Quote:
Originally Posted by Aelonderiel
The fact that Catalyst and the proprietary AMD/ATI drivers didn't work with Gnome 3 was not ATI's fault, it was the Gnome team's fault.
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lolwhut?
Gnome 3 didn't reinvent the wheel. Gnome 3's window manager (like most of the WMs that can do compositing) is using already made architectures, standards and APIs such as Compiz, Cairo, Clutter and XComposite in low level.
However, fglrx has been, and still is awful concerning 2D acceleration and Compositing.
So Gnome 3 is finally (trying to) take advantage of a hardware accelerated and composited environment but it also highlighted all the issues in the fglrx driver...
So why Gnome 3 doesn't work with fglrx ? Because fglrx can't do its low level job. If fglrx was properly working concerning hardware composition under Linux, there would be no issues at all. The only ones to blame are ATI...
But you might say "fglrx works fine with Compiz, Kwin, w/e..." but do you know it works there because of horrible and dirty workarounds to make fglrx work with them ?
For example, Kwin and Compiz automatically disable OpenGL2 (and GLES) rendering when fglrx is detected because fglrx is still unable to render OpenGL2 in a composited environment without crashing every 10 minutes and not even talking about some transformations that still need to be software-rendered to avoid fglrx crashing or being too slow.
Chromium (or Google Chrome) has blacklisted fglrx for hardware-accelerated webpage composition and WebGL, so everything runs on software.
And so on...
So, a lot of uneeded and dirty workarounds for a non-working driver. Really a waste of time and code.
I'm not really trying to defend Gnome 3 since I'm a fervent KDE user and blame Gnome 3 for stripping away a lot of customization for the sake of making it accessible to OSX-addict monkeys. However I don't find right blaming it because a broken driver refuses to run in it while the others, and even the reverse-engineered opensource ones can do much better for the same job.
Anyways it's not the job of a desktop or window manager to handle situations with this or that driver, it shouldn't be the case... WMs and animation APIs never deal with drivers directly, but with the OpenGL extensions that are claimed to be supported by them, or in the worst case they deal with X (which deals with OpenGL extensions), in this case this is called Indirect Rendering. Anyways the drivers have to work and if they don't, then they are broken and not the perfectly-functioning pieces of software that just want to use them.
This is more or less the same situation that concern(ed) pulseaudio. Pulseaudio was released and blindly included in distros next to the sound drivers that were completely broken in some parts, but these parts of the drivers were never used so the relevant bugs were never noticed in the previous simple ALSA/OSS stacks so the brainless blamed pulseaudio regardless of the fact that it is completely revolutionary, modern and perfectly working...
... they, and now you, are all barking up the wrong tree.
TLDR; Gnome 3 devs aren't the ones to blame for fglrx not working under Gnome 3, but fglrx still malfunctioning in a composited environment.
The fact that fglrx is broken is only and only ATI's fault. It's kind enough that most of Linux developers try to workaround their awful lack of motivation. (btw latest topic they got humiliated again
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTAyMzA)
(the same fglrx that makes my X11 session crash when I try to read a video using vaapi with Dual Screen... sigh)
Gnome 3 devs just didn't want to waste a vast amount of time and efforts in order to make their composited shell work on a broken driver. Anyways there's the fallback mode already for hardware and drivers that doesn't support it, yeah, because fglrx doesn't support a decent composited environment.
KDE 4's beginnings weren't more glorious in this matter. Kwin was being extremely unstable, crashy and slow on fglrx, but now with all the workarounds (and some progress on the driver side must admit) it's gotten better.
The positive thing about KDE4 over Gnome 3 is that they managed to make the whole default shell work with or without compositing.
TLDR++; Use Nvidia. nuff said.