OpenGL desktop rendering on Linux...

there's an odd title for an msdn blog post... and yet, I'm linking to it anyway... It's nice to see the linux community catches up with what we demonstrated on Windows at WinHEC two years ago.

What do folks think of this sort of thing? If you've seen the PDC demo's from PDC '03, you know that Longhorn is loaded with this sort of goodness... what kind of features do you all want in a Windows based desktop environment that has the power of Direct3D under it...

We're actively hiring people to work on these sorts of things... know anyone who's interested? Send the resume in at www.microsoft.com/jobs.

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 29, 2005
  In this regard, as far as I am concerned, both Linux and Windows are still playing catch up with Mac OS X. Quartz Extreme is delivering this sort of eye candy today!
• Anonymous
  March 29, 2005
  I would say that Luminocity has surpassed what was demonstrated at WinHEC 2 years ago adding the fact that Luminocity can run on old video cards like the Intel i830. As for Longhorn being "loaded" with the ability to do hardware accelerated compositing/rendering, I have yet to see any marked progress in the Longhorn preview releases made available to developers; what was shown at WinHEC were only demonstrations for WinHEC. It's amazing that the group working on Luminocity and Cario have been able to produce such a great implementation and make the technology available for developers to try out now.
• Anonymous
  March 29, 2005
  Regarding demonstrating progress - you're right. We haven't shipped yet, so it's hard to point at our progress from the perspective of using it on the Desktop. What we have shipped though, is two public developer previews of "Avalon" which do allow folks in the developer community to try things out today. Stay tuned - we'll have something great to show on the desktop soon enough as well.
• Anonymous
  March 29, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  March 29, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  March 29, 2005
  "there's an odd title for an msdn blog post... and yet, I'm linking to it anyway... It's nice to see the linux community catches up with what we demonstrated on Windows at WinHEC two years ago."
  When will MS finally stop spreading sillyness like this? Not only did MS play the catch-up game for years to OpenGL (and still has some catching up to do in some areas), MacOS X showed 3D powered desktop renderings way before MS ever came up with this 'inventive' idea.
  
  And before you come up with "But MacOS X came out around the same date as we demo-ed our code", take a look at some old SGI workstations of at least 10 years old and the OS it ran and what it did with windows and the desktop. Is the new X11 environment catching up? Perhaps, but not to MS.
  
  I like a lot of the MS software, but I'm really getting tired of all the 'inventive' labels on almost everything produced in the MS coding labs.
  
  FB, C# MVP
• Anonymous
  March 29, 2005
  I think it's unfair to say that there's no innovation here. We are doing some thigns in Longhorn that are inventive in the sense that no-one's ever done them before, I can't really talk about those yet.
  
  That said, I believe innovation can happen in different ways. Sometimes an innovation comes in the form of something new that no one's ever seen before. Other times, its comes in the form of something very familiar, but in a manner no one's ever done before.
  
  In this case, we're doing both. To a certain degree, we are playing catch-up in terms of the "eye-candy" factor of a hardware accellerated desktop. At the same time, everything is easy in the shallow end of the pool. There is some very serious thinking that goes into doing this in a way that maintains compatibility with the millions of Windows applications out there.
• Anonymous
  March 29, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  March 29, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  March 30, 2005
  RE: "We are doing some thigns in Longhorn that are inventive in the sense that no-one's ever done them before, I can't really talk about those yet."
  
  Well, that may be so, but it is exceptionally bad form to crow about Linux "catching up" to Longhorn when:
  
  a) Longhorn is currently demoware (and will remain so at least until Beta 1 ships to developers)
  b) Longhorn's ship date is at least 12-15 months away
  c) you've only demoed functionality that is "catching up" to other already shipping platforms
  
  Keep in mind that if Luminosity ships before Longhorn (which seems highly likely), than it is Longhorn that is catching up, no matter how many demos you do first.
  
  Sorry to beat on you, but you are showing the classic arrogance and tunnel vision that Microsoft engineers are infamous for, and I say that as a former Microsoft employee...
• Anonymous
  March 30, 2005
  Apple did it!
  
  http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/GuidePageServlet/showid-344/epid-170460/
• Anonymous
  March 30, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  March 30, 2005
  I challenge someone on the Avalon team to show off a physics based, spring-mass jiggling window frame at Tech-Ed.
• Anonymous
  March 31, 2005
  "I guess you Macophiles do realize that OSX is only vector based upto a certain point. All your shiny gel buttons are bitmaps, Quartz is more akin to Postscript with live compositing. When you use say Exsposé, it is simply scaling bitmaps."
  
  Actually, Exposé is not simply scaling bitmaps. It uses Quartz Extreme which provides device-independent and resolution-independent rendering of anti-aliased text, bitmap images and vector graphics, converting each window into a texture, then sending it to the graphics card to render on screen. Try playing a movie and hold down the shift key before using the Exposé feature. You can see the effect in slow motion while the video is still playing.
• Anonymous
  April 01, 2005
  I agree: neither Longhorn nor Luminosity has shipped yet -they're BOTH demoware at this point. That's why I made the comment about betting who would ship first.
• Anonymous
  April 01, 2005
  I don't really understand why it's important. Novice users won't switch to linux because of Luminosity, business users don't need special desktops like Aero.<br>I read a lot of stupid trolling. Sometimes i feel zealots think that Windows is worse than others. But i think similiar human developers write the code for Windows or OSX.. it's the same. And all OSs are based on the same 30-year-old code. <br>It's really ridiculous that some ppl try to make new OS wars.
• Anonymous
  April 01, 2005
  Oh, and Kam, i'm really waiting for your answer :-) Please, please don't forget it! Thanks.
• Anonymous
  April 21, 2006
  I came across Sean's blog while figuring out how to register with Technocrati... He recently got around...