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Comment by duskwuff | Hacker News Reader

Reality check: GTK 2.0 was released in 2002. At that time, most computers had under 1 GB of RAM, many were running 256-color displays at ~1024x768, and anti-aliasing was an exotic, showy feature which was rarely used on desktop systems. Hardware graphics acceleration was only used for 3D games, and support for it on Linux was extremely limited. Cross-platform compatibility for GTK wasn't even a consideration yet; it was targeted exclusively at X11 systems.

Which is a lot of words to say: software changes. The Linux desktop is a moving target; expecting a user interface library to hold still for 20+ years is a tall order.

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Everyone I know was using 24-bit color well before 2002, though 16-bit color made some applications work better (8-bit color would only happen temporarily, when running a very old application). My family shelled out the money for a 1280x1024 monitor though; take that!

Win32 says hi. I know a lot of folks here don't like Microsoft, but it is the one API that refuses to die.

> Which is a lot of words to say: software changes. The Linux desktop is a moving target; expecting a user interface library to hold still for 20+ years is a tall order.

Qt pretty much holds without major drastic changes to the approach since 1995. https://web.archive.org/web/20201109041256/https://www.qt.io...

We're at Qt 6.9 now and the process is still easy - there were only very few breakages between Qt 5 and Qt 6

Hardware graphics acceleration started on Unix and was largely used professionally.

I had access to a DEC Alpha desktop workstation with a hardware OpenGL and X accelerator. It was in 1995, before the first 3dfx Voodoo was even released.

I bet high-end Unix graphics workstations (CAD, video processing, etc) had it many years before that. The first graphics accelerator was offered by Silicon Graphics in 1983, yes, forty two years ago. It was supported by IRIX, a Unix variant.

For applications which displayed 3D graphics, sure. But using graphics acceleration as a more general tool on the desktop took a while longer - the first, experimental window compositors for X11 showed up around 2006.

> the first, experimental window compositors for X11 showed up around 2006

Although Apple already started using compositing in 2002 with Quartz Extreme in Mac OS X 10.2, which also had X11 support.

Nextstep used compositing in the late 1980s.

[[citation needed]]

NeXTstep used Display Postscript. AFAIK this has no concept of 3D acceleration or anything akin to it, and was almost entirely unaccelerated.

compositing has nothing to do with 3d acceleration.

NeXT slabs and cubes did have a low-function blitter used to composite the main display.

Edit: this was the Turbo units, which did have a bus-assisted block copy.

Before that, just well-tuned 68030 burst block copy - they rendered to backing store and did block copies with a special case of vram to vram block copies (used for window compositing).

In this direct context, I absolutely think it does and it's integral to the definition.

What do you understand by "display compositing" that doesn't involve 3D hardware?

What the hell does 3D hardware have to do with the block copies compositing window managers like MacOS are doing?

And it's still better than GTK3 because you can run it on Xorg without it being capped at 60fps regardless of monitor refresh rate.

I have cards from the 90's that had 2d hardware acceleration

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