[SOLVED] need advice whether using OpenGL or not

[T3STY]

I know nothing of OpenGL, I have never used it before. But I know it provides accelerated graphics rendering and it can take advantage of this for 3D rendering.
An old project I was working on (... kind of, I just defined some basics ...) was about an application that would provide virtual desktops and widgets in it, with animations and possibly fancy visual effects for transitions. To give you a better idea, my application should do something like what Gnome shell (Gnome 3) does.

Unfortunately, I can't decide whether I need OpenGL or not for such thing. I know OpenGL provides higher performances on systems that support it, so it might be preferable to use it anyway; but it would take me months before I can learn OpenGL well enough, so I'd like to avoid that if not necessary.

What would your advice be?

[sierdzio]

I would recommend using QtQuick 2 (found in Qt 5.x) - it has a very easy API, you can learn it very quickly, and it uses OpenGL internally. So you don't need to know OpenGL in order to actually use it :D

[T3STY]

I've never been a fan of QtQuick, and I don't think I would use it for this project. Also, it doesn't help learning OpenGL so it's not worth even trying to learn it.

[ZapB]

It depends how deep you go into Qt Quick2. If you need custom items you need to understand geometry (positions, colors, other per vertex attributes) and custom materials which then leads into shaders.

It all depends what kinds of effects you want to do.