For me, I think it's one of the greatest unfortunate event in the age of modern desktops. In the late 1990s, on a Pentium MMX computer without a GPU, it was po

For me, I think it's one of the greatest unfortunate event in the age of modern desktops. In the late 1990s, on a Pentium MMX computer without a GPU, it was possible to have a reasonably usable desktop by utilizing simple 2D operations: 256 ROPs, line drawing, rectangle filling/copying, and mono-to-color expansion. They were usually a subset of Direct2D specs, and implemented by the vast majority of graphics chips, like NeoMagic or Trident. As the processing power have greatly increased, today, it's almost impossible to use these machines anymore - simply moving a window will put the CPU in 100% load. Because today's desktops use composite window manager, it's already impossible to translate a window move to an exact RectCopy command. Even if composite is not used (and ignoring all the complexity of modern highly-abstracted GUI systems where you cannot say the boundary of a window is a line), we still cannot accelerate it, because the entire 2D graphics stack was simply thrown again, there's no standard 2D APIs for applications or developers to use. X Server still has EXA, but it's again, is not a modern framework, and it's not possible to run X without using root. I have a little non-x86 laptop with a 2D blitter, the graphics is nearly impossible to use, and things are getting worse and worse day-by-day. On the other hand, if you port Windows 95's graphics stack on it, it should be perfectly usable. In the end, I think it's the unfortunate result of economics - sure, there are still many uses of running GUIs/desktops with 2D blitters, but the benefits of supporting it greatly exceeded the cost. A GPU is much cheaper.