Traditionally, X11 didn’t have compositors, and didn’t need the extra round trip wayland exists to remove.

I wonder if there’s space for a project like xlibre (or x.org, if it were revived) to update the x11 protocol to fill whatever gap compositors were meant to fill.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been moving all my machines to lxde.

Apparently, I accidentally switched back to a compositor free desktop without noticing. High framerate, vsync/tear-free and high dpi work fine. So does fractional scaling, but I disable it.

Personally, I’d rather these hypothetical x11 devs focused on reverse engineering hdmi vrr (blocked by lawyers at the moment), and HDR / expanded color spaces.