Growing frustration with Gnome Shell

[Alan Cox]

> Besides, it's 2011. "3D-crap" is going to be available on any modern
> computer and there's no reason a modern desktop-targetted system
> should ignore it. Compiz (which has nicer "3D crap" than Gnome3) was
> happily running on my systems (including a cheap laptop) 4 years ago.
> And if you do need to run on hardware that can't do it then there are
> alternatives, the mainstream desktop shouldn't have to cater to the
> lowest common denominator.

You ignore a few rather important details

1. Everything I've seen it doing can be done just fine in software with a
compositor and some of the other compositors are noticably better
performing. We aren't talking spinning desktops on cubes and the like
here - which do need 3D assist to do well, we are talking drop shadows
and flat scaling.

2. There are lots of current devices with no 3D support in Linux

So it's very much a desktop design problem. E can do more than Gnome on
the visual effects front on a 3 year old netbook with a low end Atom and
an unaccelerated video card. Gnome isn't alone in this error - the Meego
UI is also fairly guilty in this area.

Modern processors are fast, modern x86 systems tend to have fast graphics
memory access and either UMA CPU access to video memory or a fast upload
to video path. Either of those is quite sufficient to do most visuals.

Alan