Re: Module Proposal: GNOME Shell

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 08:44 -0700, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 5:29 AM, Paul Cutler <pcutler gnome org> wrote:

>         I think Alberto's idea of reaching out to nVidia is a great
>         idea - if we can clearly communicate our needs to them it
>         can't hurt to ask.  I'd be willing to help reach out to them
>         if needed.
>
> Maybe I missed it but why are we only concentrating on Nvidia?  Are
> ATI graphics cards okay vis-a-vis xrand support and others on free
> drivers?  What about Intel?  The foundation should probably take a
> holistic approach to this issue if we want a uniform experience for
> GNOME 3.

We're generally in much closer contact with the open source driver
developers already. They hang out on the same IRC channels, work for the
same companies already. There's not really any need for formal contacts
there.

And the open source drivers generally share much more code and already
work pretty consistently - e.g., none of the open source drivers has
their own incompatible configuration tool. So, what we want from open
source drivers is simply for them to be fast and bug-free when running
the shell.

But for any sort of outreach to driver developers, whether open source
or closed source, you want to be very concrete. This is why getting
quantifiable performance numbers is a top priority of mine at the
moment. 

- Owen