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

[oiaohm]

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.

The good old anecdotal evidence why you get things so wrong.

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

I work in keeping enterprise Windows desktops working. Even Microsoft does not windows works 99% of the time they in fact in their training documentation admit to a 10% failure rate per year you will have to fix in enterprise. This is a mixture of hardware issues and software issues. The failure rate keeps me paid.

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 which pains quite a bleak picture. Oh, and I personally helped debug and solve a critical issue which prevented the kernel booting on my laptop.

So you have never had to post a bug report to Microsoft over their failures.

Doesn't happen to anyone who I know but it's perfectly possible if you keep installing/reinstalling/deleting software and warez.

This is you not having the Microsoft training on the 10% failures you have to fix. Yes installing and reinstalling and deleting software is a major problem for windows but its not the only cause of needing a complete reinstall. The most common cause of needing a complete install is you have bought a bit of hardware that a webcam or something in it has become unsupported got out of date windows updates keep on getting applied and the windows kernel comes incompatible with the old driver and starts behaving horribly. Of course when you do a clean reinstall and update before installing drivers you normally skip out on not having some driver installed

Same problem happens with software with windows where it gets old and incompatible. Entreprise you are running windows 10 pro or better with a WSUS server in most cases. Please not that WSUS server allows us administrators to delay windows updates by a week on the general pool of machines and only have a select group of machines as our update test victims so we don't get more failures than we can handle. Yes this is how Microsoft training documentation to setup WSUS tells you to set it up due to knowing they will break stuff. Basically organizations running hundreds and thousands of windows workstations are doing actions to reduce windows failures from being disruptive. If you let the 1/10 failure rate of windows machines per year lose in a organisation your support team will be run under.

Please not Windows failures are higher on older machines with the maker of drivers are less likely to be maintained. Yes enterprises have the habit of having 7-8 year old desktop computers in places. Enterprise custom software that no longer been updated is also another big cause of Windows usage enterprise failures.

Yes those with under 5 year old hardware from vendor who has not gone bankrupt so is still providing driver support and is running current versions of windows software with all updates have a good odds of being in the 90% where Windows works perfectly. Microsoft will start removing hardware support if you have any hardware deployed that is over 10 years old that the vendor is currently not supporting this can include CPUs.

birdie something to remember when you say no one complains its not true. IT support personal with enterprise put in a lot of complains to Microsoft about issues including issues about systems not booting. Yes its good fun putting in a issue about not booting and Microsoft just updates the Min requirements for windows 10 to make that hardware offically unsupported past X version of Windows 10. So the same kind of problem you got fixed with the Linux kernel birdle with Windows I had Microsoft pull that one on me where there will be no fix and I cannot make a fix for windows so choice of run that Machine insecure with Windows 10, convert it to a Linux workstation for me or dispose of it. Kernel level issues with Linux you can invest the money/time and get it fixed for hardware you have Windows you can offer to pay 20 million dollars because you have lots of these machines with problem to Microsoft and be basically be told no we are not fixing that.

Birdie think how many times you say a problem and you hear the answer "That just Windows" the horrible reality is a lot of windows uses have basically stockholm syndrome. Of course the funny part they start using Linux and they start complaining about having problems with Linux that are in fact identical to the problems they have under Windows just they are no longer noticing due to the mental issue of stockholm syndrome where you abuse a person particular ways stops being able to see the abuse from that abuser. So some of windows low complaint rate is mental conditioning that particular types of failure are normal. Right down to the fact its normal that at times you have to reinstall windows from scratch to fix problems. Yes some of the windows conditioned responses have made Linux users more tollerate to particular problems than they should be as well.

[oiaohm]

oiaohm Wayland CSD vs SSD is a false dichotomy. GNOME chose to develop Wayland with CSD in mind. KDE chose to follow Wayland and then quickly faced technical limitations in kwin and Qt.

KDE then tried to redefine Wayland’s scope instead of fixing their bugs. These discussions then happen in place like Phoronix but not in the Wayland working group.

No 144Hz the problem is the discussions have happened in the Wayland Working group. Why wayland is CSD by default is performance and there are parties that don't want Unified appearance because that does not always make sense. Yes it was in the mailing list when KDE got the extension of server side decorations because KDE developers were after unified appearance.

Basically this is a point were Gnome is representing one camp and KDE is representing another. Please note the reference compositor weston is also in the camp of CSD.

The reality there is not a false dichotomy here. Ideal world end user should be able choose if they want their desktop CSD or SSD and it really should be a mode switch.

KDE early on choose to go we want SSD route and not to provide a sold CSD only mode with Wayland.

These points get horrible when both side have valid reasons why in their usage case they are right. So there is valid reasons for a desktop that is pure CSD, There are valid reasons for a desktop that is pure SSD and there are valid reasons for a desktop that is a mix of both. Depending on the markets you are targeting depends on what one of those 3 options is right. So gnome for particular markets is right. KDE for other markets is right. Please note KDE Plasma is a mixed SSD /CSD under X11 and Wayland not a pure SSD so there is still a market group not covered by KDE and Gnome.

Yes high security setups like qubes will want SSD rendered no matter what even if it results in double title bars and other problems.

144Hz the problem here is there are 3 identifiable markets for how windows decorations should be done. Each of those 3 markets have users who stubornally get out there and say they are right while totally ignoring the use cases where what they are asking for is wrong.


By the way it is 4 different markets for Windows decorations are.
1) Client side decorations-gnome/weston ... few others at this stage in wayland. In X11 default X11 server without a windows manager with the right toolkit comes CSD has been used that way in embeddeed. Pure framebuffer toolkits for embedded useage have also been CSD.
2) Client side and server side decorations- KDE plasma and a few others this is majority of your X11 Windows managers.
3) Mandated Server side decorations- this is something you find in high security setups like different qubes installs even if it results in horrible appearance with CSD applications.
4) No windows decorations raw X11 server with most toolkits and windows managers like ratpoison and different embedded usages.

Please note the users of market 4 are generally keeping there month shut. Yes users or market 1/2/3 who are not being considerate majority of those not being understanding being in the market 2 for what they want after being questioned being the most rowdy.

Yes you are right its not a dichotomy because its a 4 way split. Every group in the 4 way split has valid reasons for it to be done their way. And every group valid reasons why the other 3 options is not suitable for their usage case. The correct answer here is agree to disagree so not be pushing something targeting market 1 to service market 2 or the reverse .

You think about it. Lets say gnome/any wayland compositor was to support operating in all 4 modes how would you know at login screen what you were walking into. Toolkits need to support dealing with wayland compositors for the 4 differenet markets. But a wayland compositor attempting to cover all 4 markets with 1 name will cause end user confusion.

X11 having multi windows managers/DE with difference in expected features does make some serous sense. Having different wayland compositors with solid names targeting each of those 4 markets for windows decorations is a good thing particular that at login screen a user picks there wayland environment they know what one of the 4 they are getting.

Gnome developers with GTK have been accepting patches to properly support KDE server side decorations. QT has been working on stuff to support operating on a CSD world. Toolkits need to support operating in both CSD and SSD modes.

[oiaohm]

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.

This problem is not going to be fixed just by having client side decorations.

[getaceres]

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.

I checked that too and I enabled every possible flag, including WebRender in Firefox. It makes things better but it's not even close to the smoothness of the same browser in Windows.

[Venemo]

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.

Sounds to me like you are talking about several different issues here.

4K 30Hz - You didn't mention what cable you use, but according to Intel's product page, your iGPU only supports 4K 60Hz on DisplayPort. Make sure you have a decent DisplayPort cable, there are many that claim to support 4K but don't support 60Hz. Then it should allow you to choose 60Hz. If that doesn't work, open a bug report against the Intel graphics driver.

Fractional scaling - I agree with you that fractional scaling implementation is less than ideal. I also use a similar display as yourself, and what I do is I set the font scaling factor in Gnome Tweaks to 1.15 (you might want to try 1.2 or 1.25 or even more). This makes it convenient for my eyes. I know this is not exactly what you asked for, but I thought I'd share in case it is helpful.

Note that browsers have their own setting for this, eg. in Firefox you set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx and that will do the trick. (On my system this is also 1.15)
So, browsers implement their own fractional scaling, you don't need to worry about system-wide fractional scaling for them.

Poor browser performance - There can be several different reasons behind this, perhaps your browser doesn't use HW graphics acceleration. It is also possible that the 30Hz display makes it look sluggish. I suggest to ask for help in the browser's community, eg. open a bug report.

[Mez']

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.

So much intolerance. We're back to the dictatorship of the one-track thinking, very much in line with the Gnome mindset.
They and you have decided unilaterally that it's the old world or a broken paradigm. That's very random. Could you explain on what grounds? Or more probably it's just an opinion in your mind you're trying to give more strength than it actually has... Of course, you have no clue except it's how you see it, so it must be true.

I'm so tired of people just making their opinion bigger than what it is. 8 billions people, 8 billions products, 8⁸ billions ideas, 8⁸ billions principles, yet they found the ONE, the one size fits all. How extraordinary!

It's also a parallel discussion to the screen ratio discussion on another topic. CSD and Gnome uses more vertical space, which I think is why their fan advocates for 16:10 or 3:2 ratio. But with the avant-gardiste SSD and a lovely extension such as Unite 16:9 is quite alright on the vertical front and you feel 10 years ahead of any kind of CSD in my opinion (yes, as yours, it is very much just an opinion).
But yet again, some Gnome fan doesn't fancy something so he dismisses it entirely because his belief can't live alongside another one. The opposite is usually not true though. It's also why options are great or why extensions were created (to make up for Gnome shortcomings as perceived by a very wide base of users).
Gnome is a mix of a "forced down your throat" design, a bit like force-feeding geese, except it's ostriches, and so happy to be force-fed they go full head in the sand. And it's a farm at that.
I'm ashamed of using it when I see the mindset. Hopefully I can get the hell out to another "new world" DE (Budgie, Lomiri) in the near future and leave that moronic mindset behind. Even if I actually liked Gnome, I would probably run away as fast as I can from such a brainwashed crowd. Maybe braindead actually. Scares the bejesus out of me. Did I miss a zombie apocalypse?

[oiaohm]

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 have seen something like this before not at 4k but if it is this you display can be frame skiping or not in fact rendering at the HZ speed. I have had a 120Hz 1080p show up at 60Hz before and then appear to be back to normal 120Hz with HDMI and Display port on different machines with cable issues. I have also had it be mega wacky. Like Stable 120Hz with windows and unstable with Linux and the revserse Yes I have two HDMI cables here one behaves perfect 120Hz with windows total crap with Linux and another the gives perfect 120Hz with Linux yet gives total crap with windows. The negotiation method and error correction and tolerance methods are slightly different between Windows and Linux drivers result in some cables work fine with one OS and nothing else.

If you have a dud cable this can increase GPU processing load as GPU is doing resend this is partially worse with Intel graphics than AMD.

The fact you are not getting a clean 60Hz suggests cable trouble. If you have cable trouble the output results horrible scrolling/frame skipping ... can all be the result of the GPU being stubborn doing everything to attempt to get a image displayed on screen at any cost. So you might have a value that screen is running at 60hz when really only 20 frames a second is being rendered because of CRC failures.

By the way capable freesync/gsync monitors.

getaceres basically you mix of hardware ticks all the boxes for a really bad experience due to a defective cable. Please note this defective cable does not mean Windows cannot work right or Linux cannot work right. Its just depends on what the issue is in the cable if the Intel graphics will respond badly on windows or Linux. The fact that the monitor is freesync this can result in the monitor saying 60Hz but the real frames per second be some value less.

Fun part is the type of cable defects with capacitive issues in cables the display port/hdmi cable can come operating system selective if it causes issues or not as the pattern of transmission the driver generates down the cable if you have error or not.

[finalzone]

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

That quoted book is actually a draft as mentioned in the introduction and outdated. GNOME Shell has experimental fractional scale disabled by default due to bugs from mainly Xserver applications which needed to get fixed. Anyone having a 4K monitor or up willing to further improve the experience can contribute and provide the rationale of their suggestion and a proof of concept.

[stalkerg]

stalkerg Wayland assumes client side decoration. That won’t change.

It's just not true. Wayland supports SSD and basically agnostic for that.

[stalkerg]

Is this an issue for gamedevs or for gamers? For what is worth, when I play a game it is always fullscreen, and even if it wasn't, the last thing I care about is whether the window border is consistent with the desktop.

It's true only for some part of game, for example configuration, login window or something like editor should has consistent.