History
One of the first systems with a compositing windowing system was the Commodore Amiga, released in 1985. Applications could first request a region of memory outside the current display region for use as bitmap. The Amiga windowing system would then use a series of bit blits using the system's hardware blitter to build a composite of these applications' bitmaps, along with buttons and sliders, in display memory, without requiring these applications to redraw any of their bitmaps.
On March 24, 2001, Mac OS X v10.0 became the first mainstream operating system to feature software-based 3D compositing and effects, provided by its Quartz component. With the release of Mac OS X v10.2 and Quartz Extreme, the job of compositing could be moved to dedicated graphics hardware.
Sun Microsystems developed an ambitious 3D graphics system to layer on top of its Swing toolkit, which was called Project Looking Glass. It was first demonstrated at the 2003 LinuxWorld Expo. Although Apple threatened to sue Sun for breach of intellectual property rights, some of the functionality in Looking Glass has been implemented in other window managers. A few years into its development, it was discontinued by Sun, whose primary business was selling enterprise mainframes.
The Desktop Window Manager in Project Longhorn was first presented to the 2003 Windows Hardware Engineering Conference demonstrating wobbly windows. Severe delays in the development of Longhorn caused Microsoft not to debut its 3D compositing window manager until the release of Windows Vista in January 2007.
Compositing under the X Window System required some redesign, which took place incrementally. Metacity 2.8.4 was released in August 2004. However, the first widely publicized compositing window manager for X was Xfwm, released in January 2005. On 26th January 2005, Compiz was released, introducing fully accelerated 3D compositing to the Linux platform. KDE's KWin also supports compositing.
Read more about this topic: Compositing Window Manager
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