Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 15th Sep 2003 20:37 UTC
Today we feature a very interesting interview with Havoc Pennington. Havoc works for Red Hat, he is heading the desktop team, while he is well known also for his major contributions to GNOME, his GTK+ programming book, plus the freedesktop.org initiative which aims to standardize the X11 desktop environments. In the following interview we discuss about the changes inside Red Hat, Xouvert, freedesktop.org and Gnome's future, and how Linux, in general, is doing in the desktop market.
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>The other big problem is that there is no 'one way to do it'. The reason 2D and 3D support is iffy is because there are no nice standardised and fairly high level interfaces for it. As long as each driver manufacturer tries to implement their own features, then stagnation is all that will happen. Look at DirectX on MS. Every card worth speaking about provides drivers that work with it.
There is one. It's called OpenGL. It's extremely powerful, etc. etc. Does that make our lives any easier? (I think you meant 'low-level', not high-level. You still need a low-level kernel layer, whatever nifty features you have).
As for driver manufacturers 'implementing their own features', that's what the difference between chipsets consists of. It's why a GeForce FX is not functionally equivalent to an S3 Virge. There is a standardized low-level interface for video cards -- VESA (and VESA 2). However, these don't provide for 3d acceleration. VESA 3 is a better version of this standard, but it hasn't made much headway.
I repeat, the ONLY way to get respectable video performance on Free OSes is IHV support.