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

[skeevy420]

From a user perspective I do not really get why people are so invested in which part of the system is responsible for drawing the window border? You never hear these discussions on Mac or Windows. What is relevant is that the different applications support the system used so they get borders, but other than that I do not get it?

If you're under 30 you might not get it, but if you went through the Windows 95-2000 era, somewhat XP, but back then people skinned everything, EVERYTHING. Every other program wanted to do its own thing. Then starting with XP was when that started happening to Windows itself due to Windows using different UI styles over the years. You can still find that in Windows 10 when you start digging into their system tools. Some of that stuff uses 9x UI, XP UI, Aero/7...but that's basically what GNOME is pushing.

Qt will look its own way, SDL another, GTK3/4 another, GTK3/4 following the HIG will look native, and so on and so forth. Will minimize be there? Can you pin it on top of everything else? Where do I grab to resize? Is there a maximize button? All that changes between programs versus being standardized. That's why we're so invested in it.

[skeevy420]

There are different logic here. Sometimes you don't want old applications to blend in at all. Why using old not maintained applications can be increased security risk.

So one section of community is asking for server side decorations and another group is asking for client side decorations and both for their usage case is right. Yes you are the usage case where you want the applications to all look like to each other. There is another group that will want GTK2/GTK3.... all to have unique themimg so you can age a application by what its windows boarder looks like.

Yes KDE and Gnome have gone a different path because with Client side decorations and server side decorations with wayland due to supporting different user bases.

For me it isn't the look as it is do they function the same. I just like knowing that all my controls are in the same place and that I can have the same basic functions in all programs. Even now on KDE it isn't consistent. GTK programs look out of place since all my controls aren't even there.

[skeevy420]

skeevy420 As a user I feel happy when upstreams say NO to stupid ideas that will increase the maintenance burden.

As as user I feel happy when I can set a theme.

[ermo]

FWIW, to me it seems like upstream is actually doing the right thing here by not blindly accepting the old way of doing things?

I get why upstream (which has made a very conscious design decision to use CSD w/Wayland) would NOT want to have to re-engineer their entire toolkit and compositor to cater to others who have gotten used to the old-world (and "broken"?) X11 paradigm and want to continue using that.

The sad reality is that these kind of use cases where old-world software needs to be made to work in the brave new v2.0 world that doesn't offer a straight-forward backwards compatibility solution was always going to be painful.

I also get why upstream asserts that the correct solution is for the old-world software to be fixed and properly interface with the brave new v2.0 world, because this approach implies solving a host of issues that old-world software just kinds of punts on. Because if upstream doesn't approach it like this, things will eventually devolve to old-world general suckiness again -- and then ALL the work that upstream has poured into improving the status quo will basically have been wasted. And we don't want that, do we?

That said, my take is that if GNOME/GTK+ truly want to be the reference UI/Toolkit/graphical shell, odds are they will benefit from inviting serious stakeholders to collaborate with them on ensuring that (e.g.) libdecoration solves the actual problem that 3rd party old-world developers face with this brave new v2.0 world. At least then the existing use cases can be condensed into a set of usage patterns that everyone can benefit from, WITHOUT forcing the core qualities of the brave new v2.0 world to be compromised.

If this collaborative approach eventually leads the old-world software to incrementally being weaned off their old-world ways, surely everyone wins in the end?

[skeevy420]

All I really want is a customizable function bar. I don't know how to do it, but I'd be happy with a compromise where the header is drawn a bit larger and a function bar added in the extra blank space on top. It's handy having more than close, maximize, and minimize up there and not hidden behind a right click.

Here's a quick GIMP of what I'm talking about. I just combined what my KWin setup looks like on Firefox on top of Pamac; Qt on GTK2 on GTK3. The double arrows are for stay on top of or below all other windows and the dot on the left is pin to all desktops. Handy when going between a full screen browser and a windowed text editor or when you run multiple desktops for different things and need to pin the Arch Wiki for a little bit.

[vegabook]

From a user perspective I do not really get why people are so invested in which part of the system is responsible for drawing the window border? You never hear these discussions on Mac or Windows. What is relevant is that the different applications support the system used so they get borders, but other than that I do not get it?

Because it makes a difference in some circumstances, such as multiple monitors with different dpi, where different scaling levels work much better than on xorg.

[finalzone]

Can we have an horizontal taskbar without installing an extension?

Extensions notably their preference needs to get ported to GTK4 first on GNOME Shell 40.

https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2021/03/12/gnome-40-your-extension/

[verude]

All I really want is a customizable function bar. I don't know how to do it, but I'd be happy with a compromise where the header is drawn a bit larger and a function bar added in the extra blank space on top. It's handy having more than close, maximize, and minimize up there and not hidden behind a right click.

Here's a quick GIMP of what I'm talking about. I just combined what my KWin setup looks like on Firefox on top of Pamac; Qt on GTK2 on GTK3. The double arrows are for stay on top of or below all other windows and the dot on the left is pin to all desktops. Handy when going between a full screen browser and a windowed text editor or when you run multiple desktops for different things and need to pin the Arch Wiki for a little bit.

It seems some people are against letting users have a customizable title bar so that they can specify what window controls they want and in what position, somehow this is a "bug that needs fixing".

[_ReD_]

Sarcasm aside I want my brother and my non-IT related acquaintances to run Linux but I cannot afford that because their Windows installations run unattended for up to a decade, while a Linux kernel update can break crucial features, or a migration from X.org to Wayland may break their workflow. Linux continues to evolve, evolve and evolve, great, only people need to have work done and they don't care one bit about your new shiny underpinnings. 99.99% of people out there don't even know what bitness their version of Windows is or whether they are running programs compiled for Windows 10 or Windows 95, because they all just effing work.

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.

[billyswong]

I've been maintaining my friends and family computers for a long time and most of the times I'm called because Windows stopped working by mysterious reasons. Most likely after an update that broke something. So no, Windows update path is not perfect and things stop working from one day to the next as every other operating system.
In the end, I decided to install Ubuntu to one of my cousins. The one that was calling me more often and, although I have to go to his house from time to time to make some new device work, my rate of technical support has descended because now his computer works like the first day it was installed, with two full Ubuntu updates in the middle, while his Windows setup needed a periodical format and reinstall because it tends to deteriorate over time just by itself.
Said that, I'm glad that he hasn't decided to buy a 4K monitor. I did it last month and oh my god. Linux is sooooo unprepared for 4K 60HZ and fractional scaling. Using it on my computer has been a nightmare with 60Hz being recognized as an option just half of the time and even when it's recognized the UI is slow as hell. While in windows is a pleasure to use a monitor like that, with crisp fonts and more space to use (I have it at 175%, so it's a bit more spacious than my old 1080 monitor) and scrolling is as smooth as ever, in Linux everything crawls like crazy. And I've tried KDE, GNOME and Deepin and none of them have come closer to the performance I get in Windows. For the first time in more than 10 years I had to change back to Windows as my primary OS because using Linux in this conditions is unbearable.

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"