> But once we got things like Compiz, a major shift in attitude towards X11 came about. What the…? Are you trying to pull a "Hey, look over there, a three-head

> But once we got things like Compiz, a major shift in attitude towards X11 came about. What the…? Are you trying to pull a "Hey, look over there, a three-headed monkey!"?! Why are you now pulling Compiz into the argument? It's totally irrelevant for this discussion. Compiz is just a client that makes use of a concerted effort of the XRender, the Composite and the AIGLX extensions to composite whole windows to the screen. AIGLX is an acronym for "Accelerated Indirect GLX"; don't ask why that acroynm was chosen, because GLX itself already is accelerated and may be indirect. Compositing also doesn't care about how you draw to a X11 drawable. All it cares about is: Here is a set of X11 drawables (windows, pixmaps), all server side, which you can draw to with server side accelerated rendering primitives. And then over there's a compositing surface (the composite layer window). The X11 server then is: "Now please give me drawing instructions on how to get the composite surface filled with the contents of the drawables!" The compositing effects render completely server side, even if OpenGL graphics effects are used, thanks to indirect rendering command execution (heck, you can even compile the drawing commands in a display list (an ooold OpenGL feature; so old, it's been removed from modern OpenGL versions) and have the whole thing executed by sending a single glCallLists command to the X11 server via GLX).