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Comment by reisse | Hacker News Reader

Dynamic triple buffering for GNOME has been postponed again, fractional scaling is nowhere in sight, but they landed

> a new workspace switcher and a much-improved image viewer.

What a joke of a product management. Sometimes I envy guys who can rewrite workspace switchers again and again on Red Hat's money.

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The amount of back seat dev that happens whenever Gnome does anything is amazing. You have no idea what the challenges are or how the development process works for this project. The workspace switcher could just be some drive by PR, who knows. Tripple buffering and fractional scaling are hard problems. If you don't think so, feel free to show them how it's done and implement it yourself.

> You have no idea what the challenges are or how the development process works for this project.

The magic of the open source gives you the possibility to see it. And I do sometimes take a look into a shitshow of management which is this three years old triple buffering MR [1]. Don't get me wrong, I didn't examine the code thoroughly, it might be a marvel of engineering, but when it takes you more than three years (and counting!) to land a feature, to the point where some people start to forgot why it was even necessary in the first place [2], and when downstream has to monkey-patch your feature as-is because the benefits are so big [3], you cannot say your development processes are alright.

And it's not only triple buffering, you can see the same pattern in the MR for VRR [4].

1. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441

2. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441#...

3. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/why-ubuntu-22-04-is-so-fast-a...

4. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154

And yet somehow despite Gnome's shitshow management, all the major distros default to GNOME.

Maybe they're doing something right?

> all the major distros default to GNOME

If your definition of major distros is limited to Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora, then probably. Linux Mint was born out of rejecting GNOME, Arch is not opinionated, Manjaro defaults to KDE (although "defaults" here may be a wrong word), SteamOS defaults to KDE, openSUSE defaults to KDE, then there's PopOS...

You can see a lot of bugs found (and being fixed) in that MR. Should Gnome add lots of new bugs for little gain?

I won't answer this question because Canonical did it for me. As I mentioned in the parent post, they considered the gain so important that Ubuntu ships triple buffering patch starting from 22.04 LTS. Well, they actually come up with this feature - Daniel Van Vugt, author of the patch (huuuuge thank you, by the way) works for Canonical. So yeah, I promised not to answer, but I'd say GNOME should definitely have upstreamed the changes much earlier.

And that's a good thing.

Gnome is not a distro. It doesn't provide a user facing distro.

It's a DE that other people are building the largest distros on.

They should be adding stuff based on their priorities, while Gnome's priority should be advancing the DE while ensuring their DE does not break all the many major distros that are based off Gnome.

It's a good thing that the distros can then add/fix stuff based on their priorities. That's what open development is about. That's what allows Canonical to differentiate from a Fedora. How they choose to prioritize the features/fixes they build on top of Gnome.

Oh hush, the only reason people don't make their own contributions is because it's hard to keep up with their unstable API

How many people do you think Red Hat pays to work on all projects within the GNOME namespace on their GitLab? There were no Red Hat employees involved in the development of the new image viewer. It was a community effort.

Will you be stepping up to provide resources?

Why are you ignoring all the other work Red Hat did this cycle with regard to things like HDR?

Does Fedora 39 support 10bit displays finally?

And still lacking VRR support. All we have is this needlessly drama laden multi-year MR https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154

Oh, I forgot about that! Thanks for the reminder. And lacking VRR is even more insulting now, since SteamOS has a working implementation for Wayland.

Given how much Valve is doing for desktop Linux, I guess one day SteamOS will be the default distribution.

In my excitement with the beta version of Fedora 39, I installed it and had fractional scaling for a few minutes- until I installed updates and rebooted. It was gone. That was the last time I touched it.

Fractional Scaling is a *must* these days, with the high res laptop screens.

Do you envy Sisyphus? Very similar situation, I think.

Sisyphus only has one rock to worry about.

Even though Linux is open-source, it's not immune to the force of money. There are paying customers for Red Hat, and maybe they don't care about DPI scaling that much.

Modern high-res screens in notebooks are almost unusable with Gnome. You need to enable "Large fonts" under accessibility to make it remotely usable. And these screens are becoming more common. So where do paying Red Hat customers use Gnome for then if it's not on notebooks and desktops? For servers?

That seems likely, yes

Mostly severs yes, desktop Linux died somewhere around 2010.

I doubt any of Red Hat paying customers are caring about image viewers or other important GNOME improvements in this release.

Red Hat didn't work on the image viewer. Why do you keep making comments on things you are uninformed on?

Exactly, distros need to kept up-to-date, and by updating GNOME, you get new features for free. Downstream, Fedora grabs these updates. Downstream of that, someone spams Hacker News with the changelog. It's the cycle of life.

> Red Hat didn't work on the image viewer.

Honestly glad to err here. Kudos to Chris Davis, Sophie Herold and other contributors.

> Why do you keep making comments on things you are uninformed on?

I'm informed well enough on the facts that a) Red Hat is the top contributor to GNOME; b) development of core GNOME features is going too little, too late, while every release is boasting about not-so-important stuff getting done. So I'm being vocal about that, because why not?

> Exactly, distros need to kept up-to-date, and by updating GNOME, you get new features for free. Downstream, Fedora grabs these updates.

If only two thirds of GNOME weren't contributed by full-time Red Hat employees, sure.

> If only two thirds of GNOME weren't contributed by full-time Red Hat employees

Can you actually confirm that they're actually instructed by Red Hat to do this? Or is there just a large coincidental overlap between GNOME contributors and Red Hat employees?

Community members outnumber Red Hat developers.

Because many of the new "features" are either unwanted or at worse distracting

Which features in the new release did you not want?

I can't believe LOL!

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