GNOME 42 Beta Released - Begins The UI / Feature / API Freeze, More Apps Ported To GTK4

[Charlie68]

I know, I was addressing your "hack" comment. It is a standard part of the spec, so I wouldn't call using the spec and associated tooling as intended a hack.

GNOME Music doesn't do any directory management at all. It relies on tracker which in turn uses xdg-user-dirs standard. There are some advantages to doing that including the ability to index, cache and process all the metadata before the app is even loaded since tracker is regularly doing that in the background which does make it very quick to sort though the data that it is aware of. The disadvantage for this design is that if you do have a lot of media you want to load on demand say from a network share or usb stick that you only mount occasionally, music is probably ill suited for that.

But also Elisa from Kde from what I know they use their Baloo (vs tracker), however Elisa allows to index other directories.
It seems a bit too limiting to me, because I really don't know anyone who uses those folders as default, especially those who have huge collections.
However at least now I can see how it works ... there is always something to learn.

[mppix]

Gnome Music? Is it that stupid player that forces you to have your music collection in the home in Music?
I really can't believe that in 2022 a simple player doesn't allow the user to choose the collection directory.

+1
I am quite fond of Gnome but it stops at my music player. Lol.
I lean towards foobar2000 type interface s but I can see why someone would prefer an album/cover interface.

Still, someone must realized that Gnome Music needs to be nuked. It is a toy player. It cannot even handle modest size libraries and it never survive loading my library (not even a subfolder).
This is before we talk about functionality. Want online album information on the fly? Replaygain? Tag Editing? Custom organization or folders? Nope.

There is probably more to it and I am probably completely missing the point (like what exactly?).
That developer should work on the weather app for a few years. Ship Lollypop instead.

Otherwise, I am really liking where Gnome is going

[yump]

I'm sure GTK4 is better in most respects, but it's somewhat concerning that so many apps are getting ported before text rendering is un-broken. There seems to be some false impression that because you can't see individual pixels on a high-DPI screen, the subpixel structure doesn't affect the physical light output. Really, the only kind of screen that there is no good subpixel AA solution for is those WOLED displays where the color plane offsets change based on the pixel color. For all normal displays, where the same subpixel is used for each channel no matter what the other channels are up to, Freetype Harmony should do the right thing.

It'd be such a shame if the Linux desktop got near-perfect text rendering out of the box just a few years ago (with FreeType v40 interpreter, and the switch to slight hinting and lcddefault filter finally becoming the default on non-Ubuntu distros, and RGB antialiasing exposed in gnome-tweaks), only to lose it again now.

[jacob]

Most people have a separate data partition, some share it with Windows, some with other Linux distributions. I can't move 200GB of music, because someone said this is the standard. This is not a standard!

Then symlink your music partition to ~/Music and voila.

[jo-erlend]

Most people have a separate data partition, some share it with Windows, some with other Linux distributions. I can't move 200GB of music, because someone said this is the standard. This is not a standard!

You don't have to move anything at all. As others have already explained, the XDG_MUSIC_DIR is configurable, but you can of course also just mount other directories into this location, where apps expect to find music. For instance, I have a secondary disk with Audio/Notes, Audio/Projects, Audio/Books and Audio/Music. I don't want audio books, notes or recording projects to be added to my music catalogue, so I only mount /media/jo-erlend/External/Audio/Music into /home/jo-erlend/Music/External, where it is then automatically picked up by compliant media players.

Same principle of course applies to the other XDG user directories. It's actually quite nice. I absolutely agree that it would be nice to have some user-friendly GUIs for this, but my principle is that if I'm not willing to do the work, I shouldn't be too upset that others aren't either.

[jo-erlend]

Then symlink your music partition to ~/Music and voila.

I think bind mounts are better. For one thing, they work with confined packages, which symlinks don't. Symlinks also unfortunately don't work well with removable media, while a mount point is just an empty folder until you mount something to it. Works well with NFS too.

[ⲣⲂaggins]

I'm sure GTK4 is better in most respects, but it's somewhat concerning that so many apps are getting ported before text rendering is un-broken.

That thread is astonishing. Some of the highlights:

My opinion on subpixel antialiasing is that it is a (clever) hack that we are better off without.

Subpixel antialiasing is harmful.

• Subpixel antialiasing makes no sense on high DPI "retina" screens. The subpixels are too small to see. Grayscale antialiasing is the best there. Subpixel is actually harmful on HiDPI, because you cannot see the subpixels (so you get worse antialiasing) and you add lots of extra work to the rendering pipeline.
• Apple has removed subpixel AA from macOS.
• ...

Subpixel rendering is dead. Long live grayscale antialiasing.

Count me glad I'm not on that bandwagon...

[openminded]

Some points there are even more brilliant.
* "Most modern monitors are high DPI" (no prooflink of course)
* "GTK4 supports rotating text" - oh I can only guess the ginormous amount of users who rotate their text on a daily basis and can't live without their simple stupid file browser rotated...

[Vistaus]

Hey, let's not start another DE war.

Some people like GNOME; some people like KDE; some others like another DE...

Some people prefer cars; other prefer bikes... either way both work.

I wasn't trying to start another war, I was just teasing in good fun. I would've made the same tease the other way around, as I also explained here: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...52#post1310452

[ⲣⲂaggins]

To add more detail now that I have time, in case the above comes off as an attempt at trolling:

• The GTK4 developers committed to rendering text using a texture atlas approach.
• That approach doesn't work well with subpixel rendering.
• They then claimed that the problem was with subpixel rendering, not with their approach.

What's the problem in bullet point 2?

Gtk 4 supports arbitrary rotation/animation of the text which moves them away from subpixel positions and 100% breaks subpixel antialiasing. This is why it's unlikely that anyone will spend the time implementing it properly. It's too complex.

It's only too complex because they committed to a bad design in the first place: glyph caching. GPU rasterisers like Pathfinder are basically made for this problem. They can render text at any transform, even perspective transforms, all with subpixel antialiasing done correctly, i.e. in screen space, not than in glyph cache space where the purported MR tries to do it, and is consequently rejected. This is why that MR is going nowhere.

Not only does GTK4 do a worse job that Pathfinder at supporting arbitrary transforms, they also do a worse job than FreeType at supporting pixel-grid aligned text. FreeType has a sophisticated hinting engine, which GTK4 just rounds to a 1/4 of a pixel, because they only cache 1/4 subpixel positions. All this is despite the fact that almost all the text users will actually be reading is pixel-grid aligned.

In a nutshell, they reinvented the wheel, twice, badly.

All of the rebuttals against subpixel antialiasing in that thread essentially fall into a few categories, all of them invalid:

• Google Chrome developer syndrome - throwing resources at a problem to make it go away, in this case HiDPI screens. (1, 2)
• Apple and/or Google's don't do it any more! (1, 9, 10)
• Design limitations. (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8)

Point 7 is the exception. It fall into the category of "we'd have to add a setting for that".