[Panel-devel] OpenGL applets

[Zack Rusin]

On Friday 06 July 2007 06:22:03 pm Sven Burmeister wrote:
> On Freitag, 6. Juli 2007, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> >         //FIXME: this is evil hand rendering
> >         //       svg would be nicer. or even better a global
> >         //       way of saying "this applet can't run on this machine"
> >
> > we were discussing exactly this the other day and will indeed be going
> > into plasma.. =)
>
> If I understood Lubos' talk correctly, the new kwin still lacks
> detection-code and just uses trial and error in order to decide on the
> abilities for the computer.
>
> In Zack's talk he said that Quasar always picks the best possible way for a
> given hardware. I am no expert, but for me that sounded exactly like the
> detection that kwin/plasma need in order to automatically know how fancy
> effects should be, without having to bother the user with settings.
>
> Doing this automatically would also allow that after installing the
> binary-drivers kwin/plasma etc. increase their candy-level.

Unfortunately these are totally different problems. In Quasar the question 
you're asking is e.g. "what's the fastest way to execute blur filter", in 
KWin you're asking "what is the fastest way of composing windows". 
For a GLApplet the question you're asking is "is OpenGL support on this 
machine?". The answer to "is OpenGL support on this machine" will never 
be "use Xrender" :) 
It's a question with a binary answer that means either "yes, this applet can 
run on this machine" or "nope, this applet can't run on this machine". 
So in this case it's not at all about "trying to find a fallback" but 
about "having one shared way of conveying that information to the user". 

z