„The cathedral of Notre Dame is eye candy, all houses should be maximally efficient concrete boxes“ is a hive drone mindset and unbefitting of a species that needs beauty to flourish, or else remains spiritually stunted.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No.
That's an extreme view; GP didn't indicate that all UI toolkits needed to resemble Motif.
I mean, would it be fair to sum up your point as "Prisons are maximally efficient concrete boxes, all houses should be eye candy"?
Motif is (was at the time) just one of a large number of GUI designs. I quite liked it myself at the time, too.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/202165712_Emotion_D...