Re: project goal Re: Release schedule

[Nicolas Roard]

On 2003-04-15 02:57:19 +0000 Jason Clouse <jhclouse@charter.net> wrote:

> Just a crazy thought--would anyone be interested in writing a backend for Fresco 
> (http://www.fresco.org/)?  Fresco seems to be in desperate need of a desktop 
> environment/user applications--KDE and GNOME seem to be absent there--and GNUstep already 
> has some fine user applications (GNUMail, GORM, Workspace, Terminal) that would be 
> beneficial to giving Fresco a leg up.  Furthermore, it seems to be a wide open 
> opportunity to capture a new "market" if you'll pardon the borrowed phrase.
>
> Fresco is a new frontier that no one seems to be taking advantage of.  Seems 
> like getting in before anyone else would establish GNUstep as the premier 
> desktop environment for Fresco.  Might even give a few people reason to try it 
> out.  And I'm sure the Fresco developers would be grateful for the interest and 
> might be willing to help out some in return.

The problem is that Fresco tries to have a common API for gui applications, it's
not only a X11 counterpart ... and it uses corba, which in the case of GNUstep 
is
a bit overhead as we have DO.

Personnally, instead of Fresco, DirectFB seems a far more promising target.
First, it has many developers (more than Fresco it seems to me), and the project
progress quicly. Second, it's more like a X11 counterpart (without net 
transparency)
than a full gui solution like Fresco. Thus, a gui toolkit such as GNUstep fill 
the gap.
Third, it has very impressive graphic possibilities (transparency, alpha 
channel ...). And it has some accelerated drivers -- and then it's way faster 
than X11.
What did it lacks ? well, network transparency, and OpenGL. In fact, OpenGL is 
possible,
but there is no accelerated 3D driver for the moment, which drastically reduce 
the
interesst. For the network transparency, it's not such a problem, as you could 
run a
version of XFree inside DirectFB if you want (like you do on Mac OS X ..) : see
http://www.roard.com/screenshots/screenshot_directfb.png .
(on a side note I think that, for GNUstep apps, a better network transparency 
than X11
could possibly be done ... less low-level) DirectFB seems to me the perfect component for 
a "linux desktop". Actually, gtk exists on DirectFB (it's the only toolkit 
vailable), but gtk isn't in itself
very dedicated to DirectFB, it's just a port. GNUstep on the other hand could 
be more
implicated.

Just my 2 cents ...

--
Nicolas Roard