Future Ubuntu hardware requirements

[Paul Sladen]

On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-10-09 at 08:59 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> > Xgl, glitz... there's a lot of bling coming down the pipeline,
> while bling is nice, bling doesn't run well on a lot of the hardware in
> the world.  And I would say most people don't need it to have it

IIRC, the next version of Windows is going to change the amount of visual
'bling' displayed depending on the actual hardware configuration available.

Having this sort of 'slider' is very common in games where you try and do
absolutely anything to get the frame-rate (aka response time) as fast as
possible.

I think this is going to be fairly important for Ubuntu in the
long-run;  Some examples of things that could be set by the 'bling' slider
in Ubuntu could be:

 Fast, new, bling++
  /|\
   |  * Enable Compositing (eg. fading menus)
      * Enable Dragable filled windows
      * 24-bit software cursor vs. 2-bit hardware cursor
      * Selections made by faded rectangle vs. XOR'ed rectangle
      * Masked/curved windows corners (SHAPE extension) vs. square windows
      * Gecko vs. kHTML/WebCore (?)
   |  * Anti-aliased vs. aliased fonts
  \|/
 Slow, old, functionality++

The key would be setting the slider automatically---it shouldn't be too bad,
because the user is free to move the slider if ''we got it wrong''.  I'd
probably peg the current user-experience at 1 Ghz machine / 256MB;  turning
features on above that and perhaps turning features off below that.

At the moment Ubuntu makes the promise that ''Ubuntu will always fit on a
single CD'';  it would nice to be able to make the statement that ''Ubuntu
will always work on your machine'' ...just that in the same way the contents
of the CD is varied depending on what will fit;  the contents of the of the
GUI experience would be varied to make sure it is always makes the 100msec
responsiveness target.

(I think at the moment, the resident memory size of OOo is likely a limiting
factor in how much RAM a computer needs to be "useful" to the user though!)

	-Paul
-- 
The summer is familiar here.  Nottingham, GB