XGL, an X server from Novell has been creating quite a stir this year. I thought I’d give it a try, so after faffing around for a while trying to get it working in Fedora, I had a go with Ubuntu Breezy… unfortunatelly it didn’t run well enough on my laptop (i810 gfx) for it to be any good so I went back to my lovely FC5 install.
I’ve recently tried AIGLX which is an extension to the xorg X server, which also didn’t run great. I think it’s definitely worth waiting for these technologies to develop a bit more before comitting to anything like this (they are alpha versions anyway).
Personally, I can’t see any real use for these technologies, although some people say they’re useful! However, the reason I don’t think they’re pointless is because it gets a lot of people interested in Linux, which can’t be a bad thing.
Nowadays, any graphic card will come with a quite powerful processor. Even if you do away with all the eye-candy effects, these technologies promise to bring a more responsive interface.
If nothing else, they will leave more processor power for other (non-graphical) tasks.
Well, it’s now a standard feature in Ubuntu, and it’s just as useless as ever 🙂 Looks nice though.