Last year I wrote about some of the work that Seth Nickell was showing off regarding Luminocity, a GL acclerated fun fest of X. Well, times are moving along, and now it appears we’ve got a spat on our hands between Xgl from Novell, and AIGLX from Fedora/RedHat. The gist is that Fedora/RedHat thinks that Novell didn’t do it in enough of a community fashion and has taken to bashing Xgl with claims like “it’s too revolutionary” and the like. Someone should tell RedHat that it just makes them look like asses doing that sort of stuff. Seriously, Novell beat you out with XGL, they’re functionally different anyway. XGL is an entirely GL based X-server, AIGLX renders stuff in GL off screen. From what I can tell, XGL is much closer to the future of the desktop.
With that in mind, David Reveman of Novell put out an mindboggling demo. It’s 58 megs of xvid goodness, but shows some seriously cool stuff. There’s more videos of the demo at the Xgl page at Novell. Likewise, there are also some nifty AIGLX videos. But I don’t see a semi transparent Quake 3 running on the corner of a cube metaphor desktop in the latter.
Accelerated, transparent Quake 3 on a Corner