On 16/08/14 17:49, Steve Litt wrote:
On Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:00:10 -0400 (EDT) Stephen Powell <zlinuxman@wowway.com> wrote:My main objection to GNOME as the default desktop environment is that it *requires* 3D graphics acceleration from the X driver, something which is not available from all drivers. (For example, the mach64 driver which I am using right now as I compose this e-mail does not have 3D graphics acceleration.)Eeeeuuuuu, get it offa me! I thought the purpose of a wm/de was to let the user run, arrange, view and interact with his programs. Why someone would require the complexity of 3d graphics to accomplish this is beyond me.
The task "draw this set of possibly-overlapping rectangles full of pixels, some of which may be partially or wholly transparent, in front of one big background rectangle" looks an awful lot like the task "draw this set of textured rectangles at different z-depths in an orthographic viewport".
Modern graphics cards are *very good* at drawing textured rectangles at different z-depths in an orthographic viewport (in fact, they're better at it than the CPU is at drawing possibly-overlapping rectangles full of pixels, some of which may be partially or wholly transparent, in front of one big background rectangle), making it actually a perfectly viable strategy for a window manager to use.