[SMP-UX]

What I meant was that who wants 500 plus megs of RAM dedicated solely to transparency and pretty special effects on the desktop? Idiots that's who.

Edit:

You might not see the problem if you have a computer with 32 GB of RAM and I certainly do. However I like to ensure that responsiveness is first up.

IRIX Motif is 2D accelerated and very snappy as it's multi threaded and designed for power users.

I've never used KDE but remember Windows Aero? Metro? What about macOS's Aqua UI? They use tons of resources and often times when the computer is just a couple years old it becomes unusable with the typical system bloat that occurs.

What I'm basically trying to say is that visual effects that aren't well designed aren't worth the resources they take up. Functionality over aesthetics any day.

[brirec]

Jesus, we’re still arguing about the merit of desktop composition after all these years?

Do yourself a favor and try comparing the responsiveness and resource usage of, e.g., KDE Plasma with desktop composition off vs on. You’ll probably be really shocked when you see how much more CPU you need to do something as simple as scrolling a browser window.

Really, try it. Any browser, scroll around on something and look at your CPU usage and the framerate of your screen.

Or image editing — try panning around an image. Doesn’t matter what editor/viewer either, since they all have to draw on your X server.

Even just moving windows around on top of one another — everything is just so much more efficient when you offload it to a hardware accelerator.

Does it use more RAM? Yeah, a little, because the way it works is by keeping the entire contents of the windows in memory rather than culling anything that’s not exposed in front. It’s definitely not 500 MB more, though, and it definitely can (and does) take advantage of any dedicated VRAM available.

And the trade off of being able to just dump a framebuffer to the viewport instead of repeatedly computing what’s been culled 60+ times a second is definitely worth it to me, but if you still prefer not using acceleration, there’s always the option to just not use it.

[arp242]

I didn't really see the previous poster mention desktop composition at all?

What I have seen is many computers that seem to spend more time calculating various animations than actually animating stuff. When I worked in a computer shop years ago I often turned off animations and transparencies for people who came in with slow computers (XP, Vista, 7) and they were generally happy with the speed-up and didn't mind the lesser visuals at all.

[hulitu]

Which are the merits of desktop composition besides drawing the whole screen just to redraw the cursor ?

[dale_glass]

Every window looks perfect all the time, and it doesn't matter if a program is busy.

Without composition, each program repaints itself. Which means there's an appreciable lag, and if the program is stuck you can get a blank box if a previously covered program is uncovered. This can be an annoyance if you need to read something from there.

Eg, an actual example is a program being blocked by a modal dialog stops being repainted. If the dialog asks you "Enter a password" and the what for is written on the no longer repainting parent you may have a problem.

[coldtea]

That's totally orthogonal to desktop composition, or rather almost in contrast with it...

[formerly_proven]

Cursor ain't in the frame buffer, moving it around only triggers a render if an application rendered a change in response to the mouse move event.

[giantrobot]

> I've never used KDE but remember Windows Aero? Metro? What about macOS's Aqua UI? They use tons of resources and often times when the computer is just a couple years old it becomes unusable with the typical system bloat that occurs.

You're misattributing blame here. Aqua, Aero, and Metro were themselves just UI themes/design languages. They did not cause performance problems. To the underlying compositor it doesn't matter if a button is brightly colored beveled triangle or a flat rectangle. A 32x32px button is 1,024 pixels that need to be drawn to a buffer irrespective of what's in those pixels.

The performance problems in those UIs were almost always related to the compositor and underlying hardware (or drivers for same). Without hardware accelerated drawing, even just 2D acceleration, the compositor was limited by the CPU and memory.

The hardware limitations are only problematic at the margins though. At those various systems' introduction the performance issues were only at the low end. As the "low end" improved performance became a non-issue. Aero sucked when it was introduced because the 3D compositor was enabled on underpowered graphics hardware at the request of OEMs. Aqua ran great on then-new PowerMacs but sucked on the mobile graphics chips in iMacs and all the Mac notebooks of the time.

[jen20]

I recall for many years running OSX on a PowerBook with 256MB RAM total, with no problems. That machine was in use until the switch to Intels. It was fine - indeed more responsive than most Windows machines laden with crapware that I encounter today with many times the resources.

[MrBuddyCasino]

I‘d agree to that. Aesthetics need not be wasteful, minimalism can be beautiful if done right and be very efficient, as the whole APL ecosystem shows. Its just that Motif attempts neither baroque opulence nor restrained elegance, its just carelessly ugly, and that is a sin against life.

[arp242]

What is "ugly" or "beautiful" is really subjective. See brutalist architecture for example: opinions are (strongly) divided. Or the divided opinions on various styles of music. etc.

I personally don't care much for the Motif looks (although I've only used OpenMotif – I'm not sure how it compares to IRIX's implementation; from some quick screenshots I looked up it seems IRIX looked better) but describing it as objectively "ugly" or "a sin against life" is just wrong.

[coldtea]

>What is "ugly" or "beautiful" is really subjective. See brutalist architecture for example: opinions are (strongly) divided

Strongly divided, as to the strength of like or dislike, yes.

But as for the split, it's pretentious architects and a handful of laymen outliers on one side, and billions of people on the other. And whenever people vote with their wallets (as tourists, or picking where to live, etc) they shit all over brutalist monstrocities.

[arp242]

I've seen quite a few people defend brutalist architecture on HN, I'm not a fan of dismissing people's tastes as "pretentious". Plus some of those comments (which I can't be bothered to look up right now) have convinced me that the things people really hate is the worst of brutalism, rather than the concept as such (it's still not my favourite style, but overall less bad than I thought before).

But we can use other examples – I don't really want to talk about brutalism as such – like metal music, or paintings from Picasso or Mondriaan, or the discussion about whether or not Alien is a good film that still holds up in 2023 from earlier this week, or any number of things.

[msla]

Examples of Brutalism:

Hill of the Buddha, Sapporo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_of_the_Buddha

Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption, San Francisco:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Saint_Mary_of_the...

Spomenik Memorials, Former Yugoslavia:

https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/

None of those are ugly.

[coldtea]

My eyes, the goggles, they do nothing!

While those are not hideous, they're hardly anything to write home about, much less call beautiful either. Compare them with a traditional budhist shrine, national monument, or church, and they're seen as the regression to ideology and "architect as god" arbitrariness that they are.

[MrBuddyCasino]

> What is "ugly" or "beautiful" is really subjective.

No.

[hulitu]

You should see Android or Win 10 for what it means ugly.

[MrBuddyCasino]

are we going to enumerate all the ugly things in the world now

[thriftwy]

500 megs of RAM TCO is like a cup of coffee. I drink coffee every day. Would you say I "dedicate" that cup of coffee to myself?