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com2kid | on: IceWM
Love how we had fancy glass transparency effects calculated in software (see also - enlightenment ) then shit got slow, and now we're back transparency stuff working again but instead of hand optimized assembly we're throwing a giant ass GPU at the problem.

Though I do have to admit they maybe the resolution increases are to blame for part of that, alpha blending 800x600 is easier than alpha blending a 4k ultra wide with HDR at 120hz...

TacticalCoder | parent | next
That's always the excuse for sloppy programming: "Things are bigger now". The truth is: CPU and RAM progressed at a speed not just a bit but much faster than real estate (pixels) growth and refresh rate.

Anyways... IceWM used to be my window manager of choice but since many years now I'm a happy camper with The Awesome WM (a tiling WM, but it can of course also be used in floating mode: one of my virtual desktop is always in "floating" mode).

com2kid | root | parent | next
> The truth is: CPU and RAM progressed at a speed not just a bit but much faster than real estate (pixels) growth and refresh rate.

Back of the envelope, for a 4k HDR ultra wide you'd need tens of gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth alone to do rendering all on the CPU.

There is a reason we offloaded to the GPU.

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serf | root | parent
awesome is great. one of the few tiling managers that actually has the grace built in to deal with windows that really can't be tiled sanely.
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jqcoffey | parent | next
totally. iirc I had this on fvwm in like 1998 on a pentium.
rincebrain | parent
As you say, purely software rendering was almost certainly infeasible to scale as resolution and refresh rates went up, but we've had at least a decade of having stupidly powerful 2D GPU hardware in all our shit.

Bring back my stupid Compiz effects. They were fun, and sometimes genuinely useful.

ahartmetz | root | parent | next
KDE / kwin has wobbly windows
com2kid | root | parent | next
Cosmic has sexy transparency effects but God the color schemes are so poorly thought through.

Out of the box their light terminal theme is flat out unreadable. Some of the chosen colors have almost no contrast.

Ugh.

And then if it is dark mode time but I pull up a terminal window that is semi transparent and it is on top of a browser window that has bright colors, again, unreadable.

Which is why transparency effects are mostly limited to cool screenshots.

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gabucino | root | parent
>Bring back my stupid Compiz effects.

sir, this is not an agentic window