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Use Alacritty instead of Termite

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Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#111

Post by cookguyruffles »

reader_mode wrote: post #44
cookguyruffles wrote: post #12

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.

I'd be incredibly surprised if mobile power management did not account for the difference between "blitting array of 2D pixels" and "running massively parallel shader". Even if not done for energy conservation, it might be for TDP profile.

Separately, it's long been a thing on Nvidia Optimus laptops where the most inexplicable thing could cause the iGPU to be swapped out for the power-hungry discrete GPU. A GL-powered terminal definitely seems like it could be in that territory.

In short, many reasons it could be less efficient, hence the question, is there any evidence that it /is/ less efficient?

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#112

Post by zxzax »

traverseda wrote: post #107
zxzax wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's not an illustrative example. What I'm describing is a cultural problem. If you don't think that link is illustrative than you don't understand what it is I'm trying to illustrate.

Again this particular cultural problem was resolved a long time. Ubuntu and XFCE and GNOME have since all aligned on this matter. I see what you are trying to illustrate, maybe it was true 10 years ago, but it's not now. Cultures can change you know.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#113

Post by CrazyPyroLinux »

dleslie wrote: post #27
bhaak wrote: post #3

> GTK and most of the GNOME project are much of the same. Avoid them and don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are meant for others to use. Choose your dependencies wisely. Sometimes only a crystal ball would have helped but often, a little bit of due dilligence would have prevented lots of upgrade pain down the line.

Gnome has a fairly negative rep now, thanks in part to its repeated spurning of feature requests from developers and users. I remember when the Gnome desktop was exciting; there were frequently new apps to try, things pushing niche workflows that the Gnome team didn't consider. That all stopped with Gnome3.

I've never understood all the love and excitement and attention that GNOME has gotten ever since Canonical got behind it and dropped Unity. All the cheerleading over what seem like really basic fixes that haven't been a problem on other DEs, like "now the single-threaded shell crashes to login less often! Horray!"

That's only intensified with 3.40 (Now hailed as "40" like a pop star using only their first name.) Apparently the top hot new feature is "horizontal workspaces"...mind-blowing.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#114

Post by Cloudef »

thayne wrote: post #110
bhaak wrote: post #3

> GTK and most of the GNOME project are much of the same. Avoid them and don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are meant for others to use. Choose your dependencies wisely. Sometimes only a crystal ball would have helped but often, a little bit of due dilligence would have prevented lots of upgrade pain down the line.

Sadly, I don't know of a good alternative to GTK. Qt, being C++ is more difficult to bind to from other languages, and doesn't seem to integrate quite as well with XDG/Linux standards, unless you use KDE which is a much heavier dependency.

I wish blender's UI toolkit was separated into own library. It's pretty much the best UI I've used, and I like blender for other reasons too (it doesn't open multiple windows, popups or nags, everything's contained in it).

Immediate mode UI framework that actually supports accessibility stuff would be neat too.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#115

Post by da_big_ghey »

bionade24 wrote: post #13

When stepping away from KDE to sway, tried diffrent terminal emulators, but especially compared konsole, termite & alacritty. Back then (October 2020) I found alacritty to have really slow startup times on high-end machines (and got confirmation that's it's not my fault on IRC). Even massive Konsole started up faster. It also treats Wayland badly. So I settled with Termite, which I really like so far. It's sad that i…

are you trying urxvt? it have a daemon mode so each new terminal create only window but not whole new instance.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#116

Post by abrowne »

fullstop wrote: post #109
bitwize wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X11's been EOL'd, dude.

I keep going back to X11 for various reasons. I was close last time, but google chrome still has various problems with wayland if one has more than one window open. I know that this is a chrome bug, but it ruins the experience and for this use case I can not use Firefox.

Same. I'm slowly switching from GNOME to Sway, but I'm not going 100% until Chromium's Wayland support is better, since I spend 98% of my time in Chromium or VS Code. The good news is they are actively working on it since ChromeOS will (does?) use Wayland so they can split the Chromium browser from the Chromium that runs the OS shell.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#117

Post by reader_mode »

cookguyruffles wrote: post #111
reader_mode wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd be incredibly surprised if mobile power management did not account for the difference between "blitting array of 2D pixels" and "running massively parallel shader". Even if not done for energy conservation, it might be for TDP profile. Separately, it's long been a thing on Nvidia Optimus laptops where the most inexplicable thing could cause the iGPU to be swapped out for the power-hungry discrete GPU. A GL-powere…

These days a lot (most ?) of rendering toolkits are GPU accelerated, including things like your browser - you'd likely hit those issues with other apps as well then.

You could hit drivers bugs for sure, but that means in your particular config GL will be worse so you need to test, doubt this translates to a general scenario.

I think a lot of people assume because your default GL setup is to use immediate mode to re-render everything at refresh rate that's the only way to do rendering and that's why GL apps get the reputation for being power hungry.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#119

Post by _d7dt »

Cloudef wrote: post #106
zxzax wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Considering it got xdg prefix and was included in wayland-protocols that should be as standard as it gets. Weston is barebones "reference" compositor. It's not for normal use. Mir is dead. The xdg-decoration is based on KDE's own protocol, it was later refined and pushed to wayland-protocols by wlroots devs. Now kde uses the xdg-decoration too. >Every compositor library I've looked at also considers this optional Bec…

Inclusion in wayland-protocols means that it had enough support without opposition. It doesn't mean that all the members are interested in implementing the feature. According to the members list, Weston and Mir are still important enough to have a vote: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/b...

>application have to explicitly ask for compositor to decorate the window.

My reading of the protocol is that even when the application asks for that, the compositor can still reject it, and the application must always provide a fallback to CSD.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#120

Post by Cloudef »

_d7dt wrote: post #119
Cloudef wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering it got xdg prefix and was included in wayland-protocols that should be as standard as it gets. Weston is barebones "reference" compositor. It's not for normal use. Mir is dead. The xdg-decoration is based on KDE's own protocol, it was later refined and pushed to wayland-protocols by wlroots devs. Now kde uses the xdg-decoration too. >Every compositor library I've looked at also considers this optional Bec…

Inclusion in wayland-protocols means that it had enough support without opposition. It doesn't mean that all the members are interested in implementing the feature. According to the members list, Weston and Mir are still important enough to have a vote: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/b... >application have to explicitly ask for compositor to decorate the window. My reading of the protocol…

>My reading of the protocol is that even when the application asks for that, the compositor can still reject it, and the application must always provide a fallback to CSD.

Yes this is correct too. I assume it was mainly put there for GNOME :) I honestly don't fathom why you would want to be CSD only in general purpose compositor aimed for desktop users. It can make sense in specialized cases. But then again I believe GNOME doesn't want normal users, but rather users that will always do what they want them to do, aka the Apple mentality.

This is all made worse with the low-level libraries and programs that don't use the gnome toolkit, end up just drawing some very primitive title bar (sometimes even without any buttons), just so people can drag the window around under gnome compositor. I guess this is the kind of end user experience gnome devs want? Nah, they'll just tell users to use only their apps instead next.

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