Neary: GNOME Census [LWN.net]

Neary: GNOME Census

Posted Aug 1, 2010 22:16 UTC (Sun) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715)
In reply to: Neary: GNOME Census by gowen
Parent article: Neary: GNOME Census

OK, this might be a bit late but your comment does not make any sense.
Being "low end" hardware does not imply no hardware acceleration, in fact any recent pc hardware (as in produced in the last 5 years; which includes netbooks), does have a GPU capable of hardware acceleration.

We don't require a "high end" NVIDIA or AMD/ATI card with 1TFlop+ of computing power.

If it does not work on your netbook it is either
1) A driver issue / bug
2) A bug in clutter/mutter/gnome-shell which we indeed do _want_ to fix.

So "it does not work on low end hardware and they won't fix it" is just wrong.

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Neary: GNOME Census

Posted Aug 2, 2010 0:14 UTC (Mon) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

> in fact any recent pc hardware (as in produced in the last 5 years; which includes netbooks), does have a GPU capable of hardware acceleration.

Sure, it's there...but in many cases it's unusable with Linux, because there's no working driver. Sure that's a "driver issue", but it's still a problem. It doesn't look to me like it'll be feasible to depend on hardware 3D working on all linux desktops anytime soon.

Of course, so long as clutter/mutter/gnome-shell works at a reasonable speed with software-only unaccelerated 3D, that's great too...

Neary: GNOME Census

Posted Aug 3, 2010 16:18 UTC (Tue) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link]

> Sure, it's there...but in many cases it's unusable with Linux, because there's no working driver. Sure that's a "driver issue", but it's still a problem. It doesn't look to me like it'll be feasible to depend on hardware 3D working on all linux desktops anytime soon.

Not sure about the "many cases" (cn), but you can't solve problems by running away from them anyway, the solution is to _fix_ 3D, it is not a hardware issue we just need proper drivers.

If nobody uses 3D because it "doesn't work", no one will fix it because "no one uses it".

We can no longer consider 3D as a "nice to have" feature given recent and future hardware developments; we have to take advantage of the hardware we have.