Xgl

[Lead Head]

I like it.

[Orethrius]

I like VLC just fine, but when the de facto standard of sites like YouTube and YTMND tends to be *grrr* WMV */grrr*, one tends to like the software that can help them track down the original (99% of the time, standards-compliant) video.  That would be mplayer.

[Jack2000]

MPC does it for me
it works just the way it is
no need for continuous updates and lame skins and
big fat load of shit like the MS one !
 ... simply ... Classic

[RaZoR1394]

There is some more info with audio and video clips over here, http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/ , http://en.opensuse.org/Xgl .

[Refalm]

MPC does it for me
it works just the way it is
no need for continuous updates and lame skins and
big fat load of shit like the MS one !
 ... simply ... Classic

MPC isn't for Linux.

[WMD]

I like VLC just fine, but when the de facto standard of sites like YouTube and YTMND tends to be *grrr* WMV */grrr*, one tends to like the software that can help them track down the original (99% of the time, standards-compliant) video.  That would be mplayer.

YouTube uses Flash to play video, not WMV.

[Orethrius]

YouTube uses Flash to play video, not WMV.

 Decompile it some time.  You'd be surprised.  

[RaZoR1394]

I just tried the new Kororaa XGL 0.1 livecd which includes Xorg 7.0, XGL and Compiz. It works great on my X850XT. It has become very popular so using the torrent download is preferred.

LINK

[piratePenguin]

I just tried the new Kororaa XGL 0.1 livecd which includes Xorg 7.0, XGL and Compiz. It works great on my X850XT. It has become very popular so using the torrent download is preferred.

LINK

I just downloaded the Kororaa XGL 0.2 livecd, it's INSANE!!
Runs blissfuly with my radeon 9600 pro.
http://people.freedesktop.org/~davidr/xgl-demo1.xvid.avi
look at that video if you just want to see what it can do without running it.

[mobrien_12]

Thanks for the video link pirate Penguin.

I see some limited usefulness.  The ability to run OpenGL really fast but not full screen is good.  The super task switcher is good.

The rest... well it's just cool.  Useless, but cool.

[piratePenguin]

Thanks for the video link pirate Penguin.

I see some limited usefulness.  The ability to run OpenGL really fast but not full screen is good.  The super task switcher is good.

The rest... well it's just cool.  Useless, but cool.

True. compiz, the compositing manager that's responsible for all the effects, is extensible. Each effect can be disabled on the fly (from the (quite nice) graphical configuror, or from any gconf editor).

By the time this is on by default in distros, most probably, effects will be enabled and disabled according to the hardware and the driver's abilities by default - like in Vista.

[adiment]

XGL isn't too bad. Runs alright here, the effects are beautiful; but not smooth enough. Like dragging windows too much (with that water effect) lags it down and it'll break at some points.

tried it out a few days ago and just went back to 'normal' gnome due to not being able to change anything in nvidia-settings and not being able to view video or anything that uses OpenGL...However I found some of it very overdone, like the very useless cube-effect between desktops.

[piratePenguin]

XGL isn't too bad. Runs alright here, the effects are beautiful; but not smooth enough. Like dragging windows too much (with that water effect) lags it down and it'll break at some points.

tried it out a few days ago and just went back to 'normal' gnome due to not being able to change anything in nvidia-settings and not being able to view video or anything that uses OpenGL...However I found some of it very overdone, like the very useless cube-effect between desktops.

Alot of it is overdone and useless - that's what they want at this stage.

You can disable any of the effects. The livecd doesn't have the dedicated graphical configuror, so you gotta use gconf-editor and navigate to /apps/compiz/ (IIRC) and uncheck whatever effects you don't want.

If I was running Xgl long-term, alot of the "useless" effects would be disabled. The "useless" effects just demonstrate the power and what's possible (so in that way they're not not-quite useless).

The "cube-effect between desktops" is there because of the other useless effect that when you hold CTRL + ALT and click + drag with the mouse on the desktop, you can spin the cube manually and look at it from different angles etc.

It demonstrates the power (try watching a video in totem, move it to the far-left or far-right of a workspace so it extends between two workspaces and then do the CTRL + ALT and click + drag thing on the desktop and continue watching the video while moving the cube...), but it's not very useful other than that.

EDIT: A related and kinda-cleaner way to get all these cool effects is through aiglx (which is included in Xorg 7.1). compiz runs on aiglx too, so it's basically the same effects - just cleaner (Xgl is like a seperate Xserver or something, which is messy... But I don't really understand the details).

[adiment]

nice. going to keep an eye on aiglx.

[piratePenguin]

yeeaaaaaaa!! got compiz to work on aiglx, which uses the free DRI drivers..
I was told it'd be very very slow, the DRI drivers being crappy for my card - but it's actually pretty fast, definitely usable, and I can do all that useless stuff running a video on the corner of the cube etc.

even the useless crap works alright, except the 'water' plugin, the CPU usage spikes with it on but it's completely useless anyhow.

At times it can use quite alot of CPU usage (as in the CPU usage for my user can get to like 80%, very rarely anything above that), but that's probably down to the incomplete driver.
http://piratepenguin.is-a-geek.com/~declan/crap/compiz.png

The wobbly windows and the cube are insane smooth, and FFS when I use them now my CPU usage goes down! whatever that's about..

even wobbly windows on totem while running a video is smooth, beforehand just moving them would make it go choppy! that was one of the things I admired on Mac OS X, moving a video while it's playing was smooth...

if anyone wants to try it out and has a radeon (9600s and under are better, the drivers are much more stable and fast) or an intel card (they have brilliant, complete free drivers) and ubuntu, here's the instructions I followed.

/me goes to fiddle with the compiz plugins