@mcc @sabrina ...I am not proud of how little progress I've made, as it's not been done at all efficiently. (Rewriting WINGs in Rust while mostly maintaining source-level compatibility with the original C library is probably kinda dumb. But I am learning.)

Most recent status update is that I'm un-mothballing it again and making sense of a backlog of local changes so they can all get pushed to a project repo. You're welcome to look:

https://git.sdf.org/vitrine/wmaker
https://git.sdf.org/trurl/wmaker

@mcc @sabrina I am 100% sympathetic to the line of thinking you've shared here, and it's inspiring. (Redox has come a long way since I last looked. I should try it out.)

I'm asking about what I consider the basics need because hardware acceleration of some stripe may actually be necessary these days, given screen resolutions and expectations about tearing. I haven't peered that deeply into the stack lately, and things in X that seem like simple blitting may actually do more these days.

@mcc @sabrina does "fast 2D desktop" include something like video playback at modern screen resolutions, or is a desktop stack from, say, the late 90s acceptable? I've been putting a little time here and there into rewriting Window Maker, and it seems to work perfectly well with only a few calls to the X server, which could do everything in software and probably work fine. But modern Web browsers and media players ask for a lot.

@futurebird I later went on to a job where I was sysadmin for WebCT and Blackboard deployments at a publisher who developed content for those platforms to sell with their textbooks.

These platforms were a miserable pile of Perl scripts and Java servlets.

It's always been like 2002 out there. I can only shudder at the thought of what Google has built in the past 10 years.

@futurebird in my senior year of high school (which happend to be in 2002), the relatively young, ambitious physics/calculus teacher learned enough MySQL and PHP to be dangerous (after iterating through Flash and various other client-side approaches which I gleefully showed him it was trivial to crack open to extract the quiz answers). This turned into a classroom CMS which, fortunately for all involved, never really took off.