[ianhanschen]

Windows can be made to behave like i3, with a lot of work. I've done a few different things over the years, but I never got into i3 so I haven't made my personal WM software work like that.

It's a bit of a curiosity nowadays, but Windows started out as a tiling system - if memory serves, overlapping windows were not supported until 2.1. But even then, it wasn't like i3.

- guy that worked on the Windows WM (USER & DWM) for over a decade

[mcyoloswagham]

damn that's very interesting, due to certain performance issues on very old hardware, I was debating writing a driver for win32k, make it work faster, like I mean 1-5ms render times, but it was too much of a mess. DWM & Win32k are very complicated

[ianhanschen]

Before coming to Microsoft, I wrote my own EngAlphaBlend() accelerator driver in 2003 or so. I knew a lot about how things worked from disassembly but after coming to MS in 2004 I quickly destroyed a lot of my own assumptions. Mess? no. Complicated? yes.

[mcyoloswagham]

well I mean it was too much of a mess in my own work, I know a bit about win32k, but trying to deal with all the xxx, yyy,zzz functions and the locks and everything kinda confused me, and so I gave up. :(