Xgl -- more eye candy than Apple?

[Kevin C. Krinke]

On Sun, 2006-12-03 at 14:09 -0500, Alex Beamish wrote:
> Over on GrokLaw [1], PJ has posted notice of Novell's decision to
> re-brand their Novell Desktop Linux back to SUSE. That's not very
> exciting, but the inclusion of Xgl and "a real-time macro interpreter
> for OpenOffice.org which can read the most common Microsoft Excel
> spreadsheet macros" is going to remove barriers to the use of OOo, I
> presyume on either on Windows or Linux.
> 
> The GrokLaw article is here:
> 
>   http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060312052013937
> 
> and the linked video is a very nice demo of what Xgl can do ..
> although who would want a screen saver running as part of their normal
> desktop is beyond me.

I've recently had the chance to get Xgl running on my Ubuntu Dapper...
wow! It is really an impressive bit of eye candy that actually has some
use. I noticed right-off-the-hop that the hardware accelerated
environment was far more responsive than stock xorg, windows were
redrawn with very decent speed and there was minimal impact on the
frame-rate with OpenGL based apps.

And just for clarification... I don't think that the animation in the
background was a screensaver, I'm fairly certain it was a clip from the
Final Fantasy movie. Regardless, it's a real wonder of work.

When I got to playing with the wobbly windows though... heh... I gave
myself motion sickness after ten minutes because I had the settings
cranked all the way up... clicking on any window sent ripples through
the entire screen... dragging an app around warped and manipulated the
window like it was some really relaxed rubbery-playdough.

All in all it's was pretty fun to mess with but I'm back to stock xorg
as things like dualhead/xinerama are not functional and some apps
behaved in rather quirky ways but run fine under normal xorg.

Polish the bugs, tone down the settings and it'll be a Vista squasher on
the desktop eye-candy level.

Anyways, just thought I'd share the experience.

I should really check this list more often, only a few hundred more
unread emails to go... heh.
-- 
Kevin C. Krinke <kckrinke-eqjHHVKjh9GttCpgsWEBFlaTQe2KTcn/@public.gmane.org>
Open Door Software Inc.

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