Os Eye Candy

Big_al · January 15th, 2009, 01:28 AM

Do you like OS eye candy?

Mystic · January 15th, 2009, 01:38 AM

Nope, its a waste of space

g6672D · January 15th, 2009, 02:05 AM

Death to eye candy wasting my precious CPU and graphics power!

CrazedImp · January 15th, 2009, 02:23 AM

Quite honestly, in today's day and age things like CPU and RAM being used by the OS is a negligible factor. The only reason your system runs slow with it on is because your system can't handle it, not because its pointless or whatever else. If you can't run what the OS was supposed to do then you should have done a bit more research prior. I'm tired of all this bullshit "OH NO ITS EATING MY RAM AND CPU", computer hardware now is well beyond that stage. I especially get annoyed with people running somewhat dated PC's who complain something runs slow. Well fucking duh. If something runs slow, upgrade. Simple. If you can't afford to do it, then you'd be a massive hypocrite complaining. People don't need to hold technology back.

I don't really care if an OS has extra eye candy or not. But it does need to be upgraded enough to keep standard with ever increasing hardware power. I think its pointless if you have a high powered PC, then you decide to run an interface that looks pre-Windows98. Its like buying an ultra high-end gaming PC, then running games on low because "running games on max eats my FPS".

FATAL · January 15th, 2009, 04:47 AM

^^^^^^^ wrong

Aliotroph? · January 15th, 2009, 05:36 AM

How exactly does one not care about eye candy and then turn around and say it needs to be upgraded to use a computer's power?

I'm more than happy to have eye candy where it doesn't impede or even helps usability. For most people it will put them more at ease with their computers and their day-to-day tasks don't use a lot of power anyway. That said, Windows has always been so low on eye candy it's never been a limiting factor except on computers that are underpowered anyway.

If your computer gets slower because of the fades in XP it must hurt trying to run new applications on it. Running old applications is fine as long as the formats work and the features you want are there. Yes, new ones are often bloated but occasionally they end up with some killer functionality that just makes them better to use. The exception here is if the fade effects and such are slowing down tasks intentionally to give time for the effect, they need to go. The classic example of this is games that use Flash-based installers. Installing some EA games takes twice as long because I get to sit through the menus animating before I can click anything.

Ack, tangent. Back to usability. On Vista I had most of the eye candy turned off. Because of speed? Hell no! Vista was smart enough to keep my games running well even with the eye candy. I turned it off because Micro$loth decided making it easy for them to have their GUI look nice was more important than making it easy for me to customize it for my eyes. Seriously! There was no way to change the fonts in explorer windows! WTF??? Some of us NEED bigger letters. Can't change the colours either. WTF is wrong with these people? So yeah, eye candy went. Vista works ok if you drag its themes back to the Windows 98 days in terms of look. Why they took out the profiles for colours and fonts starting with XP is beyond me though. Oh yeah, the old version of explorer has ugly bugs and they're somehow more apparent in Vista. Time to see if Windows 7 helps this. :/

I do find things like the animations, colourful fades, transparent bit, etc, seem to make life more comfortable for computer newbies. Simple things like having a flicker-free GUI, properly indicating a window that's busy (Vista makes those look ghostly), using animations to show "where my program went," etc. go a long way to making computers less painful for some. Apple was the best at this stuff for a long time. Windows got a lot further with Vista (it's a separate issue that everybody was selling computers that couldn't properly run it). Not sure what this is like on Linux now. Last distro I used for any real work was Fedora Core 3. Sort of olde now.

So yeah, I'll keep my eye candy, but if it gets in my way I'll turn it off.

CrazedImp · January 15th, 2009, 05:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aliotroph?

How exactly does one not care about eye candy and then turn around and say it needs to be upgraded to use a computer's power?

I don't recall saying I didn't care about eye candy, I just take what I'm given and use it if I'm able to.

Quote:

Originally Posted by FATAL

^^^^^^^ wrong

Well that means I'm right.

I should add though, back to the whole wasting of CPU and RAM thing. If you have a computer able to actually run a new OS with all the bell's and whistles on, then thats a good thing. Whats the point of having hardware in your machine that doesn't even get used? Using less resources is not always a good thing. Say if you buy a PC with 4GB+ RAM, then you take every effort possible to minimise RAM usage. A little pointless.

Aliotroph? · January 15th, 2009, 06:28 AM

Well, aside from the fact that lower CPU usage would mean less power usage...

Eye candy should never take too much RAM. Most of what I can see in eye candy for newer GUIs is using the GPU. That's fine because not much else is willing to use it. There are better uses for RAM though. One of the controversial ones is caching frequently-used programs so they load faster.

It would be interesting to see an OS where you could set profiles depending on how the computer is frequently used, or even tie that to user profiles. Some people really do use the raw number-crunching power of their computers to encode things all day, some wants things to load quickly from the desktop, and some just play games. Actually, it would be even more interesting if the OS could be set to be intelligent and learn the habits of its users.

CrazedImp · January 15th, 2009, 06:55 AM

I'm sure the whole scientific computers will be intelligent stuff will come. And less power usage? Really, if you want one thing to be concerned about in your PC that sucks up power turn off Aero if you have Vista and a high end GPU.

Raptor Jesus · January 15th, 2009, 07:18 AM

I like it

. As long as it doesn't slow now my PC, BRING IT ON!

I love my gooey windows in Ubuntu

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f3...Screenshot.png

Mystic · January 15th, 2009, 12:20 PM

Im sick of people telling me I should upgrade to use the newer 'faster' systems, if it was faster it wouldnt need an upgrade, fact is each new windows is slower and more bloated than the previous ones and only runs faster if its on a faster PC. DUH, so does everything else.
My system is fast enough to run Vista with all the crap (aero etc) loaded but I really dont care for superficial stuff like that and prefer a simpler more functional desktop so aero and that annoyingly space wasting widgets thingy are both out.

sLydE · January 15th, 2009, 01:01 PM

I like shiny things, and not really loving the whole reading this thread thing right now...OMG I'm a regular computer user!

/me runs away

rustyslacker · January 15th, 2009, 01:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Raptor Jesus

I like it . As long as it doesn't slow now my PC, BRING IT ON! I love my gooey windows in Ubuntu

Ugh, that plugin is so fucking buggy. D:|

Most of the eye candy features I've enabled in Compiz actually help usability. I've grown used to having a desktop cube, for example, and having my windows darken and fade when they're not in use.

Quote:

Originally Posted by CrazedImp

Say if you buy a PC with 4GB+ RAM, then you take every effort possible to minimise RAM usage. A little pointless.

True enough. To use a Total Annihilation analogy for Fatal to understand, it's like what happens when you have some +200 metal income, and your metal storage is maxed out. It's useless and doing nothing for you until you spend the resources.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mystic

Im sick of people telling me I should upgrade to use the newer 'faster' systems, if it was faster it wouldnt need an upgrade, fact is each new windows is slower and more bloated than the previous ones and only runs faster if its on a faster PC. DUH, so does everything else.

wat

As computers become both faster and less expensive, it's a natural progression that new software and operating systems progress to take advantage of that. So, trying to run newer software on older hardware is obviously going to lead to a slightly handicapped experience. Are you being stubborn, cheap, stupid or some combination of the above? Since you say you have a Vista+Aero capable computer, it seems the first or third.

Potnop · January 15th, 2009, 02:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Raptor Jesus

I like it

. As long as it doesn't slow now my PC, BRING IT ON!

I love my gooey windows in Ubuntu

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f3...Screenshot.png

Oh yeah... We use linux in the computer labs for programming class and I spend a good quarter of the hour I need to be doing the lab playing with the windows...

REoL · January 15th, 2009, 02:41 PM

I never bothered turning off the eye candy on Vista. It doesn't really do anything in the performance department. Maybe Windows 7, if I upgraded to that, might bog down a little, being an older machine.

My Boss's CPU was built for WINDOWS 98, and upgraded to xp. The system handles things fine, but the graphics are a bit slow, noticible, but nothing horrible. (1GB RAM, and about 1.6GHz P2, I think.)

Raptor Jesus · January 15th, 2009, 03:16 PM

1.6ghz p2? My desktop had a 1.6ghz p4.

FATAL · January 15th, 2009, 04:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rustyslacker

True enough. To use a Total Annihilation analogy for Fatal to understand, it's like what happens when you have some +200 metal income, and your metal storage is maxed out. It's useless and doing nothing for you until you spend the resources.

Moar gaters?

Aliotroph? · January 15th, 2009, 04:19 PM

REoL's boss needs a (slightly) newer video card. I hate XP with laggy graphics. Yucko. Win2K for the win on those boxes.

There was a load of kicking and screaming before Mystic would leave Win98 behind. Don't think I could ever go back to using that on a day-to-day basis. Stuff just works better on newer machines. Well, my olde Star Trek game doesn't; it's a nightmare making it work right in DOSbox, but I don't play that much.

g6672D · January 15th, 2009, 07:06 PM

Performance is not the only important factor. Simplicity often results in less bugs and/or security holes. Right now, I'll horrify you, because I have 4GB worth of RAM, and it's only using 306MB. It was at 700MB after the 98 hours or whatever of downloading Windows 7, because of caching and other reasons like that.

To use a different TA analogy, mine's not usually being used on Berthas or powerful aircraft swarms, but it isn't being wasted on multiple targetting facilities or A.K/Weasel/Jeffy/Peewee/Flea spam, which creates negative effects on unit intelligence, number and so on.

And every now and again, I do run something demanding, like PSX/PS2 emulation, VMs, Wine and other such things. In those cases, the UI prettied up is a useless distraction to what's going on inside the window. Namely, pure awesomeness.

Aliotroph? · January 15th, 2009, 08:16 PM

It's interesting how some things I used to think were processor speed issues turned out to be I/O and memory issues instead. I was listening to an XG MIDI file earlier and it occurred to me I'd never seen that softsynth lag on this computer except when it tries to run on two cores and gets confused about caching samples. So I dug out the file that used to drag my olde PII to a halt and tried that. At best I could get the CPU usage up to 20% (this is with a pile of other apps running, including Shareaza). It would stay there for a few seconds and go back to hovering between 3% and 7%. Turns out even that silly thing just wanted to do some I/O (saw a big spike on both cores for a second despite the driver only running on one).

View Poll Results: Do you enjoy OS eye candy
Yes, I like shiny things	10	55.56%
No, I turn it off to increase speed	8	44.44%
Voters: 18. You may not vote on this poll

January 15th, 2009, 01:28 AM	#1
Big_al Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: The Cute Zone. Posts: 3,930	Os Eye Candy Do you like OS eye candy? __________________ [Deviant Art\|DiskImage\|Doom Heaven\|Joke Blog\|Picture Blog]

January 15th, 2009, 01:38 AM	#2
Mystic Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: Edinburgh, Scotland Posts: 2,975	Nope, its a waste of space __________________ so long and thanks for all the fish

January 15th, 2009, 05:36 AM	#6
Aliotroph? Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: The frozen wastes of Quan'ideery Posts: 9,095	How exactly does one not care about eye candy and then turn around and say it needs to be upgraded to use a computer's power? I'm more than happy to have eye candy where it doesn't impede or even helps usability. For most people it will put them more at ease with their computers and their day-to-day tasks don't use a lot of power anyway. That said, Windows has always been so low on eye candy it's never been a limiting factor except on computers that are underpowered anyway. If your computer gets slower because of the fades in XP it must hurt trying to run new applications on it. Running old applications is fine as long as the formats work and the features you want are there. Yes, new ones are often bloated but occasionally they end up with some killer functionality that just makes them better to use. The exception here is if the fade effects and such are slowing down tasks intentionally to give time for the effect, they need to go. The classic example of this is games that use Flash-based installers. Installing some EA games takes twice as long because I get to sit through the menus animating before I can click anything. Ack, tangent. Back to usability. On Vista I had most of the eye candy turned off. Because of speed? Hell no! Vista was smart enough to keep my games running well even with the eye candy. I turned it off because Micro$loth decided making it easy for them to have their GUI look nice was more important than making it easy for me to customize it for my eyes. Seriously! There was no way to change the fonts in explorer windows! WTF??? Some of us NEED bigger letters. Can't change the colours either. WTF is wrong with these people? So yeah, eye candy went. Vista works ok if you drag its themes back to the Windows 98 days in terms of look. Why they took out the profiles for colours and fonts starting with XP is beyond me though. Oh yeah, the old version of explorer has ugly bugs and they're somehow more apparent in Vista. Time to see if Windows 7 helps this. :/ I do find things like the animations, colourful fades, transparent bit, etc, seem to make life more comfortable for computer newbies. Simple things like having a flicker-free GUI, properly indicating a window that's busy (Vista makes those look ghostly), using animations to show "where my program went," etc. go a long way to making computers less painful for some. Apple was the best at this stuff for a long time. Windows got a lot further with Vista (it's a separate issue that everybody was selling computers that couldn't properly run it). Not sure what this is like on Linux now. Last distro I used for any real work was Fedora Core 3. Sort of olde now. So yeah, I'll keep my eye candy, but if it gets in my way I'll turn it off. __________________ Aliotroph.post_count++;

January 15th, 2009, 06:28 AM	#8
Aliotroph? Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: The frozen wastes of Quan'ideery Posts: 9,095	Well, aside from the fact that lower CPU usage would mean less power usage... Eye candy should never take too much RAM. Most of what I can see in eye candy for newer GUIs is using the GPU. That's fine because not much else is willing to use it. There are better uses for RAM though. One of the controversial ones is caching frequently-used programs so they load faster. It would be interesting to see an OS where you could set profiles depending on how the computer is frequently used, or even tie that to user profiles. Some people really do use the raw number-crunching power of their computers to encode things all day, some wants things to load quickly from the desktop, and some just play games. Actually, it would be even more interesting if the OS could be set to be intelligent and learn the habits of its users. __________________ Aliotroph.post_count++;

January 15th, 2009, 02:05 AM	#3
g6672D Join Date: Oct 2005 Location: Unknown Posts: 1,330	Death to eye candy wasting my precious CPU and graphics power!

January 15th, 2009, 02:23 AM	#4
CrazedImp Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: In a wall glitch. Posts: 2,174	Quite honestly, in today's day and age things like CPU and RAM being used by the OS is a negligible factor. The only reason your system runs slow with it on is because your system can't handle it, not because its pointless or whatever else. If you can't run what the OS was supposed to do then you should have done a bit more research prior. I'm tired of all this bullshit "OH NO ITS EATING MY RAM AND CPU", computer hardware now is well beyond that stage. I especially get annoyed with people running somewhat dated PC's who complain something runs slow. Well fucking duh. If something runs slow, upgrade. Simple. If you can't afford to do it, then you'd be a massive hypocrite complaining. People don't need to hold technology back. I don't really care if an OS has extra eye candy or not. But it does need to be upgraded enough to keep standard with ever increasing hardware power. I think its pointless if you have a high powered PC, then you decide to run an interface that looks pre-Windows98. Its like buying an ultra high-end gaming PC, then running games on low because "running games on max eats my FPS".

January 15th, 2009, 04:47 AM	#5
FATAL Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Helsinki, Finland Posts: 7,429	^^^^^^^ wrong

January 15th, 2009, 06:55 AM	#9
CrazedImp Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: In a wall glitch. Posts: 2,174	I'm sure the whole scientific computers will be intelligent stuff will come. And less power usage? Really, if you want one thing to be concerned about in your PC that sucks up power turn off Aero if you have Vista and a high end GPU.

January 15th, 2009, 07:18 AM	#10
Raptor Jesus Join Date: May 2006 Location: Amerikhastan Posts: 2,756	I like it . As long as it doesn't slow now my PC, BRING IT ON! I love my gooey windows in Ubuntu http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f3...Screenshot.png

January 15th, 2009, 12:20 PM	#11
Mystic Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: Edinburgh, Scotland Posts: 2,975	Im sick of people telling me I should upgrade to use the newer 'faster' systems, if it was faster it wouldnt need an upgrade, fact is each new windows is slower and more bloated than the previous ones and only runs faster if its on a faster PC. DUH, so does everything else. My system is fast enough to run Vista with all the crap (aero etc) loaded but I really dont care for superficial stuff like that and prefer a simpler more functional desktop so aero and that annoyingly space wasting widgets thingy are both out. __________________ so long and thanks for all the fish

January 15th, 2009, 01:01 PM	#12
sLydE Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Mount Savage, MD, USA Posts: 1,736	I like shiny things, and not really loving the whole reading this thread thing right now...OMG I'm a regular computer user! /me runs away __________________ \| Worthless Genius \| My Portfolio \| Doom Legacy Wiki \| The Appalachian Independent \|

January 15th, 2009, 02:41 PM	#15
REoL Commander Keen Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: Someplace that exists Posts: 3,613	I never bothered turning off the eye candy on Vista. It doesn't really do anything in the performance department. Maybe Windows 7, if I upgraded to that, might bog down a little, being an older machine. My Boss's CPU was built for WINDOWS 98, and upgraded to xp. The system handles things fine, but the graphics are a bit slow, noticible, but nothing horrible. (1GB RAM, and about 1.6GHz P2, I think.)

January 15th, 2009, 03:16 PM	#16
Raptor Jesus Join Date: May 2006 Location: Amerikhastan Posts: 2,756	1.6ghz p2? My desktop had a 1.6ghz p4.

January 15th, 2009, 04:19 PM	#18
Aliotroph? Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: The frozen wastes of Quan'ideery Posts: 9,095	REoL's boss needs a (slightly) newer video card. I hate XP with laggy graphics. Yucko. Win2K for the win on those boxes. There was a load of kicking and screaming before Mystic would leave Win98 behind. Don't think I could ever go back to using that on a day-to-day basis. Stuff just works better on newer machines. Well, my olde Star Trek game doesn't; it's a nightmare making it work right in DOSbox, but I don't play that much. __________________ Aliotroph.post_count++;

January 15th, 2009, 07:06 PM	#19
g6672D Join Date: Oct 2005 Location: Unknown Posts: 1,330	Performance is not the only important factor. Simplicity often results in less bugs and/or security holes. Right now, I'll horrify you, because I have 4GB worth of RAM, and it's only using 306MB. It was at 700MB after the 98 hours or whatever of downloading Windows 7, because of caching and other reasons like that. To use a different TA analogy, mine's not usually being used on Berthas or powerful aircraft swarms, but it isn't being wasted on multiple targetting facilities or A.K/Weasel/Jeffy/Peewee/Flea spam, which creates negative effects on unit intelligence, number and so on. And every now and again, I do run something demanding, like PSX/PS2 emulation, VMs, Wine and other such things. In those cases, the UI prettied up is a useless distraction to what's going on inside the window. Namely, pure awesomeness.

January 15th, 2009, 08:16 PM	#20
Aliotroph? Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: The frozen wastes of Quan'ideery Posts: 9,095	It's interesting how some things I used to think were processor speed issues turned out to be I/O and memory issues instead. I was listening to an XG MIDI file earlier and it occurred to me I'd never seen that softsynth lag on this computer except when it tries to run on two cores and gets confused about caching samples. So I dug out the file that used to drag my olde PII to a halt and tried that. At best I could get the CPU usage up to 20% (this is with a pile of other apps running, including Shareaza). It would stay there for a few seconds and go back to hovering between 3% and 7%. Turns out even that silly thing just wanted to do some I/O (saw a big spike on both cores for a second despite the driver only running on one). __________________ Aliotroph.post_count++;

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