GNOME 3.32 released

Posted Mar 14, 2019 19:51 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
Parent article: GNOME 3.32 released

Fractional scaling is *huge*; people have been asking for that for years, and it's critical for certain resolutions like 2560x1440.

GNOME 3.32 released

Posted Mar 14, 2019 20:51 UTC (Thu) by kmare (guest, #113077) [Link] (7 responses)

I agree. Just as a reminder though, it is Wayland only.

GNOME 3.32 released

Posted Mar 15, 2019 3:04 UTC (Fri) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link] (4 responses)

Which is a bummer as I've never had a good Xwayland experience with multiple displays.

GNOME 3.32 released

Posted Mar 15, 2019 11:11 UTC (Fri) by sbakker (subscriber, #58443) [Link] (3 responses)

Really? For me it was one of the reasons to switch to Wayland. I had different monitors of various sizes and resolutions (1 external 24", 1 external 27", and a 13" laptop display), and Wayland allowed me to scale individual monitors.

My main problem with Wayland for now is that if the GNOME Shell crashes, my whole session is gone. Under X.org, it just restarts the shell.

GNOME 3.32 released

Posted Mar 16, 2019 16:56 UTC (Sat) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link] (2 responses)

Why does the session depend on the Shell, actually? Couldn't it simply restart and continue compositing?

The one thing I miss from X is the ability to reconfigure monitors programmatically with a tool like xrandr.

GNOME 3.32 released

Posted Mar 16, 2019 21:38 UTC (Sat) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (1 responses)

Because gnome-shell takes the place of the X server in a Wayland session. It talks to the hardware device and manages the file descriptors from the applications.

If they cared enough about it, they could implement a crash-catcher which would checkpoint the server state and restore it on restart. That's pretty difficult though and runs the risk that the crash corrupted some of the state. The usual argument is that it's a better use of time to fix the crash bugs.

The reason it can just restart and continue under X is because the X server is maintaining all of the connections and application state. If there was a bug in X (and there have been) then a crash could not restart cleanly either.

GNOME 3.32 released

Posted Mar 17, 2019 3:46 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

GNOME shell's extension system means that it is always going to be crashy in the face of buggy extensions. Personally I've decided I cannot use GNOME with Wayland and will be sticking with Xorg until the architecture gets fixed. Eventually I might just switch to something that is resilient to restarting and crashes, like Arcan plus Durden.

https://arcan-fe.com/2017/12/24/crash-resilient-wayland-c...

GNOME 3.32 released

Posted Mar 15, 2019 17:47 UTC (Fri) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link] (1 responses)

It's also a hack. AIUI, it's just a large fractional scaling multiplier (with who-knows-what cost perf) with a second downsampling pass. I've never understood why fractional scaling is so hard for the Gnome people to pull off when Unity was able to do it without any real problems.

GNOME 3.32 released

Posted Mar 18, 2019 10:17 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

I believe Mac OS X uses a similar trick, for example the 15" laptop renders at 3840x2400 with 200% scaling and then scales by 0.75 in hardware.

GNOME 3.32 released

Posted Mar 14, 2019 22:27 UTC (Thu) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link]

Some of us have been asking for it for as long as hours! I was setting up a new computer with a 12" 2400x1600 display today with GNOME and thought to myself "200% is very readable but I with I could scale it to 150% or even just 175%." What timing.