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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

That's always the excuse for sloppy programming: "Things are bigger now". The truth is: CPU and RAM progressed at a speed not just a bit but much faster than real estate (pixels) growth and refresh rate.

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).

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> The truth is: CPU and RAM progressed at a speed not just a bit but much faster than real estate (pixels) growth and refresh rate.

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.

Doesn't modern RAM go up to hundreds of GB/s? Also, compression?

You still probably don't want to use 10% of your memory bandwidth at all times for a windowing effect?

Ergo my point about compression :-)

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.

I don't really want 10% of my memory bandwidth being taken up by rendering my glassy title bars.

Now wobbly windows is something I can get behind.

Dual channel DDR5 is like 60, tops, 100s is on big many-channel servers.

awesome is great. one of the few tiling managers that actually has the grace built in to deal with windows that really can't be tiled sanely.

awesomewm is great and pretty stable. I have been running it by default on all my machines since 2014 with very little changes and almost the same config.

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