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Use Alacritty instead of Termite

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Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#181

Post by rektide »

siver_john wrote: post #85
twic wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the explanation lies here: > VTE is a terrible base for building a modern, fast and safe terminal emulator. It's slow, brittle and difficult to improve. It sounds like the maintainers of termite had a miserable time dealing with VTE, and are glad to see the back of it.

I mean I get that, but they could have just said we're no longer developing this, because we're tired or whatever. I just think it's interesting they made such a strong stand.

dev started with the hubris to try to do better.

the laziness to find supposedly good libraries to work atop.

and his impatience at a resistant, inflexible library resulted in them warding others off againat similar folly.

a three virtues mini saga if I've heard of one,

http://threevirtues.com/

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#182

Post by zxzax »

traverseda wrote: post #179
zxzax wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm a lot less sure, and the lack of clear requirements makes me even less certain. If you are interested to work on this patch, it wouldn't hurt to ask the maintainer for clarification. >as evidenced by tilix showing interest in this patch set. That's two of them, there are other terminals that use VTE. >I think that the termite developer explained very clearly why the approach suggested by the VTE maintainer woul…

I feel like you're not actually reading what I posted, which is frustrating. Like this: >Additional options could be added with the suggested approach. doesn't make any sense when the maintainer closed the ticket with "wontfix" in the middle of the discussion? Are we both reading the same thread? It seems like we're disagreeing about some fundamental facts here, but actually reading the ticket makes the facts pretty…

I'm sorry, I think I could have been more clear. Yes the ticket was closed. The place to discuss options in the new approach would be in the new ticket. Even though that particular patch was rejected as a solution, newer potential solutions to the same problems could still be discussed in the new ticket. Is there some fact that I missed? That new ticket still seems to be open for discussion, and it doesn't look like they are opposed to solving the problem at hand, they're only opposed to that one particular solution that won't solve the problem in all cases.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#183

Post by zxzax »

traverseda wrote: post #180
zxzax wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If some person openly said to you that they wanted to hurt you, then I would assume bad faith. Please let someone know if that happens, in most open source projects that would probably be a code of conduct violation. I don't think people who say such things often would be very welcome in GNOME. >I think assuming bad faith can be very helpful if only because it tells you what to not support or depend on. I'm sorry I d…

> This stuff is all open source, nobody can force you to use a library that you're not interested to use. That's not strictly speaking true, especially when politics and money get involved. Unless you're using a very loose definition of "force" which doesn't include any kind of network effect at all.

I feel your pain, I wish it were cheaper to develop software, but sadly the costs to compete with Microsoft and Apple are great. GNOME and KDE and such are already giving you all the code basically for free, I don't know what else they could do to help you out there. Accepting all feature requests that come their way is not a solution, because that usually tends to increase development costs even more.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#184

Post by jcelerier »

zxzax wrote: post #94
traverseda wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Your first link is an issue that was posted over 10 years ago and was long resolved in other area

this issue https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 is proof that it hasn't been resolved at all. Just reading GNOME maintainer's entitled comments ("If individual applications rely on non-standard behavior from compositors, those applications should get fixed. ", "I mean Qt should use GTK to draw decoration.") make my blood boil

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#185

Post by zxzax »

Cloudef wrote: post #172
zxzax wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SSD only isn't really an option, from what I have seen, eventually app designers want CSD to reduce clutter and to give their apps a better native look. This is true on all platforms, see for example macOS Big Sur. >This is if they actually are. They are, you would see terrible breakage with every app if they weren't. Your dynamic linker is effectively using dlopen/dlsym under the hood, it's not doing any type checki…

>SSD only isn't really an option, from what I have seen, eventually app designers want CSD to reduce clutter and to give their apps a better native look. This is true on all platforms, see for example macOS Big Sur. This isn't about the look of applications. This is about the needs of users and developers. I personally don't have window decorations at all on my main system, I don't need them and they are useless. The…

>This is about the needs of users and developers.

I know, I'm saying that app developers and users want CSD in some form eventually. I've seen this trend everywhere. You may not want them on your system and you're entitled to that opinion, but some app developers do want them.

>That's the point I'm trying to drive in here. GNOME devs feel like they can just break existing behaviors and ecosystems if they feel like it

I don't know what you mean, this feature was never supported in GNOME's Wayland session. It never had that existing behavior, the decorations were a private KDE extension that was picked up by mir and wlroots and then much later put into wayland-protocols. It doesn't make sense for KDE to implement a feature and then declare GNOME to be broken because some others copied that feature but GNOME didn't.

>meanwhile a single person has done a display server, that is not just wayland and xorg compatible, it's also much more flexible and more powerful than wayland ever is going to be

I personally like Arcan but according to the developer it's not trying to solve all the same problems as Wayland or X11 even though it may be compatible with some apps. I don't believe GNOME and KDE are going to rewrite their window manager in Lua for example.

>What I mean by typechecking is that with typical linkage + header scenario you get compile error if API changed (this won't prevent ABI breakage however). With dlopen/dlsym, if you have typo in your function pointer declarations, that can be hard to debug bug. Sure this can be avoided to make sure you generate such pointers from upstream headers and keep them up-to-date.

The API and ABIs for those libraries are stable across major versions, they guarantee that. All Linux distros would see major breakage if they didn't, since they don't necessarily recompile the applications along with library upgrades.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#186

Post by Cloudef »

zxzax wrote: post #185
Cloudef wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>SSD only isn't really an option, from what I have seen, eventually app designers want CSD to reduce clutter and to give their apps a better native look. This is true on all platforms, see for example macOS Big Sur. This isn't about the look of applications. This is about the needs of users and developers. I personally don't have window decorations at all on my main system, I don't need them and they are useless. The…

>This is about the needs of users and developers. I know, I'm saying that app developers and users want CSD in some form eventually. I've seen this trend everywhere. You may not want them on your system and you're entitled to that opinion, but some app developers do want them. >That's the point I'm trying to drive in here. GNOME devs feel like they can just break existing behaviors and ecosystems if they feel like it…

>I know, I'm saying that app developers and users want CSD in some form eventually. I've seen this trend everywhere. You may not want them on your system and you're entitled to that opinion, but some app developers do want them.

It feels like we are just going in circles now. Other compositors give the option for both. GNOME only gives the option for CSD, and tells others to "fix their app". You can use SSD or CSD, I don't care, but I also don't want to hear "this app doesn't work on mutter", or "use libgtk to make this app work on our special compositor".

>I personally like Arcan but according to the developer it's not trying to solve all the same problems as Wayland or X11 even though it may be compatible with some apps. I don't believe GNOME and KDE are going to rewrite their window manager in Lua for example.

Yeah I don't believe KDE or GNOME are ever gonna use arcan either personally. It's users most likely will be power users only. Considering it's reaching soon full Xorg compatibility however, it's probably possible to run X11 WM inside it. That said I'd personally would have no problem with the LUA. The whole arcan philosophy is kind of reverse of wayland, taking care of all the heavy lifting, making the actual development straightforward and less boilerplatey, even more so than X11. Heck, it's even a multimedia server for audio and video. Something jack can only dream of and pipewire trying to do.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#187

Post by zxzax »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #150
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.

> don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are meant for others to use I agree. This presentation convinced me: https://youtu.be/ON0A1dsQOV0?t=2468 GTK+ is really just a toolkit for GNOME projects. All other users are secondary.

To give another perspective, that presentation is from 7 years ago and does not reflect the current state of things. The situation has improved and currently some GNOME functionality is being moved out of GTK into a new library, so GTK can focus on being its own library: https://aplazas.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/blog/blog/2021/03/31/...

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#189

Post by dleslie »

rkangel wrote: post #133
dleslie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> things pushing niche workflows that the Gnome team didn't consider On the other hand Gnome3 is the first Linux desktop that I think is really non power user friendly. The laptop my partner uses at home is a slightly old Thinkpad I put Fedora on last year and it took her about 20 minutes to work out to use everything (less time than she took on a Mac). I think the Gnome developers have been pretty hostile to outside…

My non-power-user wife, father and mother all prefer MATE.

It works like Windows, which they are accustomed to.

Edit: I don't get why this was down-voted, but OK.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#190

Post by zxzax »

jcelerier wrote: post #184
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…

> Your first link is an issue that was posted over 10 years ago and was long resolved in other area this issue https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 is proof that it hasn't been resolved at all. Just reading GNOME maintainer's entitled comments ("If individual applications rely on non-standard behavior from compositors, those applications should get fixed. ", "I mean Qt should use GTK to draw decoration.…

I don't see how that is entitled. If you have technical arguments for why you disagree then I'd love to discuss that. Qt linking against GTK is not such a strange idea either, I believe at one point there was GTK theme engine for Qt that used GTK drawing functions to draw Qt widgets.
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