Re: gtk+2.8.x and cairo (Owen Taylor)

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-12-19 at 17:49 +0000, Bill Haneman wrote:
> OK, I understand that nobody wants to spend time fixing code that's only 
> exercised on obsolete hardware.  But it's worth remembering that one of 
> the key areas of interest/growth for Gnome is the low-cost and used 
> hardware community in the developing world, etc.  As long as we're still 
> pitching Gnome as a "less hungry alternative" to MS, we ought to be as 
> interested in old graphics cards as we are about memory footprint and 
> performance.

Considering the growth curve, my guess is that many more >2 meg 
graphics cards (1024x768 @16bpp = 1.5M) have been manufactured than
smaller cards ever were. We aren't exactly talking a 
Geforce 7800 SLI  or something...

The sad fact is that while getting *something* to display at 8bpp
isn't hard, actually producing good looking results requires attention
at many levels, including from the people creating the artwork, and
a lot of care. I assume you remember the days when starting Netscape
and then the GIMP would work, but if you started them in the other
order, Netscape would get a private palette ... woo, color flashing!

This is not to say that there aren't opportunities for people to
have fun making Cairo do as well as possible with such setups ...
after all, someone just committed a BeOS port to Cairo CVS!

But the sweet spot for cheap hardware and usable old hardware
is well above the 8bpp line; GNOME hasn't support 8bpp *well*
for 5 years, and we've had very few complaints.

Regards,
						Owen