Eye Candy
I downloaded the Kororaa Live CD to check out what was so cool about this xgl. I wasn’t expecting much, with an “old” Intel integrated video chip (82845G/GL/GE), but it runs smooth as silk.
Live CD goes in, PC boots up, login… Opens to a standard looking Gnome desktop (with a link to keyboard shortcuts). I didn’t notice that link at first, so I struggled to figure out what I knew it could probably do.
I tried immediately to open a terminal to see the jelly-like “wobbly” windows and true transparency. (KDE currently has true transparency on menus, but still semi- for everything else [terminal background]). Gnome’s terminal crashed on startup (later learned this was a known bug). Alright, fair enough, it is an early beta. Opened up a file browser and tried to see how distorted I could get the window by shaking it really hard. Ahh, so easily amused. Fun to hit Ctrl to make it sticky and watch it stretch and squeeze against other windows.
The desktop shortcuts were (mostly) easy to figure out, intuitive in a Gnome environment. Fun to spin the cube around to other desktops, but it’s not as quick as I’d like. It looks damn cool, but the animation takes a bit too long. It’s like all those Hollywood movies whenever they send an email, it has the document “fold” and turn into an envelope and fly away. Looks cool, but if I had to watch that every time, I’d probably shut it off.
One feature I thought was really useful was the way the windows automatically arrange themselves when you hit F12. It’s just temporary for you to choose a window to give focus, but I think it’s great for when I have a lot of windows open and don’t want to dig through them.
I think it makes the desktop a little too distracting, but a couple features are very valuable. I was also impressed it worked so damn well on this machine. Especially with proprietary operating systems having similar features, but much higher recommended specs.
