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Comment by akdor1154 | Hacker News Reader

Pixel-perfect fractional scaling, baby, woohoo!

After over a decade of GTK claiming fractional scaling is "impossible" and GTK devs vetoing any fractional scaling in the wayland protocol, they finally got feature parity with Qt in this area.

Now we just need proper support in Wayland and we'll finally have support for HiDPI in all major Linux DEs.

>After over a decade of GTK claiming fractional scaling is "impossible" and

So it's just as impossible as thumbnails in the file picker? The insanity of the GTK and the resilience of people willing to put up with it is baffling to me.

At least the devs can find some motivation in the fact that they'll get comments like these every time they do something good...

Thank you for moving the goalposts for the chance of a cheap shot comment, but you know very well that's not what I meant.

GTK doing something right , doesn't suddenly absolve it of all the wrongs. And just because something is FOSS doesn't mean it's not without fault and therefore without criticism.

Likewise, just because you are right in principle doesn't mean your actual comment is anything but rude and pointless.

Am I the one being rude? Maybe. Was GTK also being rude for claiming something everyone else was doing at the time, like fractional scaling, as being "Impossible"? Maybe.

Sorry, maybe I was rude, but someone needs to call out BS claims like this as they probably have enough "yes men" tooting their horn.

Please cite where a GTK developer said that fractional scaling was impossible.

> someone needs to call out BS claims like this as they probably have enough "yes men" tooting their horn.

Do they, though? Does it have any effect at all, other than potentially demotivating volunteer contributors? And if so, do those effects outweigh the negative effects?

Gnome's problems are not those volunteers contributing code, but the leadership who decided what gets merged to mainline.

Devs could have implemented thumbnails in file picker over a decade ago, but Gnome leadership was always against it.

Toxic and poor leadershipof such large projects should be openly criticized and pointed at, and not allow to hide and be gaslighten behind the "poor small volunteer devs".

"Devs could have implemented thumbnails in file picker over a decade ago, but Gnome leadership was always against it."

Please stop this bullshit.

What have years and years of criticising and pointing-at brought us, other than a couple of burnt-out devs?

And is there anywhere where we can see that this elite leadership suddenly changed their minds on allowing this, rather than a developer seeing an opportunity when a bunch of things got deprecated, which had been postponed for a long time because it creates a lot of work for downstreams [0]?

Or is the fact that they didn't want to haphazardly break those downstreams the poor leadership you speak of?

[0] https://blog.gtk.org/2022/12/15/a-grid-for-the-file-chooser/

Usually it's from someone who has never wrote a single line of code to improve the situation either.

Please spare us of this tired trope. People who don't contribute to FOSS, are also allowed to have an opinion on FOSS if they're users of it. Otherwise how would they know what to improve if you don't allow feedback from users? What you're saying is like car companies thinking their customers' opinions are irelevant because their customers never contributed to designing parts of a car.

If you're designing a mainstream product that's not just targeting professional SW developers who can contribute back with code, but also average users who will only use it but never contribute, then you will need to be open to mainstream levels of feedback that represent the average user and not just programmers.

Otherwise let's keep complaining Linux and FOSS alternatives have only ~2% market share that it's somehow the users' fault for only buying Microsoft/Apple and not the projects' for being stubborn to feedback and out of touch with their mainstream users.

I have contributed and improved more than a few FOSS pieces of software that I used when I thought it could use improvement or a bug fix, or even just documentation of the bug. FOSS isn't a company, and a huge portion of contributors aren't paid a dime. It bothers me when people criticize with vehemence against the developers, where I express my opinion is on the nature of belligerent complaints vs helpful ones. Have a nice day.

No, they're right. It's not a requirement to sling code to put your opinions out there about open source.

Everyone has their opinions. There are so many opinions out there, it isn’t really clear what to do with them. Put them out there, fine, now everybody else just has to decide if they care.

One way to tell if you should care about an opinion is to check and see if the person professing it has taken any concrete actions toward getting the world to align with it.

> There are so many opinions out there, it isn’t really clear what to do with them.

Thankfully large projects generally have feedback loop systems to figure out how to parse that feedback.

The rest of your comment isn't particularly contributing to the discussion here, short of trying to re-cement a broken take.

I remember my cousin telling me how horrible it was to work at a hotel - you really found out how horrible people could be when they thought they were owed something. Staff there obviously had to put up with it because that was their job.

Regarding FOSS, I think some users forget that they're at a free lunch and are unpleasant and insistent about their complaints as if they were paying. They're not entitled to service and don't seem to realise it.

As to whether everyone else should listen - sure - but nobody is forced to work overtime just to right some wrong in OSS software because person A was very upset about it.

In this case, PRs were made for close to a decade, tons of people implemented the feature in forks etc but upstream just didn't want it. You can't tell people to just write the code since it's open source when that's irrelevant here, the code itself wasn't what was missing. Though I still think it's great that it is now done regardless of the weird historic that specific feature had.

Please show any fork where the features you (don't) describe were available.

There are gtk file picker forks (like Nemo I think?) But I guess you could argue that they didn't just add the file picker thumbnails. So here is an example of a patch to make thumbnails work:

https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/gtk3-filechooser...

Use the forks if you want to then.

Also, why isn't that patch in an MR to GTK (if the author wanted to upstream it)?

Okay sure? I never said otherwise, you asked me for forks and I gave them to you. What's your point? I get that open source needs people to complain less and contribute more, my point is just that while it might be valid for tons of situations, it just isn't make sense for the file picker thumbnails saga.

As for the Mr, again there were a few of them and it's very easy to find. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233#note_106497

The whole thread is full of people actively writing, fixing, rebasing code, creating MRs for years

> Also, why isn't that patch in an MR to GTK (if the author wanted to upstream it)?

These MRs do a minimal change to just add thumbnails. The current file manager uses outdated widgets. Gnome/GTK expects MRs to also replace deprecated widgets in all files touched by that MR. Replacing those deprecated widgets would require a massive refactor.

The devs who actually implemented should be celebrated.

But they're not the same people as the ones that blocked specs and PRs by stating this was "impossible".

Blocking valuable improvements with an absolute statement like that makes contributing to such projects feel like fighting against windmills.

Possibly, but it wouldn't be the first time that the first category of devs feel like they're the target of such comments. And it's a well-known phenomenon that negative comments outweigh ten positive ones.

So from where I sit, one might as well not make them. (And I'm pushing back a bit to hopefully support the contributors who I'm grateful to.)

As Vinni pointed it with irony.

A honest „thank you“ to the people which made the thumbnails possible would be helpful. And involving itself. Or spending money. Gtk and GNOME are not companies. People need a motivation - from their work or from outside.

>Gtk and GNOME are not companies.

These are large entities made up of people, same as companies, not individual devs making a side project. Does that mean their work should not be criticized because their collective is not a registered publicly listed company?

>People need a motivation - from their work or from outside.

Also feedback. And that was my feedback, candid as it may be.

Like I said below, FOSS work doesn't mean it should automatically be excluded form criticism, especially if that FOSS work is so big and influential enough that it ends up having impact on other products and on people's work and lives, like Gnome being the default on most free but also commercial distros.

So please let's stop attacking and gaslighting critics, as if GNOME is some teenager developing his first app for free in his bedroom who should only be defended and praised for encouragement, instead of the giant mammoth project with private and public funding[1] developed by vested professionals of the software industry who know very well what they're doing and should be criticized when they do something wrong or are being needlessly petty and stubborn with their decisions and arguments, besides being praised when doing something right as there's already enough of that in this topic if you read it.

[1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/11/gnome-sovereign-tech-fun...

Constructive criticism is helpful. And yes - some people get it wrong or are stubborn. People don’t act always perfect despite good intentions. I struggle often to find the right tone and interpret it properly.

And I’m happy about Linux, GCC, Vim, Coretils and Gtk in general. GNOMEs keyboard centric usage is wonderful.

That said. I’m usually sad about public long term forks. Because they are not about learning or improvement but that people often failed to communicate. Yes, sometimes their targets are just differing.

Anyone good news? Maybe Mutter will support VRR itself. And maybe battery thresholds in a user friendly way. Woohooo

No we just need convince the right people to add Type-Ahead-Find back in Nautilus and background transparency officially back in gnome-terminal. Both „back“. There is existing code for both.

"No we just need convince the right people to add Type-Ahead-Find back in Nautilus and background transparency officially back in gnome-terminal. Both „back“. There is existing code for both."

Or just make a fork if you want to.

It can be criticized. But that criticism won't necessarily help anyone get what they want, least of all you.

I don't use GNOME :)

> Gtk and GNOME are not companies.

"Company" doesn't mean "business". It means a bunch of companions. Like the company in `The Fellowship of the Ring`.

> Or spending money.

People are willing and ready to spend money on quality software. It is a trillion dollar industry. Open source is an endless circle of misery that needs to be ended as soon as possible.

Both fractional scaling and thumbnails did require massive background work. The term „impossible“ is therefore incorrect. It required huge changes in the backend which weren’t feasible in short term. The thumbnails are done already and the new renderes are approaching.

Keep in mind, developers strive good solutions. Users need good solutions. Companies are often happy with less reliable solutions because they are forced to be fast. And this less reliable stuff tends to stay long.

The trade-off is that other platforms have had this support for a decade. Stuff like this keeps people from switching.

I think there are other reasons which matter.

    * what comes preinstalled
    * a weird application
    * the end

Regarding features - for users - Linux with GNOME is delivering features for decades which Windows lacks:

    * Tabs in file-browser             * fast and modern terminal (ttf-fonts, utf8, OpenGL…)
    * clear concise settings
    * maintained application repositories
    * no „desktop“ which forces me to arrange icons (WTF?)

Other consider Cortana or ChatGPT as „required“. If they think so…

You seem to be very much out of date with the current state of Windows.

tabs in file browser >built in for the last 2 years, tabs can be rearranged, moved between explorer windows, etc.

fast and modern terminal >windows terminal (released 2019 and built in by default) is one of the best terminal apps on any platform. Tabs, GPU acceleration, fonts, seamless multishell support (including Linux shells local - WSL - or remote)

*maintained application repositories > winget (released 2020 and built in by default) repository is now the backend of windows store and can maintain externally installed software, just run ‘winget upgrade —-all’ in your shell of choice

Also, you can now install any linux distro you want with a single click using WSL, with full x11 and Wayland support. If there’s a Linux app you prefer, you can use it seamlessly. You can even run a full desktop. I’d almost go as far as to say that nvidia hardware is supported better through WSL, where latest drivers “just work” and I’ve never experienced things breaking, than on baremetal Linux (although that says more about nvidia than any platform).

The point is the most are available since 2002 with Linux. Only recently on Windows. And here is argued that the special thumbnail feature was missing on Linux since around 2002.

I’m glad about the thumbnails (it was overdue by a decade) but there are many features and every new feature available is missing somewhere else[1]. Next year we will discuss either missing Flatpak support on Windows (cgroups, namespaces) or missing Vulkan on MacOS or missing built-in Android support on Linux.

[1] or not - because it doesn’t fit well. For example the weird database/library kind stuff in Explorer which teases users on Windows. I think EXPLORER.EXE has become awful hard to use. It was usable back in NT4 and NT5.

I know how much work this is, and I genuinely appreciate that Gtk has finally reached this milestone. It was the last missing puzzle piece.

It's just sad that Gtk used to have this functionality and dropped it when Gtk3 was envisioned, as it meant the ecosystem was stuck waiting for over a decade.

Wayland has fractional-scale-v1 merged.

I think it was impossible with the old rendering engine, hence the excitement in this blog post.

It's even worse, it's devs (& some users) plainly dismissing fractional scaling as "imperfect" and claiming fullscreen downscaling as the only sensible option with very little justification other than "it's what Apple does".

I had multiple discussions here in HN with users who wouldn't believe that, given fractional scale ratios, _anything_ else than direct fractional rendering produces significant blurriness. (And note fractional rendering can also produce blurriness, e.g. through misalignment).

From the blog post:

    If your  1200 × 800 window is set to be scaled to 125 %, with the unified renderers, we will use a framebuffer of size 1500 × 1000 for it, instead of letting the compositor downscale a 2400 × 1600 image.

The explanation is a bit confusing to me. I think they are saying that a window that should be drawn as 1500 x 1000 pixels on the screen because of 125% scaling would have 1200 x 800 pixels in application pixels. Since OpenGL and Vulcan use floats to render, they might as well render directly into a buffer that can be rendered 1:1 on the screen by transforming the coordinates in the instructions.

If that's what they are doing, that sounds like sanity finally.

I believe he's saying exacty that, they'll render it to the target size instead of rendering 2x and scaling it down.

What was so hard about doing that in the past?

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