Novell Raises the Bar for the Linux Desktop

[leoandru]

OK, last week I was talking about KDE 4 and how impressive it looked. This week I was blown away with GNOME and its development over at Novell.

Novell has been secretively developing a new windowing system for LINUX named XGL. Some of you may have heard about it before, others havn't. XGL is the X windowing system on top of OpenGL. you can say its similar to VISTA's windowing toolkit on top of Direct X 10 in concept.

http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/

videos of the presentation of Novell Desktop Linux 10

why Novell worked on all this behind closed doors

Gnome Mockups

[Gillion]

WOW !

Now I see why Novell wanted to drop KDE at one point.

The can concentrate on their new gui concept.

[leoandru]

I really like the way things are progressing in Linux desktop development. I'm going to swallow my words about linux destop being left behind by VISTA and MAC OS. I cant wait to see XEGL. The good thing is that we will get this long before VISTA ships. And All windowing sysem based on X stands to benefit from new tech. I hope we get good video driver support for this.

[Gillion]

The fact that Novell did this on their own is going to get some geeks really upset.

[leoandru]

The fact that Novell did this on their own is going to get some geeks really upset.

Its sad but I have to agree with them. If XGL was started inside the community, six months would be spent b1tching about what distro the CVS server would run.

So we did it ourselves, and now either GNOME will like what we did, in
which case, yay, free code for GNOME, or GNOME won't like what we did,
in which case, no harm no foul for GNOME, and yay, brand differentiation for Novell.
(And anyone who yells "fork" deserves to get one stuck in them.)

That was just funny as hell when I read it.

[Virus]

Its definately pretty but i sorta prefer the KDE 4 mockup.
Novell going on with thing though

So the fact that its using OpenGL does that mean more 3d stuff.. games etc..

[leoandru]

Linux was just ignored by the major game developers, I don't think this is going to change that. Until linux gains in desktop market share to the point where game developers can no longer ignore them then we will see more games running natively in linux.

[g2cris]

I wonder how taxing it will be on current PCs in terms of requirements? hope that its not nearly as much as visto.

[leoandru]

I wonder how taxing it will be on current PCs in terms of requirements? hope that its not nearly as much as visto.

well they did mention that there is need for a 3d graphics card to get the effects. I am assuming that once you have a decent video card that should be enough, the graphics processing will be off loaded to the gpu and video memory.

[leoandru]

More eyecandy...

"Compiz is an OpenGL compositing manager that use GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap for binding redirected top-level windows to texture objects. It has a flexible plug-in system and it is designed to run well on most graphics hardware."

Also, a new video demonstrating Compiz on XGL is now online. The video displays numerous previously unseen effects such as 3D objects on the desktop and animated backgrounds.

http://www.linuxedge.org/