During the late 1990s and early 2000s it was a lot more common for GPUs to provide 2D acceleration, and GUIs were drawn using those primitives. I remember the switch to CPU rendering happening, and the subsequent removal of 2D acceleration from GPUs, but I don't remember why.

At any rate, the 2D graphics we expect now are a lot more complex than the unantialiased lines, blits, and fills of old.

> And: historically they've been computed mostly on CPU, but I think it's time for that to change.

It would be great to wait a bit for OS & GPU power management to evolve before biting the bullet on that. My laptop goes from 6 to 2.something hours of battery as soon as I have a GL context opening somewhere, likely because it seems to power on its discrete GPU automatically in that case.

This is changing. I've been doing power measurements as well (just didn't make the cut of this blog post), and the 1060 is surprisingly power-efficient in its low frequency modes. It's also generally the case that the GPU is always active in its role running the compositor.

> and the 1060 is surprisingly power-efficient in its low frequency modes.

maybe ? the computer on which this happens is a 1070. But please be aware that series 10 are a very small percentage of people. The average laptop of non-tech people around me is easily 8 years old, often on their 2nd or 3rd battery... and these people won't be able to complain easily to anyone when their new battery's life suddenly is halved because of $SOFTWARE.

With most dual-GPU machines you do get a choice whether to power on the discrete GPU or not. It's even supported on GNOME/Wayland as of late.

Both macOS and Windows have ways for applications to specify whether they want to prefer a discrete gpu or integrated.

Don't fool yourself, they won't do anything until most of the browser/apps do it. Then they will fix it to sell "longer" battery life.