[supar]

I wish I could see this kind of discussion in the wayland/name-your-compositor mailing lists. Currently it would be easy to implement a new attribute in the ICCCM so that applications that don't need foreground unredirection (ie: they actively want to be transparent, which is a minority) can signal so, but it looks like that with the unification of the window manager and compositor we are losing this kind of extendability.

I do realtime graphics with GL for a living, and I'm really sad at the state of the linux desktop, but especially worried at the future. GL performance with any modern distribution is worrysome due to the compositors, and removing it is the first thing that I need to tell any customer lamenting performance issues. Being unable to set vsync on a per-window/context basis is really a major problem, and the performance hit that you get is unacceptable. It seems that removing vsync is all hip these days for games and toys, yet tearing is unacceptable in any other context when you can actually get triple buffering with modern hardware.

Why are we optimizing for toys, when what matters are actual applications and everyday's performance? People don't seem to realize that while the GPU can be used as a general purpose computing unit, the usage pattern is vastly different. The process handling the screen often must have either higher or total control over it many times. You immediately notice video stutter and frames lagging.

But what do I know... I do the same with audio trying to squeeze decent latency with PortAudio and/or alsa directly, while people go through the pulseaudio pipeline...