Enlightenment Working On OpenGL-Accelerated Evas Filters

[cj.wijtmans]

is it on wayland?

[dkasak]

<trolly bullshit>

Frustrated ex-user? I've been running E for almost 20 years now, and while I check out other WMs when they release updates, I always go back to the fastest, best looking, most configurable WM out there.

[raster]

Does this EFL Evas filer thing use GLSL?

The GL canvas engine now uses GLSL to do filters as opposed to software that was there before (the software engine of course uses the CPU/software to do the work).

[raster]

Is this more of a techdemo or some Hollywood sci-fi GUI?

Both. You can do either. It's just someone's desktop with their setup, wallpaper etc. showing what now is fast and accelerated that before was going via a CPU/software path and what is possible as a result. It shows it isn't a "dirty hack" (meaning you make a copy of the wallpaper, blur it once then just show that through - that it's live and tracks any content that may change below a filter area etc.).

Does anyone really use Enlightenment?

Yes.

I mean sure it looks pretty. But is it usable?

Yes.

And this is only for the built-in Enlightenement apps and CLI apps in eterm? Or does Gtk and Qt work nice and integrate well?

The above has nothing to do with Enlightenment apps or GTK+ or Qt. It has to do with being able to use filters with acceleration. If an app had transparency it'd be possible irrespective of the toolkit/app. Of course since titlebars in X11 are rendered by the window manager then you get this feature regardless of apps in such elements of the screen. In Wayland since it's client-side rendered, there is no nice way to really do this yet without making some broad assumptions.

Also too much shades, fades, opacity, transparency, blur, shadows, gradients and bling might just make it look cheap and shitty.

That's a personal taste thing. That's why you can have alternate themes. Themes can even determine what filters and effects are used where and animate them ... or not. It's not imposed on a user to take-it-or-leave-it. It's up to the theme (a blob of data) that defines the look.

[raster]

Nice tech demo, but not sure blur like in the video would be useful. I tend to read the stuff behind my terminal window (saves me having to switch). even more so if I am trying out new cli commands from web pages

Indeed it's not "useful to watch a video blurred under a terminal". It's a tech demo to show that content is live and done properly - not done as a "screenshot it and blur it only once to cheat/save processing" hack. It's automatically done on demand tracking changes (and if nothing changes it doesn't re-do the work when it doesn't have to). It's not about features in the window manager. It's about the canvas filter features and one place the canvas is used is in Enlightenment's compositor. As the look and feel is defined by data files/themes it's trivial to show off/test a feature in a pretty "heavy use case" scenario by just altering the theme to include snapshot objects + filters in the theme that would cause it to blue what is below. But the acceleration now is available anywhere if you use filters like blur. If an app wants to use this now it can, knowing that the OpenGL engine uses the GPU fully for the filtering work rather than the CPU. The same libraries that were written for Enlightenment to be built are available for apps to use too.

[raster]

This seems a bit like they're chasing yesterday's features.

Yes. Blurring has been around for decades. So what? It's a tech demo of canvas filter acceleration so it can be used anywhere in any app as desired (that uses the canvas) and now can get acceleration. When you have people asking for filters so they can for example blur a shadow object (that is a copy of the icon above set via colors to all black) then providing it so it can be fully accelerated is a good idea. Or blur the video content behind overlays subtitles to make it easier to read them... What you see is just a tech demo of a core UI toolkit feature, not a window manager/compositor feature.

[raster]

is it on wayland?

Yup. For a long time now. All the features you see work both in X11 and Wayland. Though with CSD the client can't actually do this like with SSD objects in X11. It would require coordination between the client and the compositor to place such snapshot+filter objects in the right places on the compositor side. But the compositor works as a wayland compositor. Rather well actually. Try it on a RPI and you'll see the benefits of Wayland vs X11 (significantly faster/smoother). And the filters are a core UI toolkit feature in Evas - not the window manager. The canvas his used though for the compositor thus.. the filter features will work. With acceleration.

[ldo17]

Blurring has been around for decades. So what?

It’s still a good demonstration of image-processing speed, is what.

[raster]

It’s still a good demonstration of image-processing speed, is what.

I know that... and that it's designed well to live blur any content you can throw at it in real life. My point was that "yesterdays features" is a dismissal of the entire effort as if it's "too late - someone did it before". Yes. blurring has been done for decades. That's not the point. The point is making it an easy to use feature in a scene graph that is now also fast.

[starshipeleven]

Frustrated ex-user? I've been running E for almost 20 years now, and while I check out other WMs when they release updates, I always go back to the fastest, best looking, most configurable WM out there.

No, he always posts stuff like that on any topic.