Comment by MiroslavPokorny

12 hours ago

Maybe its me, but i believe the primary or secondary reason for screen is different screens had different resolutions and color depths, both of which dont really exist these days on any major OS.

5 comments

MiroslavPokorny

vidarh 12 hours ago

I've been thinking a lot about this. Virtual desktops gets us somewhat close, but not quite. You're right the difference in resolution and colour depth isn't really relevant any more.

What I think made screens feel different was as a grouping mechanism, usually driven by a single application (though in more recent versions of AmigaOS you could open "public screens") that would manage the layout for that screen. You can do that with virtual desktops, but it takes some effort to simulate the behaviour.

I'm slowly iterating on something like that for my wm. I now snapshot the (by default tiling) layout and restore it, letting me "open" and "close" screens/virtual desktops, and re-open the applications on them, so instead of opening a single application that opens a screen, I will open a "project" and it will open a desktop and multiple applications on it whose windows will snap into place. I'm not happy with it yet, but it feels somewhat closer to me to how it felt to use Amiga screens.

summa_tech 11 hours ago

It feels like the concept faded with the advent of large VRAM and fast fill rate graphics accelerators. I remember old X Window System workstations supporting multiple concurrent windows with different color depths and modes. The hardware would compose windows from memory during display scan-out, all to save VRAM.

p_l 2 hours ago

Color depths, not modes per se, and it's more that XFree86/X.Org by virtue of being lowest common denominator didn't have optimizations based on it, and over time GTK and others forgot they exist.
Some systems like Xsgi went further with having several visuals used for predefined purposes in their modified Motif versions
badc0ffee 5 hours ago

I used X11 on some 8-bit framebuffers back in the day, and I remember the palette changing depending on which window was in the foreground. The foreground window would have proper colour, and the background ones would generally have crazy clashing colours.

sam1714 4 hours ago

The use case definitely exists today:

  - 3D apps (games) render at a resolution less than the desktop for performance reasons (even in fullscreen mode to avoid switching the video signal)
  - Similarly, streaming sticks/TVs render the UI at 720-1080p and overlay on hardware decoded 4K video (very common in anything that's not a console, Apple TV, or NVIDIA Shield)
  - Handling non-high DPI apps on a high-DPI desktop, or handling systems with mixed DPI displays
  - Combining HDR and SDR content on the same desktop. Same with deep-color apps.
  - UI effects like the OS X genie effect, app thumbnails