Michael Dolan Dot Com

Thursday, July 20th, 2006

Just hit me - how XGL could be a “Killer” feature

So XGL is nice eye candy (and AIXGL). They’re fun and make the X11 interface exciting. But do they really provide “productivity enhancements”. You can make small arguments here/there, but ultimately it’s not a game changer. I feel the same way about Vista’s Glass UI as well.

Now, how could this be a game changer - what if via Xen you could run a Windows partition on a side of the XGL cube. Maybe on another side, you run FreeBSD (or any other BSD of your choosing). Then you can achieve a very simply UI access to multiple environments. It could probably be hacked together today using VMWare and some major chopping of X11 code.

Yeah every developer just shakes their head “dream on” but hey… why not at least throw out a vision that maybe 5 yrs out can be a reality. I think this could be a productivity improvement - use the XGL cube interface to make desktop users, virtualization power users.