From: Adam 

Gary Britt wrote:
> Yes and no.  You can get Aero\Vista preinstalled (someday) and you don't
> have to recompile anything.


Which is going to be more time consuming, costly & difficult?

Not merely that but looking at:

http://en.opensuse.org/Using_Xgl_on_SUSE_Linux

"Xgl is not activated automatically when you install it. To turn it
on, run the "Desktop Effects" control panel. (Available from the
Control Center in GNOME, or by running the command
"gnome-xgl-settings" from a terminal or the Run dialog in KDE.)

The Desktop Effects tool will analyze your system and attempt to determine
whether or not you can run Xgl. If it finds anything wrong, it will advise
you on what actions can be taken. "

&

"Novell has tested a variety of popular video cards and embedded video
chipsets from ATI, Intel, and NVIDIA to find out which ones work well with
Xgl. The Desktop Effects tool will tell you one of four things:

Your graphics card is supported.
     Xgl should work fine.
Your graphics card will not work with Xgl.
     The Desktop Effects tool will not let you enable Xgl if you have a
card that either (a) has no support for 3D acceleration, or (b) is known to
cause Xgl to crash or garble the contents of the screen while performing
basic operations.
Your graphics card is not supported, but may work.
     The card isn't completely useless with Xgl, but either (a) it's
annoyingly slow, or (b) you may experience crashes or garbled graphics when
doing "tricky" operations (eg, spinning the cube while playing
full-screen video).
Your graphics card is not in Xgl's database.
     The Desktop Effects tool will still do its best to help you
configure Xgl, but you may or may not be successful. We are continuing to
test new cards and will be releasing updated versions of the
xgl-hardware-list package as we gather more information.

In some cases, the problems with certain cards may turn out to be due to
bugs in Xgl, or bugs in the video drivers, so if you are having problems,
make sure you have the latest versions of all the relevant packages.

3D Acceleration

The next piece of information the Desktop Effects tool provides is whether
or not 3D acceleration is enabled on your card. With some cards, this will
be enabled automatically. With others, you will need to take special
action; the Desktop Effects tool will do its best to help you here. "

So it is a matter of simply d/l'ing & installing the drivers for the
card which in the case of Nvidia is a simple & straightforward thing to
do"


It is new & it is therefore (IMHO) "beta" just like
Aero/Vista is so YMMV (with both).

> Linux's new fangled stuff that is pointed to as
> better than windows will never be preinstalled in the volume Windows is (at
> least not in the next 5 years) so that means these things need to NOT
> require a kernel recompile in the meantime if Linux wants to beat Windows.

By looking at the above I would say that it does not require a kernel recompile.

> Great new features of Linux need to install like apps under windows, with no
> more effort or thought from the user than when installing a windows app.

See the above document. Bear in mind this is still a beta so as soon as it
becomes GA with widespread availability on multiple distros then it will be
point & click in your software manager. Much less effort than windows
as no need for going to a web site, downloading the exe, clicking on a
licence screen etc.

> Whatever is required to install a new feature should be done automatically
> and without asking the user to waive a chicken over his head and answer a
> bunch of extremely cryptic unix guru type questions.
>


Indeed. However this is a a program at a fairly early stage so.....how easy
is to install Vista in order to get Aero?


Adam

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