XFree86 gets eye candy

I, for one, am very glad that Brad jumped from OS/2 to Windows. Where would I be without my OD programs? I'd be a very BORED computer user.

After jumping through only 182 flaming hoops, you too can have animated cursors with dropshadows in X. Typical Linux non-user-friendliness.

This is an example of how Linux is behind and Windows is the leader of the pack. Linux is trying to catch up by releasing their own version of whatever new invovation comes out for Windows. In this case it's CursorXP.

Wow.

XFree86 is -not- a linux thing. It's a totally platform independant windowing system which came into existance awhile back due to the high costs of commercial X-Windowing systems.

If you understand X at all - you also know it has nothing to do with friendliness or unfriendliness of a desktop - but that's neither here nor there...

The new version of XFree, simply put, is -sweet-. Yes, it's still lacking in many things - even some of the XFree devs have said so - but the latest release is wonderful.

XFT still renders TrueType fonts like crap though - but at least now it does it with subpixel rendering. ^.^

KDE 3.1 + XFree 4.3 = Sheer Joy

catching up after CursorXP? you are aware that WindowsXP supports alpha-blended animated cursors natively?

did you even read the article? it´s mostly about the (impressive) script the guy wrote that makes converting cursors easy. it´s related to CursorXP, because it uses PNG as format (as XFree) and that can be read by ImageMagick unlike M$´s propreatary CUR and ANI formats.

what scares me is that i understand most of the script

No, Windows XP does not support alpha blended animated cursors natively.

You can have one, or the other, but not both at the same time.

SD2XC is my script in question in that article.

XFree86 as of version 4.3 supports animated, alpha blended, 24bit color mouse cursors. Yes, Windows was first to have any of these features and CursorsXP extended this concept.

SD2XC is a program which simply converts CursorXP themes to XFree86 'XCursor' themes. It is not a rip-off of CursorXP.

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In reply to, "This is an example of how Linux is behind and Windows is the leader of the pack. Linux is trying to catch up by releasing their own version of whatever new invovation comes out for Windows." (Citizen jj79_1999)

The question who isn't 'who did this first?' because every platform has firsts that the others didn't. Unix users haven't needed WindowBlinds because they had *native* support for that in their toolkits for years. Much of Object Desktop is a hack and a mockery of Unix applications as Unix doesn't have any standard window manager such as Explorer, so that functionality was made customizable by design and doesn't require any hacks.

It is well-known that Windows has always had the upper-hand on XFree86 (and X in general). Between poor management of the project, difficulties in organizing efforts between vendors, and finalizing those efforts. There are many reasons which X has fallen behind Windows but it is not a surprise, X is a much more superior and a more supported system. Windows users probably laugh as they look at their statistics.

The X protocol runs on many different operating and architectures, there are many X servers written by different vendors and yet they all remain compatable. You can have a Sun machine run programs displaying on an Irix machine and an Irix machine displaying programs on a Linux machine; the X server software is different on each of those machines but yet compatable.. Maintaining such compatability is hard, especially once you want to start implementing things like 'cool mouse cursors' and AntiAliased fonts.

Windows doesn't have these problems because it runs on a single architecture (exclud. NT4), and it is incompatable with everyone else (sun, sgi, hp, etc), and it is only designed for kiosk; the only compatability Microsoft cares about is with the prior version of the software. Programs for Windows only display on the computer they are running on, programs for X can run on remote computers; hence, the need of compatability.

XFree86 is a free X server which is commonly used on Linux and *BSD machines. The latest version adds support for changing resolutions without restarting and cool mouse cursors; a couple years ago AntiAliased fonts were added, but only within a year became mainstream (KDE/Gnome support).