People were bashing it becuase they have limited imaginations...
The way the project looking glass stands now is pretty much a neat little technological experiment, a hack. It's going to be a while before something like that becomes practical.
Hopefully in the next couple years or so X.org will be releasing a X server that will be using OpenGL for the rendering engine instead of the current 2d-only stuff.
You see you need 2 sets of drivers right now for X Windows. You need one driver for X Windows 2d stuff, and then you need a seperate 3d driver to allow apps, on their own, to access 3d hardware capabilities. X Windows is the only setup that requires this and can make things a pain in the rear.
My understanding of the goal is that instead of having each application access the 3d hardware on their own, the X Server (the part that takes care of monitor ouput and keyboard/mouse input) will simply make EVERYTHING OpenGL enabled and applications then can use that to do their thing. Also you eliminate the dual natured drivers setup and go with simply one driver.
Now originally I thought this was odd, because it seems counterproductive to use 3d-hardware for a 2d display, but the reality is that 3d technology has progressed to such a point that modern video cards can do a form of 2d emulation much faster in the 3d portion of the card then the 2d portion of it.
Of course Apple is the first person to make a full fledged 2d operating enviroment GUI that runs in 3d-accelerated hardware. This enables it to do stuff like transparencies and expose' effects (if you haven't played around with Mac OS 10.3.x, do so) very fast with little cpu effort.
The thing that sucks about Apple's stuff, though, is that it's all very gimmicky. Not gimmicky in the fact that it's not usefull (which it is) but that it's not practical for anybody else to use to create new ways of doing stuff. The only people that get to play around with special effect stuff is Apple, because this behavior is something that is engrained into Aqua itself. It's all hardcoded into the GUI so-to-say.
What will be so cool about a OpenGL-driven X Windows is that the X.org server will simply present the capabilities to utilize OpenGL to the applications that run it. There will be nothing like Expose, or compisition effects, or transparency wiz-bang, gizmos provided by default. To the end user it will seem the same. What it will allow is 3rd parties to develop and allow users to execute their own special doo-dads. You could write a window mananger that would do the Expose effects for you. You could write a program that will, instead of minimalizing windows, send windows WAY far back into 3d space to make them small. The allow users to use 3d glasses to move windows around in strange ways.
Of course there will be lots of very stupid and bad design choices, lots of silly eye-candy that doesn't realy do anything, but it could possibly allow a smart person to accedently discover something unique and very usefull.
At the minimal level it will allow X windows to perform complex things like move to purely Vector-Graphics-based GUI (X Windows already has vector graphics capabilities btw) and have it very fast. Allow more efficient multitasking since the load for the GUI would be moved off of the main CPU for multimedia graphics and stuff like that. Make everything be nicer looking, no more window tearing when moving things around, and have it SEEM faster. (right now if you benchmark it X windows is faster then either OS X's Aqua or Window's GUI, but it's a lot more messy looking and that makes it seem slower)
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)
Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread
