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Fedora Workstation 34 Should Be Very Exciting With GNOME 40, PipeWire Default

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  • #51
    Originally posted by birdie View Post
    Pipewire is a perfect example of how a transition from X.org to Wayland should have happened: all the applications continue to work, the user doesn't notice anything, it's just configuration files that have changed.
    Well, I've tried couple of weeks ago, all my contacts on skype or zoom started complaining about my microphone. Maybe coincidence, but I've switched back.
    Originally posted by birdie View Post
    This is also how Microsoft transitioned from GDI to DirectWrite - all the old applications continue to work, while the new ones are able to get new features.
    They had their own "wayland" - aero interface. Running some app could've force switching aero off, and there was a big problem with media players. All old 3rd party players was using VMR7 or VMR9 renderers and they had some incompatibility, had to wait for developers to add new fancy EVR renderer support.

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    • #52
      Originally posted by _ReD_ View Post

      You're joking, right?
      Because otherwise, everything you just said is either very disingenuous wishful thinking, or flat-out lies.

      I make my rather comfortable living fixing those Windows installations that, according to you, are supposed to "run unattended for up to a decade". And if you where even close to the truth, I should be out of a job. Instead, oh, the daily churn and... the horror stories!
      I don't even need a large customer base. A few hundred customers with windows PCs will generate more than enough work.
      Whereas the linux customers are whole another story and I'd need 100x more, just to have the same turnaround of daily software blunders.

      To tell the whole truth, I'm actually wary of moving too many customers to Linux, because they tend to disappear in the fogs of time until their hardware breaks. Problem is, people tend to forget and die at those time scales, so...

      Once upon a time hand-holding across major distro-releases was a thing and even simple upgrades needed attention from time to time.
      Nowadays - even on Fedora, a mostly cutting edge distro - daily updates are consistently uneventful and the rare problems can usually be fixed without bother, with a simple "dnf history undo last".
      Thanks to Gnome-Software even the dreaded cross-release upgrades are now a one-click GUI affair that works very well... So. There's not even an opportunity for routine maintenance on desktop Linux.
      An anecdotal evidence of one, yes, right. I have literally three dozen acquaintances who have been running Windows 8/10 since installation without any crashes/issues/etc - none. They don't even call me that often. Lastly there are organizations here in my city running hundreds and some thousands of workstations on top of Windows 10 - no one complaints.

      Windows, when used properly, does not break, period, for 99.9% of users out there.

      It's only in a fantasy world everything runs fine in Linux maybe because you've never posted a single bug report and never had serious kernel regressions. Let me tell you a secret - each release has dozens if not hundreds of regressions breaking things for people and making devices impossible to use. You just don't know that. I, on the other hand, closely follow https://bugzilla.kernel.org which paints quite a bleak picture. Oh, and I personally helped debug and solve a critical issue which prevented the kernel booting on my laptop.

      Originally posted by getaceres View Post
      Windows setup needed a periodical format and reinstall because it tends to deteriorate over time just by itself.
      Doesn't happen to anyone who I know but it's perfectly possible if you keep installing/reinstalling/deleting software and warez.
      Last edited by birdie; 17 March 2021, 04:54 AM. Reason: pain -> paints

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      • #53
        Originally posted by billyswong View Post

        Thanks to the stupidity / brilliance of GNOME / GTK / Wayland developers, native hiDPI in Wayland *must* be in a sacle factor of integers. Look at the genius type="int" in https://wayland-book.com/surfaces-in-depth/hidpi.html

        All desktop environments that want to implement fractional scaling later on need to instruct a 2x or 3x dpi rendering for each application windows then do a re-scale post-process to each window surfaces. The end result is of course sub-optimal. Look at this Wayland issue ticket https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayla...ls/-/issues/34 Some people sincerely want to help Wayland gain a true fractional scaling but the other side just fail to understand. The developers keeps barking on they can't upscale or downscale perfectly for fractional scale factor, when the whole point of true fractional scaling support is all about let applications that support fractional scale in client side handle that by themselves such that text and images can be kept crisp clear. The developers fail to grasp that advocates care very little about if those artifacts jump up for applications that don't understand hiDPI themselves. Advocates care the computer performance and clarity of contents inside applications that they want to see. If the logical pixel doesn't line up for surfaces in fractional scaled screen, ask fractional-capable applications to provide coordinates in physical pixel (or non-integer coordinate). For a drawing program, one want the application know the actual hiDPI mouse position on screen anyway. It is wrong to keep communicating in terms of low-res logical pixel coordinates for a hiDPI-aware program.

        In the blur-and-slow VS sharp-and-fast-with-potential-artifact, Wayland chose blur-and-slow. And in year 2021, they still don't understand the wish of other side. I guess it's an example of "perfect is the enemy of good"
        It's a shame but in 2021 I still don't understand how this is not addressed. 4K screens have been affordable for some time now and they will drop even lower so more and more people will face this issues in the future. Windows and Mac decided to address it and they do it with remarkable results, specially Windows in which the performance of fractional scaling is quite good. But then I read about the status of fractional scaling in Linux and I'm really surprised that nobody seems to care for a proper solution.
        I read a blog post recently about GNOME 40 and GTK4 and they said that it won't support fractional scaling natively because GTK still considers every scaling size to be an integer and it was too late in the development process to change that.
        I don't understand how you can start working on a new toolkit nowadays and you decide to ignore something that will be necessary in the near future. Then I read another blog post about the issue and the developer claimed that it was a consumer's fault because you need to either buy a 1440p monitor or a 5K. Ignoring the fact that 5K monitors cost about 5 times more than 4K monitors. Apple can afford to make such "you're doing it wrong" statements because they only sell software for expensive, high end machines that may support fractional scaling by brute force but that's not the case for GNOME.
        Microsoft understood that so they provide a solution for fractional scaling with a very good performance. That's something that I miss from Linux right now and the problem is that I don't see any solution in the near future given that Wayland and GTK4 were supposed to be the next best thing and yet, after years of development, they fall behind the competition even when they are not finished. I guess we'll have to wait for the next Wayland replacement and GTK5 but that's looking at the far future. In that time, anyone using a 4K monitor will have to either live with sub-par performance, or change platform to Windows or Mac.

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        • #54
          Originally posted by birdie View Post

          To be honest I only have fond memories of Vista. It was largely criticized not for this transition but for jumping on HW requirements (required at the very least 1GB of RAM vs 256MB for Windows XP) and being slow (which was solved for Windows 7).



          XWayland is a hack to show old X.org applications in a window. Goodbye systray support, own/client window decorations, screen grabbing and casting, basically everything outside of just showing a rectangle on the screen.
          Vista kept crashing and overheating on my laptop that I bought new with Vista, even with no applications open. After a while, I installed Ubuntu on it and it never crashed or overheated again, not even under high load.

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          • #55
            Originally posted by birdie View Post
            Windows, when used properly, does not break, period, for 99.9% of users out there.
            If properly means don't run it at all then you're right! Windows breaks without any reason and one of the reasons it breaks the most are windows 'updates'. Period.



            So, I'll go on record saying that Windows 10 is the absolute worst OS ever released by Microsoft. It just did a self-update and broke my computer. I c
            Last edited by Volta; 16 March 2021, 01:13 PM.

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            • #56
              getaceres

              What hardware do you have? Have you tried under Wayland (FYI it's not default in Ubuntu)? I'm curious, because I have smaller screen.
              Last edited by Volta; 16 March 2021, 01:21 PM.

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              • #57
                Originally posted by Volta View Post
                getaceres

                What hardware do you have? Have you tried under Wayland (FYI it's not default in Ubuntu)? I'm curious, because I have smaller screen.
                It's not a very powerful hardware, not that I need it for some light web browsing mostly. It's this mini-pc https://www.amazon.es/gp/product/B08...?ie=UTF8&psc=1 connected to this screen https://www.amazon.es/gp/product/B08...?ie=UTF8&psc=1 by DisplayPort.

                The first thing that I tried was Ubuntu. It ran relatively well in the live session to install it and then when I booted I selected the wayland session since fractional scaling is a must for me. I enabled fractional scaling and I set it to 150%. Then I observed that Firefox and Chrome were working very slow when scrolling and also they looked blurry. A matter of running in xwayland, I thought, so let's try with Fedora since it includes a version of Firefox with native wayland support.
                The first thing I noticed running Fedora 33 was that it ran at 4K 30Hz and it didn't offer me the possibility of setting 60Hz. I installed it anyway and then, after booting, it recognized the 60Hz refresh rate automatically so I thought that it would be fine. I enabled fractional scaling, set it to 150% and started firefox only to find that, although it was crisp and clear as expected, it was horribly slow when scrolling. I installed chromium and ran it with some flags to enable wayland and although scrolling was better it wasn't near the smoothness I get in Windows using Chromium or Edge (specially the latter, but chromium runs fairly well too). I even decided to give Epiphany a try, since it's a native GNOME application and I expected it to perform better than the rest. It was actually worse than Chromium by a big margin.
                I decided to try with KDE since it seems to have better support for fractional scaling than GNOME so I installed Manjaro KDE edition. Again 30Hz by default in the live session but since the Fedora install then ran at 60Hz anyway I decided to install it. This time I wasn't lucky. I was stuck at 30Hz. Still, horrible performance in Firefox and Chrome.
                The next one I tried is Deepin since I read it has some support for fractional scaling too. Again 30Hz but this time I tried several commands and after some trials and tests it booted with 60Hz but I wasn't lucky either with the performance. Chrome and Firefox lag as crazy.
                I would have accepted that it was a problem with the hardware. That it's not powerful enough to run a desktop at 4K 60Hz but this machine came with Windows 10 preinstalled and from the first moment it has always booted at that resolution and refresh rate and scrolling any application, specially in Edge, Firefox and Chrome is as good as it can be expected.
                Last edited by getaceres; 16 March 2021, 01:41 PM.

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                • #58
                  getaceres

                  Thanks for such informative comment! Hopefully someone will take a look into this.

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                  • #59
                    Originally posted by birdie View Post
                    Windows, when used properly, does not break, period, for 99.9% of users out there.
                    So, flat out lies? Ok. Fine by me.

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                    • #60
                      Originally posted by getaceres View Post
                      Still, horrible performance in Firefox and Chrome.
                      You may want to check if hardware accelerated rendering is active in the browsers.
                      I had horrible scrolling performance until I forced the hardware acceleration on opera, chrome/ium and firefox.
                      You can check that with chrome://gpu/, on chormey browsers, and with about:support, on firefox.
                      Depending on your GPU you may have to go to chrome://flags/ to override the software rendering list or to force hardware rendering.

                      P.S. I'm on a BDM4037UW/27 40" 4k/60Hz on fedora-mate, no hidpi.
                      Last edited by _ReD_; 16 March 2021, 03:18 PM.

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