LWN: Comments on "GNOME 3.32 released"

GNOME 3.32 released

jbicha — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:20:28 +0000

It's being worked on so maybe for GNOME 3.34.

GNOME 3.32 released

epa — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 10:17:05 +0000

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

whot — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 02:42:09 +0000

> Why is it required for Wayland specifically? Or is it just that X has had it "forever" anyways?

Under X, any client can enquire about the location of the cursor, the current button state and the current keyboard state. So it's trivial to write something that can do pointer highlighting.

Under Wayland (the protocol), the pointer location and state is not available to a client unless it is focused. And even then the location is window-relative as opposed to screen relative. The only process to have access to all the information is the compositor, so whatever highlights the pointer needs to request the data from the compositor and/or get the compositor to render it in the correct place.

GNOME 3.32 released

pabs — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 03:46:56 +0000

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

zlynx — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 21:38:46 +0000

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

DOT — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 16:56:20 +0000

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

quotemstr — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 17:47:19 +0000

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

rahulsundaram — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 15:24:56 +0000

> Why is it required for Wayland specifically? Or is it just that X has had it "forever" anyways?

The latter. Note that it is not Wayland that should have the accessibility features. It is the individual Desktop Environments or Window Managers

GNOME 3.32 released

mathstuf — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 14:43:29 +0000

Why is it required for Wayland specifically? Or is it just that X has had it "forever" anyways?

GNOME 3.32 released

yodermk — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 14:00:23 +0000

But does it have the "mouse locator" accessibility feature working in Wayland yet? You know, where you press Ctrl and a little animated squiggly grows around the cursor. I brought that up years ago, filed in Bugzilla, it was closed and merged with another issue about re-writing some layer, and AFAIK there has been no action on it.

IMHO essential for Wayland usability.

GNOME 3.32 released

sbakker — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 11:11:29 +0000

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

jhoblitt — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 03:04:46 +0000

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

GNOME 3.32 released

jkingweb — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 22:27:40 +0000

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.

GNOME 3.32 released

kmare — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 20:51:56 +0000

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

GNOME 3.32 released

josh — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 19:51:53 +0000

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