On Sun, 2012-01-15 at 12:28 +0100, Stefan Wilkens wrote:
2012/1/15 Ralf Madorf <ralf.mardorf@alice-dsl.net>:
[snip] It's good that Arch Linux still provide the nv driver, at least Debian dropped it, but it's known that nouveau doesn't work for many users, that there at least is the need to offend the GPL to use the proprietary driver with a kernel-rt, while at the same time an important DE will force people to use 3D acceleration.
Regards,
Ralf
Slight deviation from the topic here, but relevant:
Work is being done[1] to provide gnome-shell's functionality to users without the requirement of GPU acceleration, this is done through the LLVMPipe software rasterizer. This does place a SSE2 requirement on the CPU but that shouldn't be an issue these days. (pentium 4 and up, amd K8 and up)
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Gnome_shell_software_rendering
"Note that software rendering does require sufficient CPU power for a good experience." SSE2 is very resource hungry, so at least for audio usage GNOME is lost. I don't like the work flow when using GNOME3, but I'll install it again and test it, since Xfce without GNOME apps is also a PITA, e.g. the Xfce Terminal Emulator starts with a delay when I click the panel's window button. The terminal is the only app that has this delay.