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Comment by bigbubba | Hacker News Reader

Why does a user care that XFCE is on an old version of GTK? I can see why that would frustrate developers, but I don't see how that surfaces to users as a usability issue.

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GTK2 fails in a lot of ways. The main one that bothers me is when I open a GTK2 app, it picks the DPI scale of one of my monitors so when I drag it over, instead of resizing to the new dpi scale, it will either become massive or tiny.

Ah that makes sense. I've never tried it on mismatched screens.

Unfortunately, I don’t know of any DE that does this well at this point.

Gnome with wayland supports it but every time you start an xwayland app you notice issues. Native wayland/gtk3 apps have been flawless for me. Things just snap to the new scale when you drag them across.

Is Chrome, Chromium, Microsoft Edge or Firefox available as a native Wayland app that just snaps to the new scale when you drag it across?

I’m pretty sure Firefox has native wayland support, which can be enabled with an environment variable.

Take a look at [1] for more.

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/c8itj2/enabling_wa...

OK, but I'd still like to know whether a firefox-wayland window will flawlessly snap to the new scaling factor when you drag it to another monitor whose scaling factor is different from the original monitor.

(Same question for Electron apps, particularly VS Code.)

It does for firefox. Chrome and electron have beta support for it but I'm not sure its on by default yet.

This doesn't make sense to me. Surely scaling the window according to the settings that apply to the monitor it's on is a job for the window manager, and not a job for the software running inside the window?

If the window manager were to upscale a window, you would get the typical artifacting, such as blurriness, from the upscaling. The application toolkit is the best place to do scaling, as it knows how to render text etc.

This is how it works on Windows as well; if the application reports it correctly supports scaling, Windows will let the application handle scaling (otherwise Windows will do it for the application, with the usual caveats).

>if the application reports it correctly supports scaling, Windows will let the application handle scaling

In contrast, unless I am severely mistaken, MacOS has the application render the window normally, then applies a scaling algorithm to the output when the user has set a scaling factor (which on a Mac is set usually through System Preferences > Display) that is not an integer. (I.e., has set fractional scaling.)

I much prefer how Windows and Wayland do it. (When I use Windows, I have the luxury of free choice in the apps I use: I spend .99 of my time in VS Code, Google Chrome and a few recently-written Microsoft-provided apps like Settings. A Windows user who needs old apps or apps written by less sophisticated developers might have a much worse experience.)

In fact, I am leaving MacOS after 11 years largely because of its relatively bad implementation of fractional scaling. I find it too blurry. (If my lifestyle required the use of a laptop, I might have stuck with Apple.) But I am unusual in ways that probably make a good implementation of fractional scaling much more valuable to me that it would be to the average user.

I think we're discussing UI controls scaling. This has nothing to do with WM, especially under Wayland, it's a job of your graphical toolkit.

Windows does. MacOS does. Wake me up when wayland is stable. Maybe in 10 years?

Good morning, wayland is stable

I ran into a bug with GTK2 stalling out with some malformed DBUS messages (symptom: your application takes an additional 20 seconds to start). So I made a sample app that demonstrated the problem, ran some system traces, tried to engage the GTK developer community and only got an "eww, gross, not touching that".

It's pretty clear that GTK2 has been left out to bit rot at this point and it's going to completely collapse at some point. Only option is to update your old apps.

I think we need something like wine for GTK2 and qt3/qt4 as a way to run old apps going forward.

It's still possible to run 20+ years old Win32 Apps that way.

I have heard about that bug

https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,51016.0...

I have not seen it, but it would affect all my programs, it sounds very annoying

Thanks for the link, I had not found that myself and the workaround suggested (installing the Unity integration module for GTK) worked! It generates a spurious error message about Unity not being on the machine, but that's way less annoying than a 25 second pause on startup.

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