On Sunday 26 December 2010 12:44:30 Roelof 'Ben' Kusters wrote: > > You are joking, aren't you? I don't know what you mean by "lesser > > graphic-cards," but I have a Toshiba laptop with Intel graphics and F 13 > > that I use as a showpiece. > > I'm not joking. Yes, there are some look-perks that Linux has - like the > cube and the wobbly windows - that are nice, and "Oh wow!" indeed. But did > you notice my mentioning of the true transparency? Even conky isn't truly > transparent, but what about borders or panels? The panels take the colour > of the desktop-background if told to do so, but that doesn't make them > transparent; move a window off the bottom to see what I mean. > Isn't it possible to keep these effects and make it transparent? My KDE panel is fully transparent (my choice is 30% visibility), I'm looking at it right now. I wouldn't know about Gnome, but KDE does have true transparency built-in, provided that you have appropriate graphics drivers for your hardware. Compiz also has true transparency (I'm using it under KDE). If Gnome doesn't have it, I'm really sorry for them... ;-) In general, eye-candy stuff is present in Fedora (and Linux in general) to a much higher degree than anything I've ever seen on Windows or Mac platforms. Compiz (-fusion, with emerald decorator and coupled with native KDE environment) is AFAIK unbeatable, eye-candy-wise. That said, there are three main reasons why these things are not the default (in Fedora at least): 1) A user may not have the hardware (or drivers) that can support such graphics-intensive stuff; you don't want to install Fedora and see it slow down and crawl on your machine just because desktop effects are on by default. 2) Some users are generally pissed off by desktop effects; while I like all that eye-candy and use it, I do agree that it should be opt-in rather than opt-out. 3) Gnome folks lack good taste for eye-candy :-D . If you try out just the default KDE spin, you'll find a much more interesting environment even by default, not to mention turning on desktop effects and such. > Leaving my comments on hardware management and wifi (almost) unnoticed. As for wifi, there's not much anyone can do. If a vendor does provide open- source drivers (or at least closed-source support for Linux), it works. If there is only Windows support, go complain to the vendor, not here. As for hardware management, I'm not so sure *why* would an ordinary user ever want to enable/disable hardware components. In Windows this is useful because the OS is total crap and users are already used to doing this on everyday basis, in order to make the crap system work to some degree, at least. Also, in Windows a user has no other choice but to use the GUI when something doesn't work right. However, in Linux in general (and Fedora in particular), things are quite different. First, one does not need to do this so often (I remember needing to disable hardware only once in the past 10 years or so, when my soundcard went away and I needed to make it shut up). Second, an ordinary user doesn't typically log in with admin privileges, so does not have/need any GUI-like thing to disable hardware. Third, a user who doesn't know what he is doing has no business doing it in the first place, while a user who does know what he is doing typically already knows how to use a terminal-su-modprobe, and doesn't need a GUI. So the "hardware manager" in Windows is a "feature" that came into life because of the very poorly designed OS, lack of a reasonable CLI, and a general habit of users to log in as admin for general-purpose everyday work. In Linux environment such a tool would be both unnecessary and useless, and that is my guess why it doesn't exist today. Or maybe it does exist, but noone knows since noone uses it. :-) P.S. Just try to disable a piece of hardware in Windows without having to reboot the machine, and you'll get the perspective about the "quality" of that whole design. ;-) HTH, :-) Marko -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
