[josefx]

> I don't think Wayland ever supported

Isn't that true for even the most basic features you expect from a windowing system? X11 may have come with everything and the kitchen sink, Wayland drops all that fun on the implementations.

GNOME does unredirect on Wayland since 2019: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/g2g99z/wayland_surfa...

> Windows killed it

They replaced it with "Fullscreen Optimisations", which is mostly the same, but more flexible as leaves detection of fullscreen exclusive windows to the window manager.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/demystifying-full-scr...

As far as I can find the update removed the option to turn this of.

[kllrnohj]

In both the GNOME and Windows "Fullscreen Optimizations" it's the compositor doing an internal optimzation to avoid a copy when it's not necessary. In neither scenario is the system nor applications "overriding" or bypassing the compositor. The compositor still has exclusive ownership of the display. And the application's swapchain is still configured as if it was going through a composition pass (eg, it's probably not double-buffered)

[josefx]

> it's the compositor doing an internal optimzation to avoid a copy when it's not necessary.

Yeah, it avoids doing the compositing part of being a compositor. It bypasses the entire pipeline.

[account42]

"Fullscreen Optimisations" is how X11 has always worked.

Window's actual exclusive fullscreen always caused tons of issues with Alt+TAB because it was designed for a time when you couldn't fit both a game and the desktop in VRAM.