[olpc-software] Power efficient theme engine

[Mike Hearn]

G'day chaps and chapettes!

The default GTK+ theme is remarkably ugly yet also remarkably fast and
easy to render. The speed improvement on my machine from using it over
a prettier Cairo based theme like Clearlooks or Ubuntulooks is
noticable and I'm using a 1.2ghz chip!

It seems likely that nearly all modern, maintained GTK+ themes will
drain lots of battery power by calculating gradients, tesselating
curves, antialiasing lines and doing other things that look lovely but
munch cycles for breakfast. Therefore it would make sense to have a
new theme designed that is:

a] Not a Windows 95 throwback :)
b] Efficient to render, especially taking into account the primitives
accelerated by the laptops GPU
c] Small code-size wise

Do people agree such a thing would be worthwhile? If so we may have a
project that would be easy to work on for new developers ...

thanks -mike