Re: Module Proposal: GNOME Shell

[Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek gentoo org>]

On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 3:21 AM, Michael <raselmsh hotmail com> wrote:
> * Moblin, which was also based on Clutter, worked without hardware
> acceleration (admittedly not particularly fast, but usable).
>
> * The visual effects in GNOME Shell don't look much beyond what Doom
> 2 was doing on my completely unaccelerated 486 fifteen years ago,
> albeit with a lower resolution.  Furthermore, most of the time it is running
> with windows mapped one-to-one.  Surely an optimised path would be
> possible for this case?  I assume (am I wrong?) that that would be a
> Clutter issue, not a GNOME Shell one.  I think that with this fixed, I could
> happily live with slower, software rendered zooming windows (and I
> suspect that the Clutter folks would quickly find some way to make it
> work faster in software too).
>

This has been done in existing window managers too. See e17/e16
(enlightenment). All of it's effects are done in software, and run
smoothly on old hardware as well. However, that kind of thing took a
lot of dedicated effort on the part of the developers (doing this was
one of their primary aims). Doing the same in gnome-shell/mutter would
require massive re-orientation of goals; which I suppose is too late
to do now.

Such efforts *could* be directed in improving the software rasteriser
in Mesa; but that would probably require a lot of effort as well. Most
likely it's cheaper overall to just buy new hardware.

-- 
~Nirbheek Chauhan

Gentoo GNOME+Mozilla Team