Kororaa XGL
I tried Kororaa XGL today on my laptop. What is it? It's a version of Linux that has the new 3D card accelerated desktop for Linux called XGL. The cool thing about that is that it being 3D Card accelerated makes it more like OS X with it's quartz extreme.
Kororaa is a LiveCD so you can boot it off the cd without having to install it on the hard drive just so you can try it out. The only thing is that it seems this particular distribution needs to be installed on a hard drive in order to be of any use at all because it seems to have a hard time loading applictions off the cd at least with the amount of memory I have on my laptop.
It has some neat effects like a fading\shrinking effect when you minimize a program, a slight wobble and fade in\out when you pop up a menu (subtle), the titlebars are slightly transparent, there is a slight drop shadow on everything and the virtual desktops have the cube effect that I like on OS X with desktop manager but with the added effect of a slight wobble when the desktop switches. The wobble effects aren't enough to make you sick of them but they are just enough to add a little visual interest to the effect. The last effect I noticed is when you drag a window the window slightly flaps like a piece of paper\sheet. All this still doesn't make it as good as OS X as far as usability goes in my opinion but it's a start at least.
The whole thing about how the applications are having a real hard time loading kind of ruins it for me though. I do have a PC here that I can sacrifice and install it permanently but it seems Kororaa requires a feature on the CPU that my old PC doesn't have (SSE). But then again the Elive CD has been failing on my old pc lately I think the dvd drive is starting to break down. Which is a shame because I was wanting to reinstall linux on there since I have a laptop that has windows. I don't want to sacrifice windows on the laptop because it's not really mine and I like to play windows games on there. If I could get a cheap dvd drive I could probably fix that PC but I kind of don't want to sink anymore money into that 9 year old computer. But I would still like to repurpose it as an old linux box as it's still capable I have ran Elive and Mandrake installed on the hard drive before. Oh yeah there was also winlinux which was the first linux distribution I tried.
Kororaa is a LiveCD so you can boot it off the cd without having to install it on the hard drive just so you can try it out. The only thing is that it seems this particular distribution needs to be installed on a hard drive in order to be of any use at all because it seems to have a hard time loading applictions off the cd at least with the amount of memory I have on my laptop.
It has some neat effects like a fading\shrinking effect when you minimize a program, a slight wobble and fade in\out when you pop up a menu (subtle), the titlebars are slightly transparent, there is a slight drop shadow on everything and the virtual desktops have the cube effect that I like on OS X with desktop manager but with the added effect of a slight wobble when the desktop switches. The wobble effects aren't enough to make you sick of them but they are just enough to add a little visual interest to the effect. The last effect I noticed is when you drag a window the window slightly flaps like a piece of paper\sheet. All this still doesn't make it as good as OS X as far as usability goes in my opinion but it's a start at least.
The whole thing about how the applications are having a real hard time loading kind of ruins it for me though. I do have a PC here that I can sacrifice and install it permanently but it seems Kororaa requires a feature on the CPU that my old PC doesn't have (SSE). But then again the Elive CD has been failing on my old pc lately I think the dvd drive is starting to break down. Which is a shame because I was wanting to reinstall linux on there since I have a laptop that has windows. I don't want to sacrifice windows on the laptop because it's not really mine and I like to play windows games on there. If I could get a cheap dvd drive I could probably fix that PC but I kind of don't want to sink anymore money into that 9 year old computer. But I would still like to repurpose it as an old linux box as it's still capable I have ran Elive and Mandrake installed on the hard drive before. Oh yeah there was also winlinux which was the first linux distribution I tried.