[Panel-devel] KDE4

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday 21 June 2005 11:45, Hans Oischinger wrote:
> Maybe this is a little early but I would really like clear up some things
> about the use of GL and COMPOSITE. When do we want to use them, do we want
> software fallbacks... du we want to use gl at all?

good questions ... first, what does GL and COMPOSITE each allow? as i've 
stated before i have NO problem stating that if you don't have Technology X 
you don't Super Eye Candy Y. it can't affect anything core, but i'm done with 
kicker using nasty ugly hacks for unecessary eye candy since that makes it 
suck for everyone.

so ... yes, we want to use these technologies. and we only want to use 
software fallbacks if the software fallbacks are:

	a) clean
	b) reasonably performant

> Take for example a funky opengl minimize effect. Do we want to always
> create a QGLWidget that would allow us to du the really nice looking stuff
> with curved surfaces, etc?

no, i think we should only do this if there is hardware OpenGL support. 
otherwise people will turn it on if its available and say that plasma is slow 
because of their stupid drivers. we also can't let plasma make KDE unusable 
on older / low end machines (think of the Ugandans! =).

if, however, we can show disabled options and a note that says "all of these 
items are turned off because you don't have 3D graphics acceleration", that 
may encourage people to upgrade to decent hardware and for HW manufacturers 
who care about these things to provide good linux drivers. ok, i'm 
dreaming ;)

so ... we should have a Plasma::Features singleton class that provides things 
like "bool openGL()" and "bool composite()". so in our code we can do

	if (Plasma::Features::the()->openGL())
	{
		openGLCoolness();
	}
	else
	{
		crappyBoringPath();
	}

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
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