Blame is not on toolkits. The history is clear: came a point where MacOS X and Windows supported flawless animations with no screen tearing, and transparency, a

Blame is not on toolkits. The history is clear: came a point where MacOS X and Windows supported flawless animations with no screen tearing, and transparency, and antialiased rounded corners for windows. Meanwhile, Linux still had blitted windows that left a grey trace for a brief instant when you moved them, and pixelwise window edges, and terrible transparency. Came along Compiz, which reversed the way clients interacted with X, and which did the slick animations and fancy graphics of the mainstream OSes. What was the only way it found to do that? Rendering everything outside of X. And nobody could do it with the old design. So that design was quickly adopted by KWin and so on. It turns out that nowadays screens are not lightweight clients over a serial line, and they have more than double the number of pixels of VGA. Compositors became a necessity for the Linux Desktop to compete, reducing X to an IPC system that it cannot be good at, because it is not the situation it was built for. Wayland is built for the status quo.