aiglx

Both John and Chris have mentioned the new hotness that we’re testing in FC5.  I thought that I would add some comments on this:

Some people have characterized this as “Red Hat vs. Novell.”  This is the wrong way to frame this.   True, Dave at Novell is the one who is largely responsible for the XGL work and the X hackers at Red Hat are some of the primary authors of the aiglx work.  However, there’s been a huge number of external contributions to the aiglx work from outside of Red Hat and one of the primary components of aiglx (the pixmap to texture extension) actually comes from the XGL!  It’s just where it’s integrated that’s important.  At worst, it’s a competition, at best, it’s inadvertent teamwork.

The irony here is that what we’ve done with the aiglx work means that we run on a lot of the open source 3d drivers, but we don’t run on the NVidia binary driver.  But NVidia says that they will be adding support for the extension in their next major driver release, which means that the aiglx code will run on a pretty wide variety of cards under Linux.  (I don’t know about the ATI folks – they have been mum on the subject.)

The important thing to realize about aiglx is that it’s a method to incrementally improve the desktop.  If your driver supports it, you turn it on.  If you don’t it still works.  And it turns out that building a window manager takes years of work.  Sure, you can get one that’s working properly in a couple of months but you spend years adding support for all the old strange legacy clients that are out there and adding enough features to make it usable for a wide variety of users.  Simply put, it’s easier to add compositing manager capabilities to a working window manager than it is to turn a compositing manager into a working window manager.  What I’m really hoping will happen is that we can take all of the really well-polished features that are found in compiz and get them into metacity.   Because that’s where the real value is in compiz – not the window management capabilities, but the great 3D effects it has.  It would be great if we could get the best of both worlds and deliver a unified solution.