GNOME Mutter 46.2 Rolls Out To Ubuntu 24.04 Users, Experimental VRR Remains Rough

[bkdwt]

Still on 46.0 version

[bkdwt]

The article:

What in the hell are Canonical doing?

[blackiwid]

Didn't you say that GTK was supposed to make people act not aggressive? You should try running GNOME or Mate and see if that helps.

You started it, making absurd claim that gnome would crash a lot (not being stable that is what that means), so don't whine when people answer back aggressive if you made a rand against gnome...

[skeevy420]

"secondary desktop" I don't even know what that is supposed to mean, you completely missed my point, the only thing I hear about unstable is extensions, that is not unstableness, that is a very specific definition of stableness, they are not freezing their ABI or something... if you say something is unstable you imply it crashes, and gnome does nearly never crash, I can't remember when it ever crashed on me... so you bend this absurd definition of extensions unsupported 3rd party stuff that the maintainer of this projects would be responsible or other interested to fix it if they want.

So you just assume that you need those, do you use 3rd party extensions for plasma? No, so why do you want to use them for gnome? Because you think plasma is the perfect desktop because it happen to align with your needs, fine, but just because you want to make out of gnome a plasma clone with extensions is that not the usual usecase, I am pretty sure most gnome users don't use (not preinstalled) extensions.

You can say but without extensions this very important feature does not exist, true, but I can find things that I find essential that don't exist in plasma... because I like programmable window manager better... the question is does it do the job for basic things, and can normal users that are not extreme powerusers work with eat greatly the answers to that is yes.

for my gaming rig to start a lutris and co it's totally fine...

But back to my original statement, you nitpicked it about gnome or not, my look and feel argument also works for gtk without gnome, I stay by the argument that many people heavily prefer such more layed back desktops, and all attempts to emulate gnome themes or things failed... it's not just pick a few darker colors and it's good...

Now you can say now "I think it's not so..." fine, I gave some proof as I have to accept that many people still think deb based distros are superior to rpm based, which I thought, too in the past, now they are wrong, but still, I have to accept their feelings and thoughts.

And yes for lts it can be a valid choice, the idea that everybody just loves plasma and that's the reason there are no forks, sorry sure, that's it, btw some devs like it because they like the OOP C++ mostly QT there is at least lxqt and surely some others, but we were talking about desktops, I think still more people use XFCE than gnome or plasma, at least gnome trends data implies that...

So yes GTK is king.

I can even go to postmarketos and look at the interfaces for those things, this is not some decisions done 20 years ago:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Category:Interface

Here we have 4 GTK based UIs and 1 QT based... Lomiri is further down mentioned which is QT based but it's "work in progress".
They at least attempt to create darker less bright UI, that looks a bit like GTK, so even that is a homage to gnome and gtk.

Now you can criticize my evidence for being not 100% sure proofing my points, but you bring absolutely zero evidence for your points...

But fine if you think that stability is about extension compatibility in this excentric view on stability gnome is not stable... just pretty much nobody but you cares to much about this form of stability.

Didn't you say that GTK was supposed to make people act not aggressive? You should try running GNOME or Mate and see if that helps.

[blackiwid]

a lot of those forks of GNOME no longer exist as forks of GNOME and have instead become their own things. Some might use GTK or GNOME libraries, but they don't use the GNOME desktop itself anymore since it ended up being too unstable to use as the base for a secondary desktop.

"secondary desktop" I don't even know what that is supposed to mean, you completely missed my point, the only thing I hear about unstable is extensions, that is not unstableness, that is a very specific definition of stableness, they are not freezing their ABI or something... if you say something is unstable you imply it crashes, and gnome does nearly never crash, I can't remember when it ever crashed on me... so you bend this absurd definition of extensions unsupported 3rd party stuff that the maintainer of this projects would be responsible or other interested to fix it if they want.

So you just assume that you need those, do you use 3rd party extensions for plasma? No, so why do you want to use them for gnome? Because you think plasma is the perfect desktop because it happen to align with your needs, fine, but just because you want to make out of gnome a plasma clone with extensions is that not the usual usecase, I am pretty sure most gnome users don't use (not preinstalled) extensions.

You can say but without extensions this very important feature does not exist, true, but I can find things that I find essential that don't exist in plasma... because I like programmable window manager better... the question is does it do the job for basic things, and can normal users that are not extreme powerusers work with eat greatly the answers to that is yes.

for my gaming rig to start a lutris and co it's totally fine...

But back to my original statement, you nitpicked it about gnome or not, my look and feel argument also works for gtk without gnome, I stay by the argument that many people heavily prefer such more layed back desktops, and all attempts to emulate gnome themes or things failed... it's not just pick a few darker colors and it's good...

Now you can say now "I think it's not so..." fine, I gave some proof as I have to accept that many people still think deb based distros are superior to rpm based, which I thought, too in the past, now they are wrong, but still, I have to accept their feelings and thoughts.

And yes for lts it can be a valid choice, the idea that everybody just loves plasma and that's the reason there are no forks, sorry sure, that's it, btw some devs like it because they like the OOP C++ mostly QT there is at least lxqt and surely some others, but we were talking about desktops, I think still more people use XFCE than gnome or plasma, at least gnome trends data implies that...

So yes GTK is king.

I can even go to postmarketos and look at the interfaces for those things, this is not some decisions done 20 years ago:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Category:Interface

Here we have 4 GTK based UIs and 1 QT based... Lomiri is further down mentioned which is QT based but it's "work in progress".
They at least attempt to create darker less bright UI, that looks a bit like GTK, so even that is a homage to gnome and gtk.

Now you can criticize my evidence for being not 100% sure proofing my points, but you bring absolutely zero evidence for your points...

But fine if you think that stability is about extension compatibility in this excentric view on stability gnome is not stable... just pretty much nobody but you cares to much about this form of stability.

[mmstick]

The compositor backend library, Smithay, is written in rust. If it gets good enough to be the best, compositors written with other languages would need bindings.


Anything with graphics that a toolkit can't do. In my case, emulators and graphics APIs. Things like fractional scaling viewports aren't exposed directly and you can't rely on the frame signal for timing. Video needs direct access and uncoupled synchronization, too.

If you're developing a Wayland compositor in Rust, you will use Smithay. If you want to use a different language, use a different Wayland library.

Wayland clients interact with the compositor via protocols, which does not require binding to anything.

In general, you should be building Wayland compositors and applications in Rust. It's irresponsible to continue using C and C++ at this point. Especially for security-critical infrastructure like a compositor.

[bearoso]

What are you inferring by backend? I wouldn't expect applications to want to dynamically link to the compositor. Applications are communicating to the compositor over a socket via Wayland protocols. It supports some protocols used by wlroots, and should have coverage similar to kwin.

The compositor backend library, Smithay, is written in rust. If it gets good enough to be the best, compositors written with other languages would need bindings.

Why would an app developer care about the compositer? Shouldn't that all just be handled by whatever toolkit you're using?

Anything with graphics that a toolkit can't do. In my case, emulators and graphics APIs. Things like fractional scaling viewports aren't exposed directly and you can't rely on the frame signal for timing. Video needs direct access and uncoupled synchronization, too.

[skeevy420]

That's also why there are so many forks of gnome but very few of plasma, because many people like the more round less aggressive peaceful looks of gtk. I mean if I would look into the bright colors (aggressive blue backgrounds) and this with white background blinking aggressive flickering icons, I would maybe also be so aggressive.

It has nothing to do with Breeze or Adwaita. It's because, in the beginning, people and organizations thought that GNOME would play out differently so they started basing their desktop environments on GNOME's plugin system. Between that breaking every release and GNOME not caring combined with GNOME not accepting their patches more often than not, a lot of those forks of GNOME no longer exist as forks of GNOME and have instead become their own things. Some might use GTK or GNOME libraries, but they don't use the GNOME desktop itself anymore since it ended up being too unstable to use as the base for a secondary desktop.

All the things that people do that requires forking GNOME or running plugins can just be done on KDE. There aren't any forks of Plasma because nobody needs to fork it to add system tray support, to add more theming support than accent colors, to be able to move the mainbar to whatever side of the screen they'd like, etc because Plasma already does it.

Number of forks is like statistics. It can be interpreted in many ways. One of those ways is that the reason all those forks exist is because you're doing something wrong and people want to fix it. Another way could be that at all those forks are like stars to show support of the project. Another could be because people don't like you and would rather do it themselves somewhere else. You could say that Plasma doesn't have a lot of forks because it isn't popular or because it isn't that buggy (say that without a smirking). You could also say there aren't a lot of forks because of how stable KDE Wayland is.

[timrichardson]

where is mutter 46.2 in the 24.04 packaging pipeline?

[blackiwid]

Ohh and what I forgot which would fit his wide definition of stability is the reason gnome even exists in the first place, that Trolltech or whatever the current company is that owns QT can change the license as they did in recent years very negatively and that can bring problems, now people say ohh like with redhat and their right stuff with binaries you can just use a unofficial fork that recompiles all their packages, but they bought one main competition having to switch distros is also not exactly "stable".

On the other hand they had a company that did most of their work, while gnome had to do everything including gtk themself, now sure they also had corporate sponsors with Redhat mostly, but they don't earn money by selling GTK or Gnome itself, they earn money with licenses to mostly servers.

There is less of a conflict of interests. Even gnome is way less dominated by Redhat than people think only 16.3% of the commits come from Redhat employees:
image.png
That's from 2010 so a bit aged but shouldn't be drastically different I don't expect 60% of contributions now from redhat, but proof me wrong...

And going back to GTK itself we have here numbers of commits of GTK4

https://blog.gtk.org/2020/12/17/who-wrote-gtk4/

Here we see a high dominance for Redhat developers, but often that results in people starting contributing to such projects on their own and then they get hired because they are active so there is a bit of causation direction, but still you could argue that this gives Redhat to much power, but it's not dual licensed it's just GNU LGPL 2.1 while with a dual license I am no lawyer but you can think of some shenanigans, yes you could always use a slightly older version of QT and fork it, if they go total nuts, but that would be a major disruption and would mean a fork and the KDE Team or companies behind the full free version have not shown to be able to maintain the QT source themself.

Btw even some would see it critical that parts of QT is in GPL and not LGPL because it forces you to either share the source of your application based on it or buy a commercial license so they don't have a problem with you having a proprietary software based on it ideologically, they just want to force you to pay money, now you can think isn't that fair, maybe but they also could just raise their prices to 1bio dollar for a license and sell their own apps based on that... so they would practically forbid any commercial software based on it besides their own...

It's not a extreme disastrous danger, but it's far from ideal and it's not like gnome has this huge problems that everything is broken either... so I think it's work to consider if we are at nit picking here always anyway...