Ubuntu - Latest version14.04

[Liam Proven]

On 11 June 2014 18:33, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you had to use Unity 2D on 12.04 because the graphics h/w did not
> support 3D then you may not be able to run Unity in 14.04 (2D is no
> longer available).  Check by booting from a live CD before upgrading.
> You may find that you will need to use one of the other UIs on that
> machine if you want to upgrade.

If hardware OpenGL isn't available, AIUI X uses software 3D rendering.
It all should still work, just slower.

It's not as slow as software OpenGL was a few years ago - now, there
is an optimised LLVM renderer. However, this works best on fast
multicore machines -- exactly the sort of machine that probably /does/
have 3D hardware, and therefore precisely the opposite of the sort of
machine where you might actually need this software rendering.

I've not tried on real hardware that lacks 3D -- I don't have any any
more -- but I've tried in VMs. It has to be said, performance was
/abysmal./ Almost unusably slow and some operations were totally
unusable. But it did work.

If you ran it under a hypervisor that offers drivers for accelerated
OpenGL using the host's display adaptor, and added in those drivers,
then it ran a lot better and was semi-usable.

However, I also must note that I've done quite a lot of testing using
VirtualBox's host-accelerated OpenGL, under GNOME Shell, GNOME 3
Fallback Mode, Cinnamon, Unity, KDE, Maté, Xfce and LXDE. I saw
display corruption or rendering problems under all the GNOME3-derived
environments.

-- 
Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk * GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com * Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell: +44 7939-087884