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Re: [orca-list] More on desktop shells, 2D vs 3D, and the future.

It is true that 2D desktop shells will and are going away, they have to.
If they don't then we are under utilizing the new and powerful hardware and will not be competitive to proprietary OS. The only thing I wish to know is that will it be possible to disable the fading and other such effects if one chooses to do so? 
I guess it should be possible and many people will still use that feature.
Secondly, if Unity 3D is going to be the default and the only option available apart from gnome shell, it is not a bad thing. If the said 3D shell is made as accessible as Unity 2D then we have an added bonus of working on the same rich looking shell which even sighted uses will use. 
In this era of integration it is very important to do so.
But the only question is how complex is it going to be for making Unity 3D accessible as much as Unity 2d? As such 12.04 is LTS so I guess we can keep using Unity 2D till 3d becomes accessible, provided we have some thing to look at by Ubuntu 13.04 at least. We still don't have a developers handbook for Orca, but if some thing is available for helping out Unity 3D accessibility, then thee will be so many who will be willing to help out. 
Happy hacking.
Krishnakant.
On 05/10/2012 10:44 PM, Thomas Ward wrote:

Hi Luke,

Thanks for laying this out for everybody. A lot of this I knew
already, but its glad to see someone explain this for those users who
really haven't been following the move to 3d graphics hardware and
software. I think some VI Linux users are panicking prematurely not
realizing that the hardware specs for 3d graphics  have been out there
for at least the last 10 years or so on higher end PCs, and anything
from 2007 on have had it on lower end e-machines too. As you pointed
out Windows has been using real time 3d graphics and  animations since
at least Windows Vista, and anything that can run Vista, Windows 7, or
Windows 8 can run Gnome Shell and/or Unity 3D as well.

To give people a real life example my wife's Compaq laptop was built
in 2007, and originally shipped with Windows Vista. Its now running
Ubuntu 12.04 and since she is sighted she is using Unity 3D by
default. Well, I can say Unity 3D runs fine on that system.

I also have a desktop from about that time with a 3 GHZ processor, 2
GB of ram, and the ATI  video card has 256 MB onboard memory. Point
being its about five or six years old now and runs Ubuntu 12.04 with
Gnome Shell 3.4 just fine. I don't see the switch to Unity 3D and
Gnome Shell as being that big a deal  unless we are talking some
really old computers from before 2004 or so, and I can't fault
Canonical or anyone else for not willing to suport those systems for
too much longer. Sooner or later those computers are going to get
replaced with something newer and why continue to support them for the
next 10 to 20 years when they probably won't last that long.
.
On 5/9/12, Luke Yelavich<themuso ubuntu com>  wrote:

Hi all,
I've seen much discussion recently about the various desktop shells that are
available on Linux, particularly those that are accessible, or will be
accessible in the future. I think its worth outlining what shells we have,
their accessibility status, and their graphical hardware requirements.

Unity:
Till now, there have been 2 flavours of Unity, a 2D flavour built on QT, and
a 3D flavour, using a custom developed graphical widget toolkit sitting on
compiz. As per my previous mail, Unity 2D development is being discontinued.
Unity 2D has more forgiving graphics hardware requirements. It doesn't
perform any 3D rendering of onscreen elements by default, and can therefore
work on graphics hardware that is several years old, and can work on video
hardware that doesn't have a 3D driver present on the system, i.e
proprietary NVIDIA and AMD/ATI video drivers.

Unity 3D performs a lot of 3D graphics rendering. The launcher, the dash,
and the top panel are all rendered in real time using 3D enabled graphics
hardware. For unity 3D to work, you need to have 3D drivers present, either
open source drivers for Intel/AMD and for some NVIDIA hardware, Nouveau.
Unity 3D will work on all NVIDIA hardware if you install the proprietary
NVIDIA drivers.

Unity 2D accessibility is almost 100% complete, however again as per my
previous mail, Unity 2D development is being discontinued. unity 3D
accessibility works partially, althogh I believe some of that is broken at
the moment. I will be workin to improve Unity 3D accessibility by the next
LTS release of Ubuntu.

Unity 2D development is not only being stopped to reallocate resources.
There are technical reasons why Unity 3D will be the focus from here on out.
See the end of this email for my explanation.

GNOME shell:
Very similar to Unity 3D in terms of hardware requirements and rendering. It
renders UI elements in 3D using 3D capable graphics hardware, and needs the
same drivers to be present to work. There is no non-3D version of GNOME
shell.

As of GNOME shell 3.4, GNOME shell is quite usable with Orca. Some areas,
particularly the top panel still need work, but users are able to launch and
search for applications.

GNOME classic, aka GNOME fallback:
Classic GNOME is used in GNOME distributions as a fallback for those who do
not have a hardware and software combination that allows 3D graphics
rendering to work. Classic GNOME has a very similar look and feel to GNOME
2. This environment is still just as accessible as GNOME 2 was.

I believe that GNOME classic/GNOME fallback is also going away in the longer
term. My technical explanation at the end of this email outlines why.

KDE:
KDE uses the QT widget toolkit. I believe that KDE does use 3D rendering by
default, although this may be incorrect. It also may be possible to disable
3D graphics rendering, although again I am not 100% sure.

Whilst QT accessibility is improving, more work is needed to improve KDE's
accessibility, as KDE has many custom elements that need to be enabled for
accessibility. We will have accessible KDe applications before we have the
whole desktop accessible, which is still good enough, given our other
desktop shell choices.

XFCE:
XFCE is a light weight desktop environment, that does not use 3D graphics
rendering by default, although this may be incorrect, and may change in the
future. XFCE has a similar look and feel to Classic GNOME/GNOME 2.

XFCE is already somewhat accessible with Orca, as it uses GTK2, however much
work is needed to improve keyboard navigation and better present custom
widgets to Orca.

3D desktop rendering is the future, whether we like it or not. This is being
done because today's graphics hardware can do quite powerful and complex
rendering, and taking advantage of this for the desktop means less work is
put onto the CPU to show the desktop, and it is much more pleasant visually
to see a window gradually fade/slide onto the screen, rather than watch a
flickery display update as the desktop is used. Windows and Mac OS X have
rendered their desktops using 3D for many years now, and all mobile devices
based on Android and IOS use 3D rendering for interface display.

So why are Unity 2D and possibly GNOME fallback/Classic going away? The
short answer is that thanks to new developments, it will be possible to use
the CPu to render the same 3D effects and UI elements. Yes, this will put
more work onto the CPU, but the thinking is that this will be satisfactory
for the user to then go ahead and update/install the required drivers for
their hardware, thereby offloading the 3D rendering work to the hardware, as
originally desired by the desktop shell developers. These desktops will not
be requiring very new graphics hardware just yet. In fact Unity 3D can be
run on graphics hardware that is 7 to 8 years old, maybe even earlier,
depending on the amount of video memory present on the hardware in question.
For a practicle example, I have successfully run Unity 3D on a Radeon 9000
mobile GPU with 64MB of video memory, which is from 2003-2004, give or take.
it wasn't fast, but it worked and everything appeared to be rendered without
issue. I also t
  hink certain Radeon 7500 chips can also render Unity 3D, but am not 100%
sure.

We can't keep supporting really old hardware forever, and compliant hardware
from the last 6 years is quite easily available now at cheap prices if you
are willing to buy second hand hardware, hense the move to 3D, and the
desire to make our desktop shells more efficient in their hardware use.

I hope this helps clear a few things up for people who are wondering. Any
questions, feel free to ask, and if you have any corrections, please feel
free to reply and correct me.

Luke
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_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
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