Re: Module Proposal: GNOME Shell

[Christophe Fergeau <teuf gnome org>]

2010/4/2 Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>:
>  * Virtually all machines produced currently, or in the last 5 years
>   have sufficiently powerful graphics to meet our needs. In some
>   cases, free software drivers that can access this hardware
>   don't exist are or still in an early stage. But we can't offer
>   someone with shiny new hardware a desktop that looks like they
>   have a 10 year old machine.
>
>    - Buy hardware from friendly companies
>    - Fix the free drivers for other hardware
>    - If necessary and desired, offer users ways to install
>      non-free drivers before they get to the desktop.

I've tested gnome-shell last week on a (not too recent) machine where
compiz works well enough and gnome-shell was really slow. I guess this
machine falls in the "free driver that needs fixing category", but
given what other colleagues experienced with a few years old machines,
I'm under the impression this situation is quite common.

I really hope things will get much better when release time comes, but
for now, saying "any 3D hardware from the last 5 years will do" is a
bit misleading since it hides the fact that gnome-shell seems more
demanding on hardware/drivers than other applications (eg compiz). Or
maybe it's the other way round and drivers were optimized for compiz,
but it's still worth being as transparent as possible wrt current
state of 3d performance expected by gnome-shell.

Christophe