Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Fedora 29 Xfce Might Upgrade To 4.13 Desktop Packages

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Fedora 29 Xfce Might Upgrade To 4.13 Desktop Packages

    Phoronix: Fedora 29 Xfce Might Upgrade To 4.13 Desktop Packages

    Yet another change proposal for Fedora 29 is upgrading its Xfce packages to what is currently in the 4.13 "development" series...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    I fully support this move. Been running Xfce 4.13(4) since months on Fedora (26/27/28) by compiling it by my own (using modified spec files). I can confirm, that Xfce 4.13(4) has been working perfectly fine so far. No bigger issues. Only xfce4-notes-plugin is still Gtk2 but the rest is entirely using Gtk3.

    Only issues noticed:
    1) Please compile xfwm4 with xpresenter support, otherwise you may end up getting tearing and delayed video output (only on some systems).
    2) Xfce supports some sort of Zoom function, where you can zoom the view of your desktop. Unfortunately this leads to an instant crash on my system.

    Otherwise everything else runs stable and smooth. No crashes - nothing. I also welcome the changes and stability improvements everywhere. Xfce 4.13(4) is notable better than Xfce 4.12.

    Also good point for a switch, so one can gather possible bugreports and have them forward to Xfce4 developers to fix them.

    So far! Thumbs up!

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by Candy View Post
      I also welcome the changes and stability improvements everywhere. Xfce 4.13(4) is notable better than Xfce 4.12.
      Stability improvements when it crashes on zoom as you said?

      Originally posted by Candy View Post
      So far! Thumbs up!
      For what?

      Seriously, how about naming an actual improvement from 4.12 other than something like "but it uses GTK3" which is completely useless for the usage.

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by Weasel View Post
        Stability improvements when it crashes on zoom as you said?
        Yes, that's how it is.

        1) We are stil dealing with a development release!
        2) The broader the audience, the more issues that remain may be caught and can be reported.
        3) I said that this issue happens on my system and may also be related to the graphiccard driver used.
        4) Yes! Overall Xfce 4.13(4) has been a pleasure to use. It's stable as in: This particular version is highly stable - for a development version.

        Originally posted by Weasel View Post
        Seriously, how about naming an actual improvement from 4.12 other than something like "but it uses GTK3" which is completely useless for the usage.
        The improvement can be seen with different views:

        1) Improvement as in porting from Gtk2 to Gtk3 and therefore porting from dbus to gdbus (?) to allow an overall consistency in technology used.
        2) The steps to bring an very popular desktop environment a step further to actual technology and giving it a fair grounding for further development.
        3) Using Gtk3 may for some be a wrong decision but looking at the overall programs that get ported from gtk2 to gk3, then this makes sense.
        4) Xfce has a few very good contributers where one cleaned up xfce4-terminal and brought it on a new level by implementing a new vte and have the terminal to a current state. Deleting old crufty code and cleaning it up massively. The other one that ported a fair amount of plugins from gtk2 to gtk3. A few others who keep working and debugging Thunar (besides the code cleanups and improvements of the code quality). The few (whose name I don't mention) found a few scenarios inside Thunar where it may lead into errorous execution and therefore crashes. These benefits came, beause of these people, who are motivated by the overall progress of Xfce (Gtk3) port.

        So what else do you want ? Xfce is and stays what it is. Xfce! An easy desktop environment that get's your job done.

        If you feel something is missing or doesn't fit your needs, then feel free to subscribe to the Xfce devel mailinglist and contribute. Or report bugs or help the developers debugging the code or testing the stuff you use (as I've been doing for the past).

        Oh and I don't want to forget the other developers who have done quite a good job porting all stuff to Gtk3. Because of the progress the overall motivation to work on Xfce (as I conclude now) returned.
        Last edited by Candy; 24 July 2018, 09:06 AM.

        Comment


        • #5
          Does any roadmap for 4.14 release date exist yet?

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by turboNOMAD View Post
            Does any roadmap for 4.14 release date exist yet?
            Nothing official but I believe it was on an Xfce blog post a few weeks back where they indicated 'in the next year'
            Michael Larabel
            https://www.michaellarabel.com/

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by Candy View Post
              Yes, that's how it is.

              1) We are stil dealing with a development release!
              2) The broader the audience, the more issues that remain may be caught and can be reported.
              3) I said that this issue happens on my system and may also be related to the graphiccard driver used.
              4) Yes! Overall Xfce 4.13(4) has been a pleasure to use. It's stable as in: This particular version is highly stable - for a development version.
              There's nothing to praise about it in this state. Just because it uses GTK3 doesn't warrant free stability points. You're misunderstanding my point, I'll explain below.
              Originally posted by Candy View Post
              The improvement can be seen with different views:

              1) Improvement as in porting from Gtk2 to Gtk3 and therefore porting from dbus to gdbus (?) to allow an overall consistency in technology used.
              2) The steps to bring an very popular desktop environment a step further to actual technology and giving it a fair grounding for further development.
              3) Using Gtk3 may for some be a wrong decision but looking at the overall programs that get ported from gtk2 to gk3, then this makes sense.
              No offense but everything you said reads like a marketing spin with zero actual substance. Seriously.

              Originally posted by Candy View Post
              So what else do you want ?
              People to stop thinking that code "rusts" especially after such a minuscule time frame since 4.12. I'm personally sick of seeing people who say code gets "old" and needs a "rewrite" despite the fact that the new one is, at the moment, inferior, and even when completed it won't offer anything substantial to the user compared to the existing code. It doesn't mean it's worse, but it's not better either, at least not worth the "hype".

              Much of the stupid mobile crowd who think that if something doesn't receive an update for 2 weeks it must be old, crufty, rusted, bad code, unmaintained, not recommended to use. WTF? They get happy when they see a million bugs fixed, despite the fact it means they've been using bug-ridden shit for the entire time compared to something that's "finished and in slow maintenance only", which they classify as "old code". Delusional to me.

              I like XFCE, it's one of the DEs I actually use and I'm quite picky. So don't take this the wrong way: I'm not bashing XFCE. In fact, like I said XFCE is a stable DE (i.e. slow development). This is a good thing to me, it means it's quite finished. Finished software is not "bad", on the contrary in fact, it means it's solid.

              What I'm saying is that some people's reasoning is just hilarious to me, they just want "new stuff" like GTK3 even if it offers exactly zero benefits compared to before to daily usage, and that's what gets to me.

              When I asked you if it offers anything substantial compared to 4.12, it was not a rhetorical question. Was a genuine one, considering how much praise you gave them, surely something must be worth it? I guess I was wrong and it was just the mobile crowd way of thinking where "new = better, even if less stable, hey at least it's new!"

              Maybe they should just change version numbers and the source code date and claim it's "new", people would get hyped about a date change too, because it's new and makes the code less "crufty"... somehow. Probably.
              Last edited by Weasel; 24 July 2018, 11:43 AM.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by Weasel View Post
                There's nothing to praise about it in this state. Just because it uses GTK3 doesn't warrant free stability points. You're misunderstanding my point, I'll explain below.No offense but everything you said reads like a marketing spin with zero actual substance. Seriously.

                People to stop thinking that code "rusts" especially after such a minuscule time frame since 4.12. I'm personally sick of seeing people who say code gets "old" and needs a "rewrite" despite the fact that the new one is, at the moment, inferior, and even when completed it won't offer anything substantial to the user compared to the existing code. It doesn't mean it's worse, but it's not better either, at least not worth the "hype".

                Much of the stupid mobile crowd who think that if something doesn't receive an update for 2 weeks it must be old, crufty, rusted, bad code, unmaintained, not recommended to use. WTF? They get happy when they see a million bugs fixed, despite the fact it means they've been using bug-ridden shit for the entire time compared to something that's "finished and in slow maintenance only", which they classify as "old code". Delusional to me.

                I like XFCE, it's one of the DEs I actually use and I'm quite picky. So don't take this the wrong way: I'm not bashing XFCE. In fact, like I said XFCE is a stable DE (i.e. slow development). This is a good thing to me, it means it's quite finished. Finished software is not "bad", on the contrary in fact, it means it's solid.

                What I'm saying is that some people's reasoning is just hilarious to me, they just want "new stuff" like GTK3 even if it offers exactly zero benefits compared to before to daily usage, and that's what gets to me.

                When I asked you if it offers anything substantial compared to 4.12, it was not a rhetorical question. Was a genuine one, considering how much praise you gave them, surely something must be worth it? I guess I was wrong and it was just the mobile crowd way of thinking where "new = better, even if less stable, hey at least it's new!"

                Maybe they should just change version numbers and the source code date and claim it's "new", people would get hyped about a date change too, because it's new and makes the code less "crufty"... somehow. Probably.
                I agree with most of your points, but do note that GTK3 has one improvement over GTK2: support for hidpi. Yes, I know that there is some kind of workaround for GTK2, but for the average user, who just wants a working desktop out-of-the-box, hidpi by default is certainly a nice improvement in GTK3 over GTK2. (me not included, btw, as my screen is 1920x1080)

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by Weasel View Post
                  This is a good thing to me, it means it's quite finished. Finished software is not "bad", on the contrary in fact, it means it's solid.
                  Actually this is not entirely true!

                  Xfce worked but the software was neither finished nor was it solid. Infact Thunar had long time issues with various versions with glib. Whenever it entered some file copying or other stuff the thing simply crashed. It took the developers quite a long time figuring out the cause and working around it.

                  What I like to explain is this: With the conversion to Gtk3 the people who were working on the code also took the time cleaning the code up. Removing deprecated and old junk and opened up the code for the next iteration that may come in the future. A much cleaner and solid code base than before (more or less).

                  Does it give any benefits to the end user ? Comparing to 4.12 ? Dunno. Debian most likely still use 4.10 with their current distros.

                  Was the port necessary ? Dunno! Blame it to the people who wrote Gtk+

                  On BeOS or AmigaOS, people rearely update their toolkits. Though on Amiga there were a bunch like Intuition, GadTools, MUI, Reaction ... only to name some prominent ones. People wrote Programs using all kind of Toolkits. But nowadays people seem to be settling with either MUI or Reaction as their default Toolkit. Once written and 20 years be it like this. Some classes get added but nothing removed. No major API changes or major rewrites.

                  I remember one of your earlier replies where you said that Microsoft never changes API. Instead they add new functions but maintain compatibility with old stuff, so the things still work.

                  On Linux this doesn't seem to be a valid approach. Things get changed. Concepts get changed. Stuff gets re-implemented and people follow.

                  I can assure you that there is plenty of stuff that I hate with Gtk3.

                  I hate:
                  1) Buttons in the Window decoration
                  2) Invisible Scrollbars
                  3) The new fileselector that covers the entire Laptop display
                  4) Huge performance loss compared to Gtk2

                  Example:
                  I recently ported one of my old Windows programs from VB5 to C. Instead of Forms I redesigned the GUI using Glade3.
                  I created the Window by calling the GtkBuilder. Buttons, Callbacks, Signals etc. all added and 3 days later the program ran.

                  By switching one line in the linker I was able to link between Gtk2 and Gtk3. But I figured out that with Gtk3 the entire layout of the GUI was fucked up. I used a fixed layout grid and placed some pushbuttons (15pixels heigh). With Gtk2 linked everything looked awesome. With Gtk3 linked everything looked like an ass because of the CSS Styling, extra padding, margins and so on.

                  It took me a while to figure out that I can apply a CSS gtk_css_provider and have all my padding become "*{padding:0px;}". This ended up that everything looked less crappy than it used but still it doesn't look the same as Gtk2. Another sideeffect was, that I was able to see how the big buttons became little buttons (because of the padding) when the program launched up.

                  The window popped up, you see big buttons for a blink of a second and then the style gets applied and the buttons shrink to the expected size (no matter if the applying of the stile is done before gtk_widget_show(window); gtk_main(); was called.

                  Usually I use dynamic containers, so I don't care about the button sizes at all. But for this specific program I needed a fixed layout. Doesn't work with Gtk3. But then I must admit that I haven't spent much time reading the API or other ressources, so I can solve the problem.

                  Most of my programs that have a GUI (under Linux) still uses Gtk2.

                  But yes I understand what you are trying to say. Changing the toolkit doesn't change much of the program itself (if there isn't any other changes beside changing the toolkit only). But that's how it is. We need to deal with it.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Vistaus View Post
                    I agree with most of your points, but do note that GTK3 has one improvement over GTK2: support for hidpi.
                    Also running in Wayland, natively that is. (GTK2 would have to use XWayland).

                    Afaik that's the main reason XFCE people migrated over from GTK2, as they wanted to not be left out in the "legacy" DE when Jeezus-Wayland comes.

                    Comment

                    Working...
                    X