For the last three years PLexyDesk was using CPU based animations for widgets, which is fine for most desktop use cases, but it doesn’t scale that great on netbooks and handsets.
So we decided to use OpenGL, to do the animations and graphical effects, when it’s possible (when the hardware supports it).
I have not merged this branch to PlexyDesk upstream master yet so if you would like to try this new experimental feature compile plexydesk from the “shaders” branch.