GTK4 Gets Smoother GPU-Accelerated Scrolling, Modern Cursor Blinking

[juno]

Those news never fail to amaze me about how much of those things that obviously should aren't GPU accelerated yet.

[GrayShade]

Weren't people complaining a while ago that simply blinking the text cursor in a terminal made their GPU use a lot of power because of the need to upload too many pixels? Do we really want a fade effect now?

[cybertraveler]

Does it work with NVIDIA proprietary drivers?

Personally, I'm in the 'don't care' camp for that.

I care about the UX, usability and easy of use, but IMO, Open Source / Free Software is core to the GNU/Linux ethos and thus my focus is on:

1. Advising users to avoid modern NVIDIA hardware.
2. Supporting nouveau drivers.

Also: even if work is done to ensure that NVIDIA propertietary driver users have a good software experience, the overall GNU/Linux experience is degraded due to the facts:

1. distro developers sometimes have to tell users that they can't fix their bugs because they don't have the source code. I've seen this happen in practise.
2. core-stack upgrades sometimes result in driver breakage. IE your distro updates the kernel, but NVIDIA haven't pushed out a compatible driver yet.
3. users often have a reasonable guarantee that their hardware will be supported by the software/driver stack for a long time. When that user relies on proprietary drivers (NVIDIA or otherwise), they have much lower guarantees. It might be they have to stay back on an old stack.
4. In the case of NVIDIA, some devs (e.g. the main Sway dev IIRC) have been [quite reasonably IMO] unwilling to create separate code paths just for handling NVIDIA's proprietary driver. Also: look-up the economics term "opportunity cost".

TL;DR <insert famous Torvalds quote about NVIDIA here>

[Shiba]

What I don't understand is how the smooth desktop experience has regressed in the first place. I remember that both Gnome and KDE were pretty smooth in 2006 on single core 2GHz CPUs with Radeon 9500 128MB GPUs. Why is this still an issue?

How could it be smoother? Neither GTK+ 2 nor Qt 3 had smooth scrolling.

[Guest]

How about addressing biggest problems with GTK+, such as adding documentation (haven't seen worse documentation anywhere) or creating a stable API for theming (oh wait, they've decided to drop it entirely rather than ensuring that mistakes from GTK+3 won't be repeated).

My hobby GTK+2 project made sure I'll look elsewhere next time I need a widget toolkit.

[You-]

The theme API has been stable now for around 5 years, ever since the release of GTK 3.22. that is enough for most.

[starshipeleven]

How many gigs of RAM does this nifty feature require?

Does it work with NVIDIA proprietary drivers?

Does it work out of the box or the code must be altered to enable it?

Can it be disabled? Can it be made faster?

Ah come on there is already another guy asking a buckshot of stupid questions at the beginning of many threads.

[birdie]

Personally, I'm in the 'don't care' camp for that.

I care about the UX, usability and easy of use, but IMO, Open Source / Free Software is core to the GNU/Linux ethos and thus my focus is on:

1. Advising users to avoid modern NVIDIA hardware.
2. Supporting nouveau drivers.

Also: even if work is done to ensure that NVIDIA propertietary driver users have a good software experience, the overall GNU/Linux experience is degraded due to the facts:

1. distro developers sometimes have to tell users that they can't fix their bugs because they don't have the source code. I've seen this happen in practise.
2. core-stack upgrades sometimes result in driver breakage. IE your distro updates the kernel, but NVIDIA haven't pushed out a compatible driver yet.
3. users often have a reasonable guarantee that their hardware will be supported by the software/driver stack for a long time. When that user relies on proprietary drivers (NVIDIA or otherwise), they have much lower guarantees. It might be they have to stay back on an old stack.
4. In the case of NVIDIA, some devs (e.g. the main Sway dev IIRC) have been [quite reasonably IMO] unwilling to create separate code paths just for handling NVIDIA's proprietary driver. Also: look-up the economics term "opportunity cost".

TL;DR <insert famous Torvalds quote about NVIDIA here>

Your stance is amazing as if open source graphics drivers (in-kernel/xorg) never break. Oh, wait. People report having a lot less troubles with closed-source NVIDIA binary drivers than with open source nouveau drivers. And AMD's open source experience is often far from stellar. Fanaticism is almost always inconsequential and egregiously stupid if you look closely.

But I digress. Let's keep on talking about amazing GTK4.

[marty1885]

How about addressing biggest problems with GTK+, such as adding documentation (haven't seen worse documentation anywhere) or creating a stable API for theming (oh wait, they've decided to drop it entirely rather than ensuring that mistakes from GTK+3 won't be repeated).

My hobby GTK+2 project made sure I'll look elsewhere next time I need a widget toolkit.

So true, it is a pain in the a** to build GTK apps even reading the friendly manuals. Most of time I have to resort to reading the source code.

[starshipeleven]

Your stance is amazing

It's a good answer to your own.