[zozbot234]

> Translucent windows, drop shadows, and the "genie effect" are fun for half an hour tops, but these desktops consume additional processing power and memory and introduce latency

There's certainly some room for optimization in how desktops work today. I can see the obvious case for tear-free (v-synced) compositing when dealing expressly with full-screen (or close to full-screen) animation or full-screen video, since screen tearing is highly noticeable in these use cases. Wrt. everything else though, there's nothing wrong with rendering without vsync and avoiding that added latency. These optimizations can however be hard to make precise beyond very simple cases, like a single foregrounded full-screen app being enabled to take over the whole display. Tiled windows might be the next most obvious step.