Future of GNOME (mockup)

ave a look at this astounding XGL/Compiz video (I conceded embedment of videos in page). The video demonstrates the cutting-edge Linux desktop experience (with pleasant background music). As the title of this video says, “the future is now!”; be sure to read some of the bound comments.

I also came across several nice GNOME screenshots in recent days.

• Attractive blue theme in Ubuntu
• Media player (mplayer) skin
• Another look at the skin
• Illustration of desklets (very much like Mac Widgets or what Microsoft calls “Gadgets”)
• Vista-inspired looks

Related item: GNOME is Also Beautiful

Baghira Mac OS X lookalike for KDE

INUX can be assimilated to merely any desktop environment, including the appearance of its rivals’ desktops. It can endlessly adapt, particularly layout-wise, although look-and-feel is getting there too. Different interfaces (achievable through desktop environment), as well as various addons, make this truer than ever before. There are several design sets lying about, which enable Linux to look and behave merely like any other operating system. Here are a few examples that I collected recently:

• KDE posing as Mac OS X
• GNOME posing as Mac OS X
• Another approach/route to GNOME OS X
• KDE as Windows XP (not quite so ‘brushed up’ though)

Another nice style that I found is Noia for KDE (version 1).

Here are some sets of instructions of interest. These are step-by-step recipes to achieving some of what’s shown above:

• Transforming GNOME to become a OSX lookalike
• A recent blog item pointing to Arnaud’s OSX cloning tutorial

Wallpaper from Houghi (click image above
to enlarge; non-lossy PNG version)

HE admirable Compiz/XGL cube has already earned its 15 minutes or fame. However, one alternative that often gets overlooked is 3-D Desktop, which has been available for GNU/Linux for several years.

Here are two 3-D Desktop videos from YouTube. They illustrate that simple function and demonstrate its beauty. Like XGL, speed is highly dependent upon OpenGL with a decent graphics card.

• Video #1
• Video #2

Palm Bliss: An old product of my interest
in themes and templates

UITE often I rave about KDE, as I last did a week or so ago. However, I admit that GNOME is beautiful too, so I have collected a few themes and previews which support its beauty.

• Gentle Gnome mockup
• Glass Icons Theme
• nuoveXT
• Avio-GDM

Lastly, here is a way of making GNOME look more like Mac OS X. I don’t necessarily endorse or praise, but I just love the looks of Apple hardware and software. KDE is able to achieve similar results, I might as well add.

An example of less innovative KDE themes: Baghira Mac OS X lookalike

ESTERDAY I took a quick tour through some mockups and proposal made for the KDE project. I would like to present three examples, which are merely screenshots, sometimes combined with art work.

• Navigation Bar Reloaded
• Korganizer better integration
• KBFX 0.5 (One of the mockups)

As these ideas were contributed and voted on by the community of users, no doubt KDE will remain at the forefront of functionality and user experience. It’s a case of programmers preparing and eating their own dogfood, so to speak.

An old screenshot of my Linux box at the University.
In the background I embed sunny resorts that I once
visited and they revolve periodically, owing to KDE

am exceedingly impressed by the innovative work of the KDE team. These folks truly invent some productivity methodologies which exist nowhere else. KDE is primarily targetted at operating systems such as Linux and BSD and it puts them both at the forefront of innovation. How they do it, I don’t know, but I suspect that requests and suggestions from the public (KDE userbase) make it a reality, via wishlist items, reported as ‘bugs’ with low severity level. Allow me to exemplify my statement using a timely realisation.

Only yesterday, I needed to restart KDE (no reboots involved). This happened after over one month of this non-stop KDE session. The motive? Possibly a few memory leaks, which had accumulated throughout 5 weeks of 24/7 computing (I run experiments using untested code overnight and whenever I am absent). Either way, once restarted, KDE restores the user’s session perfectly.

All windows re-appear in the correct virtual desktop, in the same position with the same dimensions as prior to logout. A complete system reboot would have had the same impact. Shells are reinstantiated and created, possibly positioned at the same directory/path as before. While it sounds simple and trivial, it is not. File managers likewise. FTP connections are restored with the servers in question, even at the right depth and directory level. The only exception are SSH connections that were opened without calling the command directly, e.g. SSH within a shell. Otherwise, even remote connections as such are restored! Again, this should not be taken for granted.

In this older version of KDE (3.1, as haven’t tested it yet with the newer setup at home), Mozilla applications are the sole exception. They are not being restored. Nonetheless and all in all, well done, KDE team! You thought of everything the user will ever need.

There is a Mozilla Firefox extension called SessionSaver. It achieves something similar to the above by fully restoring tabs, even with textarea input re-instered. This mechanism is robust and even resilient to browser crashes, all at the expense of browsing performance, as well as some system resources.

Related recent item: Why I Love KDE

Screen-shot of Metisse for FVWM

ESTERDAY I read about three-dimensional displays, which are said to require no glasses and make stereo-vision a reality. This seemed like ‘queue hopping’ from a scientific point-of-view, so I had to read it carefully and identify some points of skepticism. I was successful in finding some gaps and deficiencies, which a careful read would quickly reveal (albeit the headline is very eye-catching — an exaggeration within or even beyond reason).

If you have some idiosyncratic interests which pertain to the study of vision and human-computer interaction (HCI), you may find some of my past essays on the topic intersting:

• Spherical Display
• The User Interfaces of Tomorrow
• 3-D Interaction on the Desktop
• Accelerated X Draws Competition
• The Desktop Sphere
• Next Generation of X
• Spherical Desktop