Re: GNOME Shell on llvmpipe?

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico gnome org>]

On Thu, 2011-01-13 at 18:11 +0000, Adam Williamson wrote:

> Sure. It's a fallback, not a feature. It'd just mean that 'my graphics
> card driver sucks' results in 'I can run Shell' (as long as the system's
> got a decent CPU) rather than 'hello, gnome-panel!'.

One thing that bothers me is that gnome-shell is doing
compositing/scaling that is not much more sophisticated than the
original MacOS X (which had software-only rendering) and yet it requires
a very good graphics driver.  Those boxes had very slow processors by
today's standards, and yet they were perfectly usable.  Not blindingly
fast, but perfectly usable, with compositing and animations and such.

I'm all for using graphics hardware as well and as thoroughly as we can.
But it bothers me that we may be able to do all that gnome-shell needs,
in software, and we are not pursuing that route yet.  Maybe someone
will :)

  Federico