Comment by Crysstalis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Crysstalis | Hacker News Reader

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>You'll need to explain why and how it is "flawed and inferior"

Because it needs special support in the window manager. At that point it is the same as what Wayland is doing except it still has all the other flaws of X11 and it will break when someone wants to disable compositing or use another old window manager. As for the other parts, those would technically work, and it already does work like that for the most part. Most programs that can do DPI scaling do already have a way to scale themselves. But that is not a good experience for users, the point of it working seamlessly is to have support for it built into the window manager.

>Then i suggest making better effort towards understanding what others write or at least ask clarifications

There are no clarifications to ask, you are repeating the same comments that get posted all the time. Keep in mind these are the type of comments that you can see repeated very often:

"I have no problem, it works on my hardware"

"It is not a problem because I personally prefer it this way"

"Just try to fix the problem yourself by tweaking these developer settings (config files, environment variables, etc) and hoping it works"

If your comment follows this pattern then I would say just avoid making that comment, it is not moving the discussion forward. I think you can agree, when building these systems the goal is to get something that is usable out of the box for everyone. So these comments do not "move the needle" towards that, these are just reinforcing the current status quo.

> Because it needs special support in the window manager. At that point it is the same as what Wayland is doing except it still has all the other flaws of X11 and it will break when someone wants to disable compositing or use another old window manager.

But it also does not rely on Wayland and all the flaws it has - after all my point was about being possible on X11, not about Wayland. Wayland had nothing to do with the post i wrote.

> But that is not a good experience for users, the point of it working seamlessly is to have support for it built into the window manager.

Yes, which is exactly what i wrote in my original message: "Window manager support for some common messages/hints (ala EWMH) so that the window manager is responsible for telling applications how to scale would improve things".

> There are no clarifications to ask, you are repeating the same comments that get posted all the time [...] If your comment follows this pattern then I would say just avoid making that comment

I suggest try to actual read what people are writing instead of trying to pattern match answers to whatever you think the poster is writing. This may also help understand what i write in my other replies about backwards compatibility.

>after all my point was about being possible on X11

Well my point was that it will always be an inferior experience on X11 even though it technically is possible in some circumstance. WM hints only work correctly if the window manager is compositing which many window managers are not, or do not want to add, and some X11 users still seem to insist on not using them... Any attempts to add this to X11 are fighting an uphill battle.

>I suggest try to actual read what people are writing

I did and I believe those replies are following those patterns. Those comments seem unrelated to the other things about backwards compatibility. It is an entirely separate concern.

> Well my point was that it will always be an inferior experience on X11 even though it technically is possible in some circumstance.

Regardless of what you consider "inferior" (again, i do not see anything inferior assuming it is done as i described), the point was that it was possible.

> WM hints only work correctly if the window manager is compositing which many window managers are not, or do not want to add

Compositing is only needed for applications that do not support scaling themselves. There is no compositing necessary for applications that do support scaling, aside from the (literal) edge case of having an application cross two (or more) different monitors of different scale values and wanting to have the same visible area in all of them.

> and some X11 users still seem to insist on not using them...

At the end of the day it is up to users to decide what they want to do with their computers - and deal with pros and cons of their choices, the best developers can do is try to provide options.

If something isn't possible in whatever "perfect" sense one might have, it can still be worth implemented in "good enough" ways. For example i use Window Maker, a window manager without desktop compositing support (aside from a minor use for window thumbnails) the UX of which i like in general despite its flaws in some cases. If i had multiple monitors with mixed DPI, i'd rather stick with WM even if i had to deal with the "window looks too big/small while dragging it between monitors" flaw since i consider the latter a minor issue while switching to a different environment (and all the consequences it may have) a much bigger one.

> I did and I believe those replies are following those patterns. Those comments seem unrelated to the other things about backwards compatibility. It is an entirely separate concern.

Your responses indicate that your beliefs are wrong then. The comment about backwards compatibility are relevant if you are also trying to do that pattern matching against what i write there.

>At the end of the day it is up to users to decide what they want to do with their computers - and deal with pros and cons of their choices

The issue with this thinking is that those cons eventually cascade back to the developer, if you know for a fact users will use an option that is going to break the intended use case. Window Maker is going to be broken or have a sub par experience with the situation you describe, because that only works with applications that support this method. Old legacy applications with no scaling support will still need support from the window manager. So that is a perfect illustration of why that solution is inferior and can never work correctly if you want to take this angle of "I can make whatever choice I want, including the broken ones".

>Your responses indicate that your beliefs are wrong then

I do not think so, your additional writings have drifted further from that subject. I should remind you, this thread is a discussion of GNOME, not Window Maker.

> The issue with this thinking is that those pros and cons eventually cascade back to the developer, if you know for a fact users will use an option that is going to break the intended use case.

Thinking "for a fact" that users will do something is a perfect way to make several of them unhappy when they want to do something else :-P.

> Window Maker is going to be broken or have a sub par experience with the situation you describe, because that only works with applications that support this method.

Maybe, but as i wrote, the alternative is either not using Window Maker or not having any scaling support, both of which would be way more undesirable for me.

> Old legacy applications with no scaling support will still need support from the window manager.

Sure, like any application with no scaling support in any platform that provides it, will need to support them somehow - this isn't limited to X11.

> So that is a perfect illustration of why that solution is inferior and can never work correctly if you want to take this angle of "I can make whatever choice I want, including the broken ones".

As far as i am concerned, the solution i describe is both superior and works perfectly fine when the alternative is introducing worse issues.

And this is the important bit: what i consider better and superior and what you consider better and superior are not the same thing, hence being able to have the option to set up things in the way each one likes (which of course relies on underlying systems that are modular enough to allow that).

> I do not think so, your additional writings have drifted further from that subject. I should remind you, this thread is a discussion of GNOME, not Window Maker.

I brought up Window Maker as an example that i have personal experience with, it could have also been IceWM or any other window manager without support for desktop composition.

Also FWIW my original reply in this thread wasn't about GNOME specifically either, it was a reply on some issues the original poster had with the Linux desktop environment in general (itself a post not specifically about GNOME too).

>Thinking "for a fact" that users will do something is a perfect way to make several of them unhappy when they want to do something else :-P.

My point is those users will be unhappy anyway, they choose to break their own system. There is little reason to try to accommodate them further. The alternative is always going to be don't use that WM or don't have scaling support. It is not superior as you are always faced with this choice. That is the choice you get when you want to use legacy apps and WMs which is the only real reason to still be using X11.

> My point is those users will be unhappy anyway, they choose to break their own system.

That is a very "i know what is good for the users better than them" stance.

> The alternative is always going to be don't use that WM or don't have scaling support. It is not superior as you are always faced with this choice.

It is (or can be) superior when taking the entirety of the environment into account, not just the particular "scaling vs not scaling" support. It shouldn't really be that hard to understand that someone might prefer to stick with a window manager (or other program) because they like its overall UX despite not having a perfect solution for some particular problem, right?

I understand that, but what you are doing by making that choice is actually choosing to make those other problems your problem. Maybe they do not affect you, but they are still there, so the "solution" can hardly be called superior or even a solution at all. It just is something that does not affect you. Taking the entirety of the environment would consider all apps and all options that could possibly be used, I bet you can see how that would quickly become a bad situation that the users almost certainly do not know better than the developers how to handle. By definition, if a user is only focusing on their specific apps in a very strict and controlled situation, they actually cannot know what is the best overall choice.

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