Comment by Const-me
13 hours ago
There’s a reason why all modern desktop environments are designed the same way: power efficiency when multitasking.
Imagine you have 3 windows visible at the same time: a videogame rendering at the refresh rate of the display 144 Hz, a video player rendering frames at 30 Hz, and a text editor rendering blinking cursor at 2 Hz. Because the videogame wants to deliver frames at 144 Hz, the desktop compositor has to deliver the entire desktop at 144 Hz. Asking the video player and especially the text editor to also deliver frames at that frequency would be wasteful. Irrelevant for desktops with fast discrete GPUs, but directly translates to battery drain on laptops.
I don't think this is any better for power efficiency? You're taking the modern system as an axiom, which it isn't. The old system didn't "deliver frames at" any specific rate. The graphics chipset sent to the monitor whatever was in the framebuffer at a specific rate, and windows updated whenever they wanted to. The text editor didn't "deliver frames at 144Hz" or any other Hz - it updated some of the pixels in the framebuffer when you pressed a key.
It cost nothing to not change the pixels when you didn't press a key, no matter whether you weren't pressing keys at 60Hz or you weren't pressing them at 144Hz.