Re: Module Proposal: GNOME Shell

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sat, 2010-04-03 at 18:41 +0200, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> 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.

There is very little that GNOME Shell does that makes it *inherently*
more demanding than Compiz.

> 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.

As described in the roadmap, the necessary first step is obtaining
numbers.

- Owen