[Users] GTK 4

[David Niklas]

On Sun, 25 Apr 2021 19:43:50 -0700
Tom <tgrom.automail at nuegia.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Apr 2021 00:06:02 +0200
> Aaron Fischer <mail at aaron-fischer.net> wrote:
> > It actually is a real problem for me. On my system (Thinkpad X200 with
> > NixOS/Wayland/Sway) CM is kind of unusable for me. The keyboard
> > shortcuts stop working randomly, which is a real pain for me.
>
> Part of the problem is your running unstable immature software with
> lots of bugs just for the sake of modernity and "it's the future!".
>
> Another thing you need to take into account is that wayland has
> mandatory compositing. A lot of the Wayland propaganda is about how
> much more "performant" wayland is then X11 and that's only true if
> you've been using bloated and poorly written "freedesktop.org" software
> like GNOME3. In X11 you do not have to run a compositor nor should you
> on a mobile device. It just sucks up your limited power budget and
> introduces more input latency, which does contribute to the overall
> 'feel' of typing software.
>

This discussion would benefit from real world tests as opposed to
opinion pieces.

As someone who has done a little comparison between wayland with GNOME3?
and X11 with various WMs, I can say that wayland requires OpenGL. You
might be tempted to think, "All GPUs can do OpenGL. This doesn't matter?"
But it does.

Nvidia doesn't do a good job supporting the opensource drivers for their
HW, rendering them with "...no actual hardware acceleration..."[1]. It
literally takes years before you can get HW acceleration on these
cards ("The documentation made public at this point primarily covers
Maxwell, Pascal, Volta, and Kepler..." -- Jun 2019).[2] For Turing, it
took 2 years.[3]
Then, you have to wait while the devs work on the drivers and for that
support to trickle down into the repositories of the various Linux
distros and their CD/DVD/USB images.
The same applies to Mali (ARM) GPUs. It took 11(!!!) years to get FLOSS
support for their 400 series GPUs.[4][5] Again you have to wait for the
distros to pickup support before you can get do a normal install and have
OpenGL support.
It also takes some time for newer GPU drivers -- even if they were
contributed ahead of time -- to get picked up by distros and bundled into
their DVD/CD/USB images.

It is therefore important:
1: For security.
2: For preferring OSS.
3: For interoperability across distro releases and new HW releases.

To have a display server that can operate without OpenGL.

Of course, this only covers a single topic within wayland. GTK4 I don't
have time to do a bunch of testing on and tell you how well it works or
what it does and what the latency is like. Even if I did, I'd probably
just be encouraged to contribute optimizations and bug fixes to their
code base; but that misses the point of telling people what something is
like right now. And besides, if I had time there would be a ton of other
awesome projects I'd be helping out than GTK4.


Thanks,
David



[1]:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=opensource-turing-3d&num=1
[2]:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Open-GPU-Docs
[3]:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-and-2080-founders-edition-review
[4]: For example:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-19.1-Picks-Up-Lima
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_(GPU)