Re: Metacity, Mutter, GNOME Shell, GNOME-2.28

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Mon, 2009-04-06 at 17:37 +0100, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> 2009/4/6 Jason D. Clinton <me jasonclinton com>:
> > On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Tomas Frydrych <tf linux intel com> wrote:
> >> mainstream user. There are good reasons to provide legacy support, and
> >> it's great to be able to run GNOME on a machine that is 5 years old, but
> >> it must be seen for what it is -- legacy support, it cannot be where the
> >> collective effort of GNOME should be concentrated.
> >
> > Actually, compositing requirements are fairly low. A machine that's
> > five years old would be right on the border of being supported. The
> > Intel 915 chipset with GMA 900 was released in June of 2004.[1] While
> > there aren't a lot of people out there testing on this older hardware,
> > it's supported by the same `intel` driver used on the newest Intel
> > chips. airlied (and Red Hat) is doing great work on the DRI2 driver
> > for R200/R300 ATI chipsets. And for the newest ATI/NVidia stuff,
> > there's always the proprietary option (regrettable though it may be).
> 
> You are missing the remote desktop scenario here. This is not only a
> matter of working on old hardware, being able to run gnome smoothly on
> a thin client solution through XDM, or VNC, or whatever is also
> needed.

I've already answered this previously: Composited desktops may not well
with today's network protocols, but that's a software issue, nothing
inherent to thin clients.

I have no sympathy for the complaint that nobody has been working on it
and we just have to live with VNC and remote X (*). If we care about
thin clients, we have to compete on today's terms. We can't compete on
yesterday's terms and hope that will be good enough.

But in the end, what we do for GNOME Shell doesn't come down to what we
think would be nice to have, it comes down to what we write the code to
do. Writing two versions of GNOME Shell, one using modern technology and
one using ancient technology, and then switching between them depending
on the available hardware is a big project. Not one person has showed up
with an interest in working on this.

If someone shows up and thinks this is how they want to spend their
time, I'm certainly willing to discuss how that can be accomplished. 

- Owen

(*) Of course, Novell _has_ done some work on this in the context of
Compiz recently. And even results with plain old remote X and remote GLX
are surprisingly good; that's my understanding of how the City of Largo
is using Compiz.