LFCS 2012: X and Wayland

Back in the day when OS X was the only desktop to use composition people tended to always regard the OS X desktop as the 'most snappy' or 'best looking' desktop. They would then look at the Linux desktop and compare with that and talk about how slow it was all the time.

The difference is that without composition the Linux desktop would force a re-render of the the window being moved and any of the overlapping windows in order to display the window moving around. This caused a lot of re-rendering of windows and when Linux couldn't keep up with the movement you saw a lot of high cpu usage, tearing of windows, and badly/incorrectly rendered space on overlapping windows. With composition OS X just used the image buffer and didn't have to re-render anything.. also if it couldn't keep up with mouse movement the display just lagged in order to retain smooth movement.

Without the technological understanding it was impossible to understand why OS X behaved and looked so much better then Linux/X did. So they just say 'OS X is faster' and just assume that is a valid explanation.

One of the horrible little facts about life is that people will often form a very valid opinion about something, even though they lack the ability to explain how they came about that opinion. Then when you ask them to explain it then they will simply make something up as to not appear to be stupid, and it's often very wrong. What is worse is that If people expect that they need to explain their opinions they often unconsciously pick a opinion that is easier to explain away.

The moral of the story is that even if people are unable to discern and point out differences in how windows and displays are rendered they will still react to changes positively or negatively.