Direct Rendering InfrastructureThe Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) is the framework comprising the modern Linux graphics stack which allows unprivileged user-space programs to issue commands to graphics hardware without conflicting with other programs. The main use of DRI is to provide hardware acceleration for the Mesa implementation of OpenGL. DRI has also been adapted to provide OpenGL acceleration on a framebuffer console without a display server running.
Mesa (computer graphics)Mesa, also called Mesa3D and The Mesa 3D Graphics Library, is an open source implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and other graphics API specifications. Mesa translates these specifications to vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers. Its most important users are two graphics drivers mostly developed and funded by Intel and AMD for their respective hardware (AMD promotes their Mesa drivers Radeon and RadeonSI over the deprecated AMD Catalyst, and Intel has only supported the Mesa driver). Proprietary graphics drivers (e.
GTKGTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the Wayland and X11 windowing systems. The GTK team releases new versions on a regular basis. GTK 4 and GTK 3 are maintained, while GTK 2 is end-of-life. GTK1 is independently maintained by the CinePaint project.
Compositing window managerA compositing manager, or compositor, is software that provides applications with an off-screen buffer for each window. The compositing manager composites the window buffers into an image representing the screen and writes the result into the display memory. A compositing window manager is a window manager that is also a compositing manager. Compositing managers may perform additional processing on buffered windows, applying 2D and 3D animated effects such as blending, fading, , rotation, duplication, bending and contortion, shuffling, blurring, redirecting applications, and translating windows into one of a number of displays and virtual desktops.
Freedesktop.orgfreedesktop.org (fd.o), formerly X Desktop Group (XDG), is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It was founded by Havoc Pennington, a GNOME developer working for Red Hat in March 2000. Some of the project's servers are hosted by Portland State University, sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Google.
FLTKFast Light Toolkit (FLTK, pronounced fulltick) is a cross-platform widget (graphical control element) library for graphical user interfaces (GUIs), developed by Bill Spitzak and others. Made to accommodate 3D graphics programming, it has an interface to OpenGL, but it is also suitable for general GUI programming. Using its own widget, drawing and event systems abstracted from the underlying system-dependent code, it allows for writing programs which look the same on all supported operating systems.
Nouveau (software)nouveau (nu:ˈvoʊ) is a free and open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards and the Tegra family of SoCs written by independent software engineers, with minor help from Nvidia employees. The project's goal is to create an open source driver by reverse engineering Nvidia's proprietary Linux drivers. It is managed by the X.Org Foundation, hosted by freedesktop.org, and is distributed as part of Mesa 3D. The project was initially based on the 2D-only free and open-source "nv" driver, which Red Hat developer Matthew Garrett and others claim had been obfuscated.
Tiling window managerIn computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more common approach (used by stacking window managers) of coordinate-based stacking of overlapping objects (windows) that tries to fully emulate the desktop metaphor. The first Xerox Star system (released in 1981) tiled application windows, but allowed dialogs and property windows to overlap. Later, Xerox PARC also developed CEDAR (released in 1982), the first windowing system using a tiled window manager.
SystemdSystemd is a software suite that provides an array of system components for Linux operating systems. The main aim is to unify service configuration and behavior across Linux distributions. Its primary component is a "system and service manager" – an init system used to bootstrap user space and manage user processes. It also provides replacements for various daemons and utilities, including device management, login management, network connection management, and event logging.
Qt (software)Qt (pronounced "cute" or as an initialism) is free and open-source cross-platform software for creating graphical user interfaces as well as cross-platform applications that run on various software and hardware platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Android or embedded systems with little or no change in the underlying codebase while still being a native application with native capabilities and speed. Qt is currently being developed by The Qt Company, a publicly listed company, and the Qt Project under open-source governance, involving individual developers and organizations working to advance Qt.
Udevudev (userspace ) is a device manager for the Linux kernel. As the successor of devfsd and hotplug, udev primarily manages device nodes in the directory. At the same time, udev also handles all user space events raised when hardware devices are added into the system or removed from it, including firmware loading as required by certain devices. It is an operating system's kernel that is responsible for providing an abstract interface of the hardware to the rest of the software.
Virtual desktopIn computing, a virtual desktop is a term used with respect to user interfaces, usually within the WIMP paradigm, to describe ways in which the virtual space of a computer's desktop environment is expanded beyond the physical limits of the screen's display area through the use of software. This compensates limits of the desktop area and is helpful in reducing clutter of running graphical applications. There are two major approaches to expanding the virtual area of the screen.
Cairo (graphics)Cairo (stylized as cairo) is an open-source graphics library that provides a vector graphics-based, device-independent API for software developers. It provides primitives for two-dimensional drawing across a number of different back ends. Cairo uses hardware acceleration when available. A library written in one programming language may be used in another language if bindings are written; Cairo has a range of bindings for various languages including C++, C# and other CLI languages, Delphi, Eiffel, Fortran, Factor, Harbour, Haskell, Julia, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scheme, Smalltalk and several others like Gambas (Visual Basic like).
Windowing systemIn computing, a windowing system (or window system) is a software suite that manages separately different parts of display screens. It is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) which implements the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) paradigm for a user interface. Each currently running application is assigned a usually resizable and usually rectangular surface of the display to present its GUI to the user; these windows may overlap each other, as opposed to a tiling interface where they are not allowed to overlap.
LibreOfficeLibreOffice (ˈliːbɹə) is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite consists of programs for word processing, creating and editing of spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams and drawings, working with databases, and composing mathematical formulas. It is available in 115 languages.
Window (computing)In computing, a window is a graphical control element. It consists of a visual area containing some of the graphical user interface of the program it belongs to and is framed by a window decoration. It usually has a rectangular shape that can overlap with the area of other windows. It displays the output of and may allow input to one or more processes. Windows are primarily associated with graphical displays, where they can be manipulated with a pointer by employing some kind of pointing device.
X.Org ServerX.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation. Implementations of the client-side X Window System protocol exist in the form of X11 libraries, which serve as helpful APIs for communicating with the X server. Two such major X libraries exist for X11. The first of these libraries was Xlib, the original C language X11 API, but another C language X library, XCB, was created later in 2001.
Free and open-source graphics device driverA free and open-source graphics device driver is a software stack which controls computer-graphics hardware and supports graphics-rendering application programming interfaces (APIs) and is released under a free and open-source software license. Graphics device drivers are written for specific hardware to work within a specific operating system kernel and to support a range of APIs used by applications to access the graphics hardware. They may also control output to the display if the display driver is part of the graphics hardware.
Haiku (operating system)Haiku is a free and open-source operating system capable of running applications written for the now-discontinued BeOS, which it is modeled after. Its development began in 2001, and the operating system became self-hosting in 2008. The first alpha release was made in September 2009, and the last alpha was released on November 2012; the first beta was released in September 2018, followed by beta 2 in June 2020, then beta 3 in July 2021.
Raspberry PiRaspberry Pi (paɪ) is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs) developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in association with Broadcom. The Raspberry Pi project originally leaned toward the promotion of teaching basic computer science in schools. The original model became more popular than anticipated, selling outside its target market for uses such as robotics. It is widely used in many areas, such as for weather monitoring, because of its low cost, modularity, and open design.
