Originally posted by: rmrf
Originally posted by: drag
Originally posted by: rmrf
the alt-tab was kind of cool, but I could care less if my window disforms when I'm moving it around at mach-speed on my desktop
I'm not a fan of Novell at all, but I'm sure they've worked hard on it.
Well not only does it wiggle stuff around, but it does it faster then what simply moving windows does right now on a desktop.
Also you noticed how the video still played as it was being manipulated and iconized? That and they replaced the most of the eye-candy features aviable on OS X.
And not only that, but unlike OS X these things are not hardcoded into the system, but they are configurable and allow people to make up their own eye candy if they care to program it or use a altarnative composition manager.
that and it was all running from a laptop with a old laptop with a 7500 ATI mobility graphics card. (I beleive)
No need to have new hardware to get these things.
that is very interesting. I figured with all the eye-candy they had going on, they were running it on some uber quad xeon machine with the latest quadro card from nvidia.
it seems fairly promising then. are they releasing it as a WM, or an xorg replacement? I think in the end, that will determine my decision.
XGL is a X server that runs on OpenGL.
It's not so much a replacement for X.org.. it's part of X.org. Eventually when it matures it will probably be the standard X server for most people running Linux.
Also note that it's going to backward compatable with current X servers. X is a standardized protocol and if your running a modularized version of X.org's X server/libraries/drivers (X.org 7.x series) then this should be pretty much a drop in replacement. Maybe it would have to update the drivers, I am not exactly sure.
And not only would it provide hardware acceleration for items like composition
(basicly you render windows off-screen, take a snapshot of that then use that as a texture for OpenGL primatives that are displayed on the actual screen. and use X damage extension to inform the windows when they need to be redrawn) But it will make things easier for driver developers. (closed source and open source)
Also it should reduce the load on the central cpu because it will allow for much more efficient use of your video card's capabilities. Right now on a non-composition enabled X server you have to redraw the window constantly when moving things around. This leads to tearing, when a application is working hard you'd get blank spaces in it, buttons dissapear and reapeer. Windows blank out. Stuff like that.
On a current composition-enabled computer, unless your using nvidia's propriatory drivers, the X.org's XAA drivers (very legacy items) are unable to provide effective access to your video card and you get high loads and slow times. (The newer EXA drivers fix most of this however.)
With a opengl-enabled X server you can get all of this and use the 3d capabilities of your video card to do everything. It's about the same difference as running software-rendered Quake2 versus hardware-rendered Quake2.
Other projects like Cairo will make it easier to get better acceleration for things like text rendering and window drawning.. making the normal aplications themselves 'opengl'. No need to reprogram apps to do this either (except for odd bugs and such that may come up). This is taken care of down at the application library level with GTK and QT stuff.