post #26

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.

The English-speaking world still hasn't really agreed upon a term for that decade, especially in America, where "aught" and "nought" are rarely used words. (We tend to use "zero" instead, and "the zeroes" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aughts

Re: Burn My Windows

#107

Post by nitrogen »

marcodiego wrote: post #26

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 physicality that Compiz and wobbly windows brought to the desktop was a huge boon to my productivity. Everything was low latency, high framerate, and just felt real. I could rotate my virtual desktops around and they felt like actual spatial locations for organization. I could drag windows and they felt like quasi-tangible objects, not just abstract rigid platonic rectangles.

It was far more than just a gimmick, and I really miss the effects today.

Re: Burn My Windows

#108

Post by Fatnino »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #24
canbus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bragging about wobbly windows was the best thing ever. I'm glad I'm not alone!

Multiple desktops on a rotating cube tho. Shit was straight fire

Then there was this one screensaver that made the cube slowly rotate while all your windows from all the faces blew around like leaves in a gentle whirlwind in the middle.

I really really want to see this come back. Even back then it was never released to stable and I got it from a script that grabbed and compiled all the bleeding edge stuff. It worked for a few weeks and then an update somewhere broke it and I never saw it work again :(

Re: Burn My Windows

#109

Post by godot »

marcodiego wrote: post #26

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…

I clicked on the youtube link expecting to see Compiz examples, and was extremely pleasantly surprised to hear the music of Top Racer on SNES (I believe the game might've been called Top Gear 1 in America. In Asia Top Gear was the sequel to the first Top Racer game). One of my favorite SNES sound tracks of all time.

Re: Burn My Windows

#110

Post by silisili »

canbus wrote: post #16
mediocregopher wrote: post #7

Compiz was one of those things I could show off to friends to prove that linux was actually way cooler than any of _their_ operating systems, but since then seems to have been completely forgotten about (at least by me). This was a nice blast from the past.

Bragging about wobbly windows was the best thing ever. I'm glad I'm not alone!

Just found this! This thread has really let me compiz out my Gnome, between the flames and wobbly windows!

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3210/compiz-windows-e...

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