Disclaimer: Yeah, I know I’m usually avidly against flash and I generally don’t watch videos on people’s blogs but I thought I would try embedding this one rather than just linking to it.
XGL is this totally sweet program for X desktops (like Gnome, which is used in Ubuntu and KDE, which is used in Kubuntu). It makes you desktop completely fluid and malleable. Things jig around and with a click of a key or drag of a mouse you can switch to another window or desktop but not just switch as in “Wham bam thank you ma’am!” it’s switch as in “Oooh… ahhh…”
Unfortunately it does not work very well at all on KDE with an ATI graphics card driver, it works on KDE with other graphics or it works on Gnome with ATI (I think). I don’t think I’ll be able to get it to work but maybe sometime soon they’ll bring one out for KDE using ATI.
Check this video out for an example of the sweetness. Menus go wobbly when you open them, windows can be made transparent and dragged around, the whole screen can be dragged around… and the coolness continues.
Funnily enough, that’s the second time today I’ve heard about XGL, and I’ve never heard of it before today.
It does look fun, but the guy who told me about it couldn’t install it on his machine because his graphics card was too new, and they hadn’t written the drivers for it yet.
Owl.
Haha, that’s cool! I like feeling up-with-the-times 😛 Bummer, I’ve never had that problem of something being “too new”!
I believe another suitable title for this post would be “And when I say Cool, I mean totally sweet”…this looks awesome. If I ever change to Kubuntu, Ubuntu or any Linux distribution that will run it…it’s soooo going on my computer. 🙂
You totally should change! No need to worry about viruses and spyware and stuff. Although you haven’t got someone there to explain things to you like I have. If I were doing it again and know what I know now, I might get Ubuntu just so that I can have XGL 😛 It’s pretty similar to Kubuntu. Although I do like KDE…
Oops, I think you need an accelerated graphics card to run XGL so you probably couldn’t use it on your laptop.
😥 😥 😥 😥 😥 😥 😥 😥 😥 😥 😥 😥 😥 😥 😥 😥 😥 😥 😥 My desktop upstairs has become more Mum’s web development computer…so, I can’t put a distribution on that, coz she wouldn’t know what the heck is going on… :P…Maybe when I have the money to buy a really good laptop, i’ll buy one with heaps good graphics, and lots of space, so I can either Duel Boot, or run Linux with good games run through WINE :sheepish: