5 ms·

Well: * NetworkManager is a dumpster fire. * Wayland is 10 years in the making and it's still barely out of alpha and still missing crucial features such as

by eecc 5y ago

Well: * NetworkManager is a dumpster fire. * Wayland is 10 years in the making and it's still barely out of alpha and still missing crucial features such as fractional and consistent scaling. * Pipewire is a welcome attempt to mitigate another source of grief, Pulse Audio. * Gnome? Lets not get started... Please. RedHat has been a boon to the Linux community but it's lack of - how can I put it tactfully - design taste? has stranded the platform into a decades-long quicksand of endless circular reinvention.

kzrdude 5y ago
Well, Xorg is also missing fractional and consistent scaling - because there are many bugs with it
- benttoothpaste 5y ago
  I use fractional scaling with Xorg so it is not missing. Not sure about consistency. It is acceptable for me though.
in_mice 5y ago
You're not wrong on wayland. I remember hearing people talking about how great wayland was gonna be a decade ago. Gnome and Network Manager are fine though. My XPS 15 wifi has been supported for the last three years without any issues.
- md8z 5y ago
  Wayland is a lot better than X. The problem with any of these low level enhancements is that they take a long time to plumb through the entire system. I wish it wasn't so, but it is.
md8z 5y ago
"still missing crucial features such as fractional and consistent scaling" This has very little to do with Wayland and mostly has to do with the apps and the toolkits. I haven't really seen many Linux native apps that are able to function correctly at a non-integer scale. The rendering of these apps may have to be entirely changed and refactored to use floating point instead of integers. That a big thing to ask every app to do. The hard part is doing that, and then it's trivial to put a flag in Wayland (or XWayland) for an app to say that it supports it.
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  Clipboard is consistently broken on Wayland. I don't use any XWayland application, it's all native Wayland. Sometimes when I copy things they don't paste, and I need to switch back to the original window for the copy to register. Or even copy again to be sure. This was never, ever a problem in more than 10 years using X11. But, fractional scaling is working like a charm on Gnome + Wayland (after a gsettings command). Very crisp, despite people saying it doesn't work. On X11, even on KDE, I can't get fractional scaling this crisp. This is the only reason I'm using Wayland; all the rest sucks. But, the problem is, GTK doesn't support fractional caling natively. Even GTK 4 supports only integer scaling. So for fractional scaling the compositor has to scale up, then down. This approach generally causes blurring (though I don't know why Gnome on Wayland here isn't blurred). When I see screenshots of people with fractional scaling on Gnome, it appears very blurry. Comparing side by side, here it isn't. I don't know why and at this point I'm afraid of messing it with and ruining everything.
  - md8z 5y ago
    "Sometimes when I copy things they don't paste, and I need to switch back to the original window for the copy to register." I have honestly never had that problem in years of using GNOME Wayland, but I experienced it many times with misbehaved X11 apps. Maybe you want to come up with a reproducible test case and then report it? "Even GTK 4 supports only integer scaling. So for fractional scaling the compositor has to scale up, then down. This approach generally causes blurring (though I don't know why Gnome on Wayland here isn't blurred)." That's what I mean, it has to be done in the toolkits first. The first step would be to add support for that to GTK which is unlikely to happen until at least GTK5. Then after the apps can start to support it, I think you're looking at at least a few years before there is a realistic chance of having that. Sorry to disappoint, it's just not an easy thing to have. And I don't think there is much incentive to support this from a hardware perspective either since most people that I see asking for this are using it as a workaround for oddly sized 4K monitors. "This is the only reason I'm using Wayland; all the rest sucks." I feel your frustration but I actually would not suggest using Xorg in 2021 unless you really know what you're doing. It's not secure unless you take great pains to make it so. GNOME's Wayland session is the most secure Linux desktop there is outside of security-focused distros.

by eecc 5y ago

kzrdude 5y ago

Well, Xorg is also missing fractional and consistent scaling - because there are many bugs with it

benttoothpaste 5y ago
I use fractional scaling with Xorg so it is not missing. Not sure about consistency. It is acceptable for me though.

in_mice 5y ago

You're not wrong on wayland. I remember hearing people talking about how great wayland was gonna be a decade ago. Gnome and Network Manager are fine though. My XPS 15 wifi has been supported for the last three years without any issues.

md8z 5y ago
Wayland is a lot better than X. The problem with any of these low level enhancements is that they take a long time to plumb through the entire system. I wish it wasn't so, but it is.

md8z 5y ago

"still missing crucial features such as fractional and consistent scaling" This has very little to do with Wayland and mostly has to do with the apps and the toolkits. I haven't really seen many Linux native apps that are able to function correctly at a non-integer scale. The rendering of these apps may have to be entirely changed and refactored to use floating point instead of integers. That a big thing to ask every app to do. The hard part is doing that, and then it's trivial to put a flag in Wayland (or XWayland) for an app to say that it supports it.

nextaccountic 5y ago
Clipboard is consistently broken on Wayland. I don't use any XWayland application, it's all native Wayland. Sometimes when I copy things they don't paste, and I need to switch back to the original window for the copy to register. Or even copy again to be sure. This was never, ever a problem in more than 10 years using X11. But, fractional scaling is working like a charm on Gnome + Wayland (after a gsettings command). Very crisp, despite people saying it doesn't work. On X11, even on KDE, I can't get fractional scaling this crisp. This is the only reason I'm using Wayland; all the rest sucks. But, the problem is, GTK doesn't support fractional caling natively. Even GTK 4 supports only integer scaling. So for fractional scaling the compositor has to scale up, then down. This approach generally causes blurring (though I don't know why Gnome on Wayland here isn't blurred). When I see screenshots of people with fractional scaling on Gnome, it appears very blurry. Comparing side by side, here it isn't. I don't know why and at this point I'm afraid of messing it with and ruining everything.
- md8z 5y ago
  "Sometimes when I copy things they don't paste, and I need to switch back to the original window for the copy to register." I have honestly never had that problem in years of using GNOME Wayland, but I experienced it many times with misbehaved X11 apps. Maybe you want to come up with a reproducible test case and then report it? "Even GTK 4 supports only integer scaling. So for fractional scaling the compositor has to scale up, then down. This approach generally causes blurring (though I don't know why Gnome on Wayland here isn't blurred)." That's what I mean, it has to be done in the toolkits first. The first step would be to add support for that to GTK which is unlikely to happen until at least GTK5. Then after the apps can start to support it, I think you're looking at at least a few years before there is a realistic chance of having that. Sorry to disappoint, it's just not an easy thing to have. And I don't think there is much incentive to support this from a hardware perspective either since most people that I see asking for this are using it as a workaround for oddly sized 4K monitors. "This is the only reason I'm using Wayland; all the rest sucks." I feel your frustration but I actually would not suggest using Xorg in 2021 unless you really know what you're doing. It's not secure unless you take great pains to make it so. GNOME's Wayland session is the most secure Linux desktop there is outside of security-focused distros.