Variable Refresh Rate "VRR" Support Comes Down To The Wire For GNOME 46

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Variable Refresh Rate "VRR" Support Comes Down To The Wire For GNOME 46

Today marks the UI, feature, and API/ABI freezes for the GNOME 46 desktop ahead of its stable release on 16 March. One feature coming down to the wire that looks like it may not make it -- unfortunately -- is the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) integration...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-VRR-February

[jonkoops]

Honestly, for such a headline feature as VRR I think the GNOME team should make an exception and try to ship it in a 46.1 release, rather than punting it to 47.

[andre30correia]

Honestly, for such a headline feature as VRR I think the GNOME team should make an exception and try to ship it in a 46.1 release, rather than punting it to 47.

gnome devs never care about that, i cant remember such exceptions in their gnome releases, maybe they should start making a rolling gnome without so breakages every 6 mouths for stable things for two years or so

[plonoma]

It would be very good if this feature could get in.

[AsciiWolf]

Hopefully it will be in good shape for GNOME 47 along with proper HDR support. And who knows, maybe it will get backported into GNOME 46 on Ubuntu 24.04 and other LTS distros.

[mxan]

All the features that keep sitting around unmerged for years in GNOME makes me glad I use KDE more.

KDE already has VRR (left unmerged in GNOME for 3 years) and already has real fractional scaling (for GNOME it won't happen until GTK 5). Plasma 6 adds compositor hand-offs so KWin crashing won't take down your whole session (GTK devs think compositor hand-offs are "absolutely stupid"), it adds a nice overview / exposé mode that works just like GNOME's, it's soon to get triple buffering (also unmerged in GNOME for 3 years), soon to get session restore, soon to get HDR (KDE devs are at the forefront of developing HDR and colour management support on Wayland), has better core apps, and is customisable out of the box without needing 5000 flimsy extensions that break every update. Why do people still bother with GNOME? It's a stangant project at this point.

[whitor]

>already has real fractional scaling (for GNOME it won't happen until GTK 5)

That's nonsense. Yes, KWin supports fractional scaling, but so does mutter. Qt 5 applications don't support fractional scaling, it's only coming with Qt 6 and Plasma 6. GTK 4.14 will have fractional scaling as well, so the only real difference is that GNOME still has fractional scaling behind a dconf option.

These kind of nonsensical statements leads me to believe that people who keep bringing in KDE into GNOME threads don't really use the features that they claim to care so much about. It's just a spec war for them, like iPhone vs Android comparisons a decade ago.

[kiffmet]

(…) These kind of nonsensical statements leads me to believe that people who keep bringing in KDE into GNOME threads don't really use the features that they claim to care so much about (…)

I use my computer for work, development and entertainment/gaming and I have a display with above-average, but not quite high DPI (123PPI, 1440p, 24''). GNOME makes it literally impossible to scale the contents on my screen, such that nothing is too big or too small. Additionally, the experimental fractional scaling setting introduces blur and reduces the max. screen resolution reported to fullscreen applications, and there was no VRR support until now.

I cannot get a decent user experience on my setup with GNOME 4X. A future 5Y series of the desktop, based on GTK5, may fully fix that, but until then relying on all features, that KDE gracefully provides ample support for, is an absolute must for me to have a good user experience in the first place. So yes, I have been using these features every single day for a good while now (KDE Wayland user for 3 years).

If that project didn't exist, I probably wouldn't use a Linux desktop at all, because it'd be uncomfortable/lackluster as hell and a massive tradeoff on my specific setup.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

>already has real fractional scaling (for GNOME it won't happen until GTK 5)

That's nonsense. Yes, KWin supports fractional scaling, but so does mutter. Qt 5 applications don't support fractional scaling, it's only coming with Qt 6 and Plasma 6. GTK 4.14 will have fractional scaling as well, so the only real difference is that GNOME still has fractional scaling behind a dconf option.

These kind of nonsensical statements leads me to believe that people who keep bringing in KDE into GNOME threads don't really use the features that they claim to care so much about. It's just a spec war for them, like iPhone vs Android comparisons a decade ago.

These kinds of nonsensical statements lead me to believe you think fractional scaling works as well in GNOME as it does in KDE which simply isn't true. You know this particular capability is one important reason why Fedora Asahi uses KDE and not GNOME right? Same for Nobara.

[whitor]

I use my computer for work, development and entertainment/gaming and I have a display with above-average, but not quite high DPI (123PPI, 1440p, 24''). GNOME makes it literally impossible to scale the contents on my screen, such that nothing is too big or too small. Additionally, the experimental fractional scaling setting introduces blur and reduces the max. screen resolution reported to fullscreen applications, and there was no VRR support until now.

The blur that you see is because Xwayland does not support per-surface scaling. It's not a GNOME-specific issue. KDE ships a workaround for Xwayland scaling that only works with modern X11 apps, but leaves older apps completely unscaled. They do ship a toggle between two scaling modes, but it only looks good if you stick to the subset of apps that are compatible with the workaround. A GNOME/Red Hat developer is working on a generic solution, but I understand why you'd prefer having the workaround if you can't get rid of X11 apps.

Anyway, my comment was aimed at the kind of people that criticized mutter's scaling support as not "real" because it used to scale Wayland apps to the next integer and scaled it down. They keep claiming that KDE supports "real" fractional scaling (i.e. drawing at fractional scales) when it hasn't shipped that yet for its own apps.