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Use Alacritty instead of Termite

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Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#91
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome developers actively hate their users and non-gnome developers. This issue takes the cake: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217

Gnome is one of those projects that should be considered "free in license only". While the project is free to hack on as you wish for your own purposes, your chances of being able to influence the development of the main project are minuscule. To borrow a term or two, it's developed in the bazaar, but run like the cathedral. Maybe an open-air cathedral. Firefox is another project that I'd put under this label. All th…

> "free in license only"

Very interesting. Thanks.

Are you familiar with Bryan Cantrill's "right to fork, but not the power" observation?

It deeply influenced me. Alas, I didn't find his post-mortem until after I already joined an FOSS effort (kauli.org). Which failed. For so many reasons. Neutering us contributors probably being foremost.

Copypasta:

OpenSolaris challenges • That certain critical bits had to remain proprietary made forking the operating system technically difficult... • And that virtually all Solaris implementation knowledge lived within Sunʼs walls made it a practical impossibility • The community had the right to fork, but not the power • This led down the primrose path to open source governance: governing boards, elections, constitutions • And because all development on the system realistically required copyright assignment to Sun, OpenSolaris (sadly) remained a Sun puppet • Worse, some among Sunʼs middle management fancied themselves puppeteers...

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cant...

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's your best argument against Gnome it seems like they are doing pretty well. Decorations can be done client-side with a library if needed - there is no reason to push that work to the compositor.

And now Qt, Electron, games , old programs will need to do extra work to satisfy a GNOME designer ego. you could always tell the window manager not to paint the decorations and you could have your own cool decorations (using a library if you want). From my point of view this looks that GNOME is force pushing their vision to all their users and all GTK users unfortunately.

Electron uses Gtk and Games should use SDL2. They will support CSD, which is work, but it will happen.

You could also say that SSD would mean that Mutter needs to do extra work just to satisfy an application designer ego.

Btw: I'm a GNOME user who is against SSD.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#93

I used to use termite, but switched to kitty for ... reasons I can't remember now. Does alacritty support ligatures yet? I've been using kitty because it does, but then I have issues with tmux in kitty ... I know, I want my cake and eat it

I've been running kitty and tmux for over a year now and if I have any issues with tmux I've been inured to them. Oh wait, I think a lot of kittens don't work and that might be related? What problems do you have?

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#94
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Gnome is one of those projects that should be considered "free in license only". While the project is free to hack on as you wish for your own purposes, your chances of being able to influence the development of the main project are minuscule. That's not been my experience at all. The outrage machine on social media tends to spread around the small handful of patches that do get rejected so they can get angry about…

As a programmer Gnome has really damaged their relationship with a lot of developers. For example take a look here: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 >I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry. Gnome kind of goe…

Your first link is an issue that was posted over 10 years ago and was long resolved in other areas. It's not an illustrative example. I really wish people would stop trying to revive these ancient flamewars without acknowledging the current state of things (not saying this is your fault, but a little diligence always helps).

The second two links you're posting are again, the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of patches are accepted, you just happened to stumble across two of the contentious ones that got a big outrage response on reddit. Please go look at the other thousands of issues and MRs against GTK if you don't believe me, it's not just GNOME people filing those.

I would say I thoroughly agree with the last article you posted. There has never been a "Linux platform." It was always Motif versus KDE versus GNOME versus Enlightenment versus all the rest. Historically they only cooperated with each other on certain things. If none of them refused to cooperate, we would still probably be using Motif. We can come up with various reasons for why this fragmentation happened but placing all the blame for that on GNOME for going its on way doesn't make many sense when this fragmentation always existed.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#95

Is there any indication of the energy impact using a GL context to render plain old text? These concepts seem incompatible in the context of a laptop, and who needs GL here when the bottleneck is biological. One of my favourite working modes is shutting down everything and just hacking away in vim, partly for distraction management but primarily because of battery.

Why would GL rendering be any less efficient ? You don't have to rerender the entire screen in GL or render at MAX FPS if nothing changed.

[deleted]

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#96

I have no beef with gtk/gnome and the like, but I find it really funny when developers use such colorful language. Still, as a heavy terminal user, I fail to understand what's the big deal with the choice of terminal. I have used only xterm for more than 20 years (with a short stint with gnome-terminal, and I didn't find any relevant difference). It starts instantaneously and doesn't make any fuss while it's running.…

Speed. A terminal’s job is most just to print text on the screen. You might be surprised at just how slowly that can be done.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#97
post #96

I have no beef with gtk/gnome and the like, but I find it really funny when developers use such colorful language. Still, as a heavy terminal user, I fail to understand what's the big deal with the choice of terminal. I have used only xterm for more than 20 years (with a short stint with gnome-terminal, and I didn't find any relevant difference). It starts instantaneously and doesn't make any fuss while it's running.…

Speed. A terminal’s job is most just to print text on the screen. You might be surprised at just how slowly that can be done.

Never had a problem with xterm's speed. In fact, it seemed snappier than gnome-terminal, especially when maximized.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#98
post #59
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why you are saying that has something to do with some attitude from GNOME. There are several Wayland compositors that don't implement that feature.

>There are several Wayland compositors that don't implement that feature. Can you list some that aren't weston or dead projects?

I don't follow all the Wayland compositors but Enlightenment doesn't, and Weston matters here. If somebody really wants this to become standard, implementing it in Weston should be priority.

Every compositor library I've looked at also considers this optional, e.g. mir, qtwayland, wlroots.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#99
post #10

I liked termite because of the keyboard based selection mode and the minimal functionality. Wasn't aware that Alacrity supports that now. Alacrity is my choice for Windows, but unfortunately I cannot use it on WSL2, because it needs GLX features, which are not available. I hope I can soon use the new WSL2 graphics support

> unfortunately I cannot use it on WSL2

I’m confused by what you’re saying here, because I can’t think of any particularly compelling reason to run Alacritty inside WSL beyond ease of installation.

You can run the Windows Alacritty from WSL2 with no trouble (like any other .exe file), and you can run WSL stuff inside Alacritty.

Admittedly spawning something WSL-side inside Alacritty from the WSL side becomes a smidgeon more complicated, because you’ll need to rewrite any `alacritty --command …` to run it through wsl.exe or your distro-specific launcher. But even if you need to do that, that should be pretty much set-and-forget with a little wrapper shell script.

Have I misunderstood the reason for your remark?

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#100
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having observed this for a while that often seems to be just the way Gnome works. Patches that help non-Gnome projects are held to a much higher (sometimes unobtainable) standard than patches that help members of the Gnome foundation. It seems very insular, and if you want to "scratch your own itch" as an outsider expect to take 5-20x as much effort for the same feature. There will always be a reason why this patch i…

Again if you actually read the bug report, it contradicts what you're saying. This patch was rejected because it created unnecessary work for terminals outside the GNOME project. The favored solution would help all terminals using that widget.

Did they ever implement that solution?
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