Comment by lolpython | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolpython | Hacker News Reader

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> Gnome's Wayland implementation is much better then KDE at this moment

Agreed, with a caveat— Gnome's Mutter compositor for Wayland has bugs. It does not support server side rendered window decorations while KDE does. This means that the title bars for Alacritty[0] terminal emulator and the mpv[1] video player are ugly and not so functional. This is an intentional decision by the GNOME team[2]. Also the screen locks while watching videos on mpv because Mutter does not support the idle-inhibit protocol, although work is currently being done on this[3].

[0]: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/5956

[1]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/pull/7186

[2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217

[3]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/111

The window decorations stuff drives me batty. Titlebar and buttons aside, there seems to be a widespread misunderstanding about window shadows. There is some vague effort afoot[1], but a surprising number of developers don't really care whether they're consistent (note, nobody even mentions shadows in that extremely long gitlab issue you linked to), despite the Gtk folks going to tremendous efforts to make them look nice for their specific toolkit. Which is great, until you have a Gtk 3 app beside a Gtk 4 app and it looks like they're each being affected by a different light source, begging the question: why do we even have them? Shadows are supposed to create a consistent sense of space and guide the eye around the desktop, but if they're all different, that isn't happening. They're just noise.

To be fair, it's difficult because Wayland clients might have rounded corners and other odd shapes, and I'm not in a position to really look into it myself so I shouldn't complain, but argh, the indifference about it is frustrating.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1517

Ugh. I enjoy the GNOME look and feel but every thread on their big tracker makes me want to switch desktop environments. "Your standard is irrelevant because we don't want to follow it" is something I'd sooner expect from Microsoft than from an open source collective.

Also, Mutter does not support variable refresh rate.

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