GTK 4.11.1 Released With Better Textures, Wayland Fractional Scaling

[Estranged1906]

Gnome doesn't show a list of your open windows unless you go to the Activities screen. It's not a taskbar just a bar

[pracedru]

This is great news. Good work Wayland and GTK people!!!

[You-]

I don't believe that no one ever told them to let the system tray live. But... Now, they add a half baked duplication of system tray called... background apps that only work on some Flatpak apps.

Background apps is not a system tray. It is a different feature than can if you squint also be used to replace some of the functionalities of a system tray.

The problem with the system tray is the current implementations are broken and attempts at fixing the brokenness is being derailed by attempts to include the kitchen sink.

You have to remember even gnome 3.0 had a system tray (it was in bottom right) and there are designs to bring it back - once a new spec without the deficiencies of current solutions (like relying on pid or x11) has been finalised. There was hope it would be done by gnome 44, but that didnt work out.

[You-]

If the current team said you guys' wishes are nice to have but we don't prioritize fixing regression that don't affect ourselves, then there won't be so many conflicts. But the lengthy debates actually go like this: "We" think the user request is ideologically wrong and those features that users want to keep but "we" remove should never exist in the first place or are clutches that are now time to throw away. Then users anxiously add arguments for why the feature existed and why users think it should still exist in the future. Then those excuse cards will be pulled out and thread will be locked for "It is not forum here."

If any of what you said had any semblance of truth, I doubt gnome would be the major desktop environment in linux.

What's the point of time investment when there are ALREADY people who tried and got their patches rejected or left on table forever, not because of technical reasons but politics and ideologies.

as I said, if you rolled up your sleeves, you could increase gtk development manhours by 50% by your own input alone. If you are contributing that much, no one would dare stop you from developing the features you want. You will first have to show though that you are willing to put in the work to do the development and also give commitment to maintain the features you want developed. Without that it will be throwing code over a wall and hoping the already overworked volunteers give you free maintenance on their time.

[MorrisS.]

Gnome doesn't show a list of your open windows unless you go to the Activities screen. It's not a taskbar just a bar

yeah, just a bar which shows few elements making useless the space occupied. The best choice for desktops is the classic taskbar provided by a menu where programs are well organized. Why to use 2 bars when one is more than enough?

[TemplarGR]

So, this is different than 'getting fractional scaling' as we've known it so far. Instead of GTK rendering to 2:1 or 1:1 and the compositor scaling it to a nearby fraction (read: blurring), this provides a way for GTK to tell Wayland "Hey, I can render this at native scale myself, don't mess with what I give you.". You end up with much crisper results. This means that GTK 4 apps compiled against 4.11+ are going to be 'pixel perfect' at fractional scales instead of slightly blurry.

What a load of nonsense.... There is no "pixel perfect" with fractional scaling.... There is absolutely no method to achieve that. It is like saying lossy compression is equal to lossless. It cannot physically happen dude...

[mangeek]

What a load of nonsense.... There is no "pixel perfect" with fractional scaling.... There is absolutely no method to achieve that. It is like saying lossy compression is equal to lossless. It cannot physically happen dude...

Follow the link to the GTK blog and watch that video in full-screen. Sure, bitmap images will always need to be stretched or squished in a messy way, but fonts and vector-based user interface elements can be rendered 'pixel perfect' at any resolution. And what a difference it makes to use apps and toolkits that render to the native resolution instead of to a lower-res buffer that gets stretched by the compositor. That's what all this fractional scaling work is for; we've already had the ability to scale things fractionally for years, but if the toolkits and the compositor can work together, they can render as much as possible as accurately as possible, stretching and blurring much less than before.

[billyswong]

When will some people will go outside their bubble and admit that just because Windows is most popular desktop OS doesn't mean that every other OS should follow its design ideas and they are not the best just because they are most popular?

If any of what you said had any semblance of truth, I doubt gnome would be the major desktop environment in linux.

So to GNOME fanboys, market dominance means nothing when they don't like the item, but is evidence of truth when they see fit? Wow. Windows 8 was hated by many. Same for Gnome 3. But since they are usable enough, sheer inertia kept their overall market dominance. Windows gained market dominance in Win9x era. Gnome gained market dominance in Gnome2 era. When we talk about market dominance as a factor of "is this design good", it is the migration that matters, not "is it dominating right now".

[mrg666]

What a load of nonsense.... There is no "pixel perfect" with fractional scaling.... There is absolutely no method to achieve that. It is like saying lossy compression is equal to lossless. It cannot physically happen dude...

There is this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D

and this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript

Well, there is always a "way"