Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v6)

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

> AFAIK the goal was to only maintain it until the very last graphics
> chip in use was able to run shell. It's not there as a preference,
> it's a fallback mode for unsupported hardware.

Plenty of people see it as a preference, but right now on the hardware
side there are plenty of chipsets without 3D support or where it's not
good enough for Gnome 3.

As a starter in recent/currently available chipsets you can add

- Some Intel gen chipsets with > 2048 pixel wide displays
- All the USB plug in displays
- Imagination based hardware

and I'm sure there are plenty more.

They don't I suspect need fallback mode though, all of the examples I can
think of that are current have very fast framebuffer access for pushing
bits, usually host memory based (the USB one update is slower but not the
draw rates).

E/EVAS manages to do pretty much everything Gnome 3 non fallback does
effectwise on such chipsets snappily (often faster than Gnome 3 feels on
hardware 3D), so really it ought to be a case for the most part of fixing
the broke dependancies of Gnome 3 on 3D hardware. You can do drop
shadows, shading, scaling of a flat 2D image and the like very fast with
the CPU.

I do wonder if Gnome 3 had been based on the E canvas whether any of the
problem would have occurred in the first place ?

Alan