Wobbly and Transparent Windows on Linux
I’m not so much up on the latest and greatest news on the Linux platform, so please excuse my ignorance here. I did minimal research to bring you this news.
There are some cool Avalon-like Windowing magic coming to Fedora and thus the rest of the Linux world. It’s all based on a new OpenGL based window/compositing manager called Luminocity, written as a “toy” project by Owen Taylor.
From what I can tell, it’s not revolutionary technology like I feel Avalon is. More like smoke and mirrors. It doesn’t seem like Luminocity is a generalized graphics renderer. It seems more like a window manager that can take 2D content, warp it in 3D, and then rasterize the result s on top of your display. You still rely on “plain old X” to draw the contents of a Window and then Luminocity will go and warp and twist the 2D rendered surface.
Avalon, on the other hand, creates a display list of hardware-accelerated primitives that can be arbitrarily played with at any level in the hierarchy.
If you go down the page (on the “cool” link, above). You will see some cool widget rendering samples based on some technology called, “Cairo”. Funny how Cairo used to be the code-word for a “future” Windows release that never really was, but which Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Longhorn have some elements of.