Xgl, Compiz, AIGLX and Beryl

I've had a *little* more time to read up on the latest changes in Xgl/Compiz to see where we are headed. All the hype in the linux community over the last year has been the advancements made in 3d. The Suse developers pushed Xgl out the door which really spurred things along. Then Compiz, the compositing manager. Xgl and Compiz So just about every linux fan boy has seen at least a glimpse of the flashy 3d linux desktops. That's your cube, window placement, mac expose' quivalent, water effects, slide shows on top of the cube, transparency in windows, frames you name it! AIGLX A little while ago we sore AIGLX make its way into modular xorg (7.1). So now this is available in the standard x server. You may be asking at this point, "but why the need for AIGLX when Xgl already seem to provide all the 3d effects?". The reason is Xgl is an xserver that runs atop of modular xorg. That is, it runs atop a normal xfree server. Xgl, that provides OpenGL rendering is 'always on' and cannot be turned off (unless you close the x server and start up a normal server). This means providing hardware accelleration anywhere else (such as games) is very difficult. You can think of AIGLX as 'indirect' glx rendering. It provides this rendering when required and thus plays nicely with 3d games and other 3d mediums. Xgl was only ever meant to be an iterim thing until this functionality could be properly incorporated into the exisiting xorg server (which they have now done). Whilst this is a step better, eventually AIGLX will get replaced with a 'pure' opengl driven x server. From what I've read, this might come in the form of XEGL. It will use the improvements to X developed by AIGLX/XGLX and newer developements in the OpenGL standard (OpenGL ES extensions), to be a fully functional OpenGL X server. Thus, removing all legacy 2d and framebuffer rendering. Beryl Move over Compiz, Beryl is in the house. Initially Compiz started out at compiz-vanilla. Then a large amount of work and addons came from a girl known as Quinn Storm which then lead to the compiz-quinstormm branch. This branch was receiving a *lot* of updates compared to novell's vanilla branch. Basically, the lead developer Quinn Storm and the community were dissapointed in the communication coming from the main developers at Novell. Furthermore, Quinn Storm and the community wanted to push along this branch a lot faster than Novell were willing to. So by this time the branch was that diferrent anyway, it was time for a fork; Beryl Summary Major differences between Xgl and AIGLX: AIGLX is apart of the new modular xorg. XGL is seperate. XGL runs on top of a normal X server, much like a full screen Xnest session. AIGLX is apart of the same server. AIGLX provides indirect rendering so have no problem running 3d games. Xgl has problems. AIGLX only works with free software drivers and the latest propriatory Nvidia drivers. Xgl work with propriatory drivers but will not work with free software drivers. Beryl is now where you are going to see all future works of compiz by the community and Quinn Storm. I'm in the middle of migrating my desktop and laptop from Xgl/Compiz to AIGLX/Berly. I'll have more information when I have more time and have finished the conversion process :)