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...

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TacticalCoder a day ago | 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).

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com2kid a day ago | 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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oblio a day ago | parent [-]

Doesn't modern RAM go up to hundreds of GB/s? Also, compression?

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reverius42 a day ago | parent | next [-]

You still probably don't want to use 10% of your memory bandwidth at all times for a windowing effect?

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oblio a day ago | parent [-]

Ergo my point about compression :-)

Desktop images are generally large blobs of pixels next to each other. I haven't verified but I would be surprised if 10x compression is not possible. So maybe 2-5GB/s? Also it's not like the GPU doesn't use up energy itself while doing this.

	▲	darkmighty 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		GPU can clock a lot lower and use much less energy by focusing on parallelism.

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nixon_why69 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Dual channel DDR5 is like 60, tops, 100s is on big many-channel servers.

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happymellon a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't really want 10% of my memory bandwidth being taken up by rendering my glassy title bars.

Now wobbly windows is something I can get behind.

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com2kid 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

DDR5 you are looking at around 40 gigabits / second for single channel setups.

Oh wait someone stacked 7 full screen transparent terminal windows on top of each other and now you've exceeded memory bandwidth.

Meanwhile any GPU from the last decade (15+?) years will handle dozens of transparent objects on top of each other.

I'm 100% in love with old school but sometimes I just have to admit newer HW is better.

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serf a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	O_H_E 18 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Curious, if a window refuses to go under a certain size, can't it be tiled using its minimum dimensions, and the rest of the layout adjusted a bit?
	▲	sudhackar a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		awesomewm is great and pretty stable. I have been running it by default on all my machines since 2014 with very little changes and almost the same config.

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jqcoffey a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

totally. iirc I had this on fvwm in like 1998 on a pentium.

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rincebrain a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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wing-_-nuts 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Bring back my stupid Compiz effects.

One thing I had in xfce in 2004 was the ability to make any window translucent/transparent.

Back in the day I'd have a video playing in the background with open office or my ide in the forground, slightly transparent.

It was really neat.

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ahartmetz a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

KDE / kwin has wobbly windows

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com2kid a day ago | parent | prev | 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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WD-42 a day ago | parent [-]

Cosmic-themes.org

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lproven a day ago | parent [-]

I don't want to have to download and apply a godsdamned thing to make my brand new software usable.

COSMIC is great and I like it, which is odd as it violates a lot of my personal preferences... but pretty it is not.

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silon42 a day ago | parent | next [-]

+1 I dropped Gnome3 when I had to download some plugins to make it usable (Alt+Tab usability fix, etc).

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WD-42 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They are just single text files. But I guess complaining on the internet is easier than download a config right?

	▲	lproven 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		1. Yes, it is. 2. There are lots of desktops. Why choose one that doesn't work the way you want when others do?

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gabucino a day ago | parent | prev [-]

>Bring back my stupid Compiz effects.

sir, this is not an agentic window