> smaller resolution In early 2000s I've used a PC with 800x600px CRT monitor and one of early Intel Celerons. My memory is fuzzy, but at best it was cheapest

> smaller resolution In early 2000s I've used a PC with 800x600px CRT monitor and one of early Intel Celerons. My memory is fuzzy, but at best it was cheapest Coppermine Celeron (more likely Mendocino). Nowadays I use notebook with Intel Core i5 2540M (quite old) and the biggest display I use has 2560x1440 pixels (much newer than notebook). Now I have at most (2560x1440)/(800x600) ~ 8 times more pixels. I didn't find numbers from the same benchmark for Coppermine and i5 2540M, but I expect 2540M to be at least 10 times faster than slowest Coppermine. So I think modern CPU are fast enough to render GUI at least as fast as 15-20 years ago. GPU of course can do this much faster, cannot argue with this. > You also got gradients, transparency and the like I wonder if users really want this or we have it for other reasons (like developers want to show-off and companies want to sell new OS/App). For me the peak GUI was around Windows 2000 - most of what come next was not really an improvement for me. I'm not representative (and mostly use i3 WM, not Windows), but the fact that Widnows XP was used well beyond official support ended and many users around the world still use Windows 7 tells that many users don't really want to follow the latest GUI trends, but instead they are forced to.