XGL on SUSE - WOW!!

[slowcoach]

Download the video from
http://www.malcolmhall.com/?p=45

VISTA? boring....

[Stuart]

The Mac has been doing stuff like that for a couple of years now..

[punky]

Well, there is this.

I used to use it.. Its pretty and sort of useful, but was still a bit of a gimick and I stopped using it.

As Stu said, Macs have been using hardware accelerated desktops for years, but very under utilised. The only times when you see it are when you minimise something (if you have genie effect turned on), drop a dashboard widget onto the screen (wonderful water rippling), switch user (screen rotates in a nice cube), and iChat where it positions the people chatting at various angles/positions.

---------- Post added at 12:27 ---------- Previous post was at 12:14 ----------

Its nice, but I think like SphereXP the novelty would wear off eventually.

The way the windows wobble when dragged is a bit annoying though.

[Tristan]

Now I'm pretty sure I mentioned this th other day.

As to the Mac having done it for years, yes, Quartz Extreme (the Mac equivalent) has been around since 10.2, but as someone pointed out, it's been pretty under-used.

Also, as I said in my post the other day, the best demo video, by the guy who wrote Xgl, is here:

http://www.freedesktop.org/~davidr/xgl-demo1.xvid.avi

(57 MB download!)

Although Novell sponsored the last 6 months or so of Xgl work, it's not exclusive to Suse or NLD. In fact, I've been using it in the development version of Ubuntu for a week or two now. It's incredibly impressive, apart from a couple of irritating bugs that keep me from having it turned on permenantely. Perhaps the thread should have been called "Xgl on Ubuntu -- WOW!"

The really exciting thing as that as good as this looks, it's only brand new technology. All the effects were cooked up by just one guy. What is great about open source is that now it's available for anyone to write patches to come up with even better new effects -- this is a pretty exciting time for Linux.

---------- Post added at 13:24 ---------- Previous post was at 13:22 ----------

Originally Posted by punky

The way the windows wobble when dragged is a bit annoying though.

Then you can turn it off, but still keep the rest of the effects. That's the beauty of plugins. Personally I've changed the settings so that the windows feel "heavier", and don't wobble any where near as much. I like it much better.

[slowcoach]

Originally Posted by Tristan

Now I'm pretty sure I mentioned this th other day.

I should have known you had already covered it