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jiggy2011

This is probably a legacy of X's network oriented history. If your window contents are being rendered by another computer on the end of a high latency connection you want to be able to reorganise your windows on screen without waiting for the other end to finish the reflow.

I assume that window contents are drawn to a buffer before being rendered on a modern system anyway. I can't remember the last time I saw partially drawn window contents.

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It's not a historic artefact. You can't trust the app to render in time... (that's also why client side decorations are worthless).

But wouldn't that also hold for OSX/Windows?

Well, even if you assume the app will take too long to render, is it really worthwhile to render the "rest" of the window (pointer, frames, etc). The main reason you're working with a particular window is the content, not the chrome, so drawing the chrome asynchronously only serves to make things look weird, not actually get things done faster.

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