GNOME 46 Alpha Released With Many Improvements

[Myownfriend]

OMG dear GNOME, are you on copium? Just who cares about this https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-RDP-Remote-Login? Why, who uses GNOME on remote sessions, how could anyone with GNOME on the desktop benefit from this? I'll tell you, no one... NO ONE!

It's not an odd scenario for someone to remote into the home computers from a remote computer when they're away. I used to do it in when I was in college. You're complaining about a feature that's straight up expected for a DE to have.

Oh yes, GNOME Backgrounds now favors JPEG-XL as a format and adds a new default background., it's important, of course, who use JPEG-XL? Especially who use that for BACKGROUND?!

I use JPEG-XL. It's a very impressive format that a lot of people really want browsers to enable support for by default. It's ability to be decoded progressively would makes it excellent for use in galleries because you it wouldn't require a separate thumbnail images to be loaded from the server. Instead, the website would just load a small part of the full image when it's used as a thumbnail and when the full quality version is request, it only needs to request the remainder of the file.

That's also why myself and someone else have pitched support for it being added for thumbnail cache in the xdg-specs. The files would be significantly smaller than PNGs (less than half the size) and wouldn't need to store the thumbnail at different sizes. That would also allow the cache to have thumbnails since a folder of progressively JPEG-XL would be their own thumbnails.

As for their use in wallpaper, why the fuck not? JPEG-XL has the ability to recompress regular JPEGs as JXLs at a smaller file size with no-additional quality loss so if you consider JPEGs to be well-suited for wallpapers then JXLs are better-suited. I have a huge folder of hundreds of wallpapers that I have bot to use as wallpapers and for testing purposes. They're almost all PNGs or Jpegs. Since Gnome supports JXL backgrounds I convert all of them to JXL without quality loss and I'd save space without losing the ability use them as wallpapers.

You might be the only person on the internet who thinks this is stupid.

They are on copium, cringe or some kind of drugs.

This reeks of old-guy-trying-to-fit-in-with-the-kids. Neither cringe nor copium can apply to these scenarios in any way.

And this is even funnier https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutte..._requests/1154 VRR takes 3 years? Simply feature for the rest of all modern screens and they just CAN'T do it. just can't.
...
KDE implemented and it works really well, especially at gaming or any high FPS content.

Don't know why you inserted so much between these statements but, no, KDE's implementation does have flickering problems and why are you under the impression that VRR is a simple thing to implement? Have you added VRR support to anything and have some sort of additional insight into the process, because it really doesn't sound like you know much.

Oh yes, this is another VERY important thing... Better anti-aliasing for the 16 x 16 pixel Adwaita icon theme -_-

Do you think implementing that took away resources from something like VRR? These were implemented by different people. Also anti-aliasing is particularly useful on smaller icons in order to preserve detail on things that don't have very many pixels available to them.

[Myownfriend]

GNOME is a lost cause, despite all efforts. I have more hope in COSMIC.

Okay. I don't see what you thought you'd accomplish by commenting that.

GObject is shit. Rust is a lot more saner, despite being so young.

You're aware that GObject just a library meant to be used with something like C while Rust is an actual language, right?

[spicfoo]

OMG dear GNOME, are you on copium? Just who cares about this https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-RDP-Remote-Login? Why, who uses GNOME on remote sessions, how could anyone with GNOME on the desktop benefit from this? I'll tell you, no one... NO ONE!

Plenty of people use remote sessions and find them useful. A commercial company isn't investing resources into a feature for fun. Don't post such nonsense just because you don't use it.

[skeevy420]

The DRM leasing / portal argument is funny to me as it comes up again and again. Gnome from the beginning resisted attempts to make desktop sharing a Wayland protocol and Gnome devs implemented the sharing portal in a bunch of (not Gnome) apps - and I'd argue the result is great. You seem to make a conspiracy out of it - IMO saying a lot about your judgemental capabilities.

Gnome in my view is usually the side who *doesn't* want to cut corners but do things right from the beginning. So DEs don't need to support a bunch of half-backed solutions forever - and once it's done people tend to be happy with the result. Crucially they usually don't talk any more about the fact that if the opposing parties had it their way, things would be way more shitty now.

But well, have fun using initd, alsa, X11, without dbus and portals and everything, I'm sure it's gonna be great

As for KDE: it's IMO great to see proper competition in the Wayland world and people preferring KDE being able to use it, not being forced to Gnome for technical reasons.

I'm not here to say who is and isn't right, I just know where things do and don't work. Some things still don't work very well on Wayland and a lot of things just don't work on GNOME. It doesn't matter who is doing what the "right way" when people can't use their hardware with the software they're being provided or when companies can't provide a Linux-based operating environment that meets their users' expectations.

Opposite of what you say, a lot of people and companies are tired of being forced onto KDE or forced off of GNOME for technical reasons. They want to use GNOME, but GNOME doesn't want to cover how they use their software. Deepin and System76 got tired of dealing with GNOME so they're creating their own desktop environments. Valve switched from GNOME to KDE because KDE was willing to work with them when GNOME wasn't. That's not a conspiracy, that's just what happens when you don't care about the users of your software. Users can be anyone from Internet Assholes to Valve.

Even Linus had to tell Lennart to care about the users and to respect the old and alternate ways of doing things. Keeping the old and alternate ways of doing things while still pushing things forward is what made and makes Linux great. GNOME forgot how to do that with 3.0...which Alan Cox points out in that video.

[timofonic]

Okay. I don't see what you thought you'd accomplish by commenting that.



You're aware that GObject just a library meant to be used with something like C while Rust is an actual language, right?

C+GObject is meant to be some kind of OOP inside C. That approach is extremely very prone to issues. Even OOP abstractions in Linux kernel are a total nightmare, specially for hardware driver programmers.

[spicfoo]

C+GObject is meant to be some kind of OOP inside C. That approach is extremely very prone to issues. Even OOP abstractions in Linux kernel are a total nightmare, specially for hardware driver programmers.

Maybe so but it is still completely absurd to compare a library (GObject) and a language (Rust) like you originally did. Rust only released 1.0 in 2015. GObject has existed was released in 2002, 21 years ago. It's not news to anyone that a library released decades earlier wouldn't have all the features of a language that got released a short while ago. GObject was what made it possible for GNOME to have a ecosystem of automated language bindings including programs written in C++, Python and it turns out even Rust. GNOME today has more Rust programs including ones that ship with GNOME by default as a result. Your Rust fanboyism that isn't appreciative of this history is annoying to me as Rust programmer. I used to wonder why people were hating on Rust till I started reading comments like yours.

[Myownfriend]

C+GObject is meant to be some kind of OOP inside C. That approach is extremely very prone to issues. Even OOP abstractions in Linux kernel are a total nightmare, specially for hardware driver programmers.

I'm aware of what GObject is used for. Why would you judge a library which is just extending a language from the 70s, based on the fact that it doesn't provide the things that an entirely different, more modern language provides?

spicfoo responded beautifully. As they pointed out, you're criticizing Gnome for not using Rust but they do use Rust for some applications

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Rust

That doesn't include Loupe (Image Viewer), Snapshot, and Gnome Tour which are also Rust applications. There's also World of Gnome apps like Fragments, Ambersol, Decoder, Citations, Bustle, and Shortwave that also use Rust.

[You-]

wow, some forum commenters here seem to have had a bad start to the year.

I love how gnome is meant to have delayed VRR by 10 years or so when KDE AFAIK only got it recently and even then there was (maybe until this merge window - I havent checked) some kernel work that was needed to make it more robust - something that KDE and other implementers would also benefit from. A question has been should it be enabled before that work - it will benefit some users and not others, or put in the effort to make it work better everywhere.

As for fractional scaling, mutter has had the experimental feature for a few years now. It isn't enable-able by default though, due to negative impacts on some apps. this has been meant to be looked at recently, but the relevant parties don't seem to have had the time to spare to dedicate to it yet. I use fractional scaling, yet I understand why it may be hidden - it has costs. I prefer it not to be though and hopefully this choice will be changed soon - but the feature already exits and you only need to change a setting once in maybe many years, so the outcry is a little weird.

As for VR Displays - it isnt being blocked. Even the portal is no longer being pursued. Just imagine another developer had told the person who wanted it in a person that no, it wont be portal - it would have been another "Red Hat dictating to independent developer", but instead its still twisted as the opposite. If you read the issues, the work being done by that developer enables VR support even without a portal, it is a step in what needs to be done.

[aufkrawall]

Personally, I think it's better to do things right from the beginning. For example, when it comes to VRR on Wayland, everyone is talking about how KDE already has it, but for some reason nobody mentions the fact that it currently suffers from various issues like flickering.

Nobody mentions it because it generally works well, especially auto-option for fullscreen windows.

[andyprough]

I don't know what is new GNOME 46 but I am excited for it and look forward to it!

That's really deep. You don't know what they are doing but look at how excited you are about it anyway! They could be killing puppies for all you know, but that's not going to dampen your enthusiasm.