Though I do have to admit they maybe the resolution increases are to blame for part of that, alpha blending 800x600 is easier than alpha blending a 4k ultra wide with HDR at 120hz...
Anyways... IceWM used to be my window manager of choice but since many years now I'm a happy camper with The Awesome WM (a tiling WM, but it can of course also be used in floating mode: one of my virtual desktop is always in "floating" mode).
Back of the envelope, for a 4k HDR ultra wide you'd need tens of gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth alone to do rendering all on the CPU.
There is a reason we offloaded to the GPU.
Desktop images are generally large blobs of pixels next to each other. I haven't verified but I would be surprised if 10x compression is not possible. So maybe 2-5GB/s? Also it's not like the GPU doesn't use up energy itself while doing this.
Now wobbly windows is something I can get behind.
Bring back my stupid Compiz effects. They were fun, and sometimes genuinely useful.
Out of the box their light terminal theme is flat out unreadable. Some of the chosen colors have almost no contrast.
Ugh.
And then if it is dark mode time but I pull up a terminal window that is semi transparent and it is on top of a browser window that has bright colors, again, unreadable.
Which is why transparency effects are mostly limited to cool screenshots.
COSMIC is great and I like it, which is odd as it violates a lot of my personal preferences... but pretty it is not.
sir, this is not an agentic window