I hope the folks at freedesktop.org don’t mind all the traffic that davidr is causing, but anyone interested in the future of the Linux desktop have got to see this.

I have to admit that a lot of what he shows is eye candy, but to me the idea is to make the things on the desktop seem more real. This could ease the paradigm shift that happens between the real world and your computer screen, thus hopefully making people more productive. I’d have to try it out for real to be more sure and I can’t wait! I just hope I don’t need a Cray and a quad SLI to get the same effects shown in the demo :).

Demo video here.

So what is the CDT angle on all this? Well, one of the earliest uses we saw for the CDT was as a core development environment for Linux C/C++ apps. If something like Xgl can cause the demand for Linux to grow, we should see more Linux developers using the CDT, probably including former Windows developers who will be expecting a Visual Studio equivalent.