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Use Alacritty instead of Termite

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Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#141

Post by rthomas6 »

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…

> On the other hand Gnome3 is the first Linux desktop that I think is really non power user friendly.

I think Plasma and Cinnamon also belong in this group.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#142

Post by vladvasiliu »

zokier wrote: post #122
vladvasiliu wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... and not to mention it's one of the slowest (yes! contrary to what they blowhard they response time to keys is very large) terminals out there. This is intriguing to me. You're not the first I've seen complaining about this, so there must be something to it. But in my case, on a fairly low-end machine, what I type shows up instantaneously[0] on the screen, even when the CPU is busy compiling. I'm running an i5-6…

Nothing with computers is instantaneous. I strongly suspect that there is at least 15ms of latency in your setup, and probably much more. Different people have different sensitivity to latency, just because you don't notice it doesn't mean it isn't there.

Well, you're right, technically. But in that case, all terminal applications have latency, so is your point that the parent's complaint is unfounded?

In these kinds of discussions, the talk is usually about perceived latency not absolute latency. If it feels like there's basically none, then it's good enough. It doesn't mean there's absolutely 0.0 ns latency.

> Different people have different sensitivity to latency

This I can get behind. But I doubt that what seems instantaneous to me would seem "terribly long a time" to someone else, especially since I look specifically for this. As you pointed out, no terminal app has absolute 0 latency, so if one particular software has terrible latency compared to another one, the difference would have to be pretty huge.

Do note that I'm not talking about being bothered by the latency. I know a lot of people who will notice the latency when pointed out to them, but they don't really care. Personally, I hate when things lag, even if I may happen to have a worse perception than average (don't actually know if that's the case).

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#143

Post by Cloudef »

zxzax wrote: post #139
Cloudef wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>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. I would not say this is true, GNOME just handles extensibility differently. If you want to help with this, please consider working on this issue: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1053 That would pave the way for GNOME shell extensions to implement window decorations (and o…

What actually will happen is that those developers either will ignore gnome, force the application to run under xwayland if it detects mutter, or implement a really primitive decoration that will make users open bug reports "why is the decoration so weird?". They'll be taking similar stance as gnome devs and start telling users "it's not our bug", "report it to gnome devs".

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/3646

>SSD might be the approach used by other desktops, but it is not the only way to achieve this functionality, and it may not even be the simplest.

Surely zero code in client is the "simplest". It also makes sure the decoration always works and behaves the same way in every application. It also won't stop working if the application freezes. Sure with a magical library that you managed to force on everyone at least the consistency and "not buggy" could be solved. But why is this necessary when others don't need it?

And I surely don't want to see, libkde-decoration.so, libgnome-decoration.so, libwhatever-decoration.so

Here is also very good technical writeup on CSDs from author of yet another display server, that's not wayland nor X11

https://arcan-fe.com/2018/01/27/argumenting-client-side-deco...

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#144

Post by mwill »

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…

This is a weird aside, and almost certainly not your problem since it sounds like you're using Wayland, but for anyone else reading, I had slow start up times with alacrity myself, and sometimes getting a blank window, and it turned out to be a problem with xserver providing weird numbers for my monitor when it tries to figure out DPI, and `WINIT_X11_SCALE_FACTOR=1 alacritty` solves it.

Best I can figure its not really a winit/alacritty bug, but some gremlin with my particular monitor/gpu/nvidia drivers.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#145

Post by zxzax »

Cloudef wrote: post #54
akvadrako wrote: post #50

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.

Sure you can do everything with a library, and that's how you end up with library hell, or dependencies that will be hard to get rid of or replaced later, because how big they become or how broken the API was (e.g. fontconfig). But being the only ecosystem where that's needed is pushing some heavy boilerplate on developers. Why would games, or non-gnome apps care about decoration? There's plenty of good examples of a…

>Why would games, or non-gnome apps care about decoration?

I don't think they would which is why the low level toolkits like SDL are the ones that have to handle it. Unfortunately that's the way it is, libwayland is very barebones and doesn't have a way to draw decorations.

>this is not the only case where gnome devs just decide to be jerks.

Please do not assume bad faith and suggest that someone is being a jerk to you personally because they didn't implement a feature that you were interested in. This is a sure fire way to cause burnout and stress to open source developers.

>wlroots and sway developers are doing good work to try to bring wayland and its tools to same level as X11, but then we have these other groups that just actively reject anything that doesn't go along with their "vision".

I have seen wlroots and sway developers reject patches and features that don't go along with their vision too, so I am not sure what distinction you're trying to draw.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#146

Post by jstimpfle »

zxzax wrote: post #112
traverseda wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As someone who has to occasionally work on a Gnome desktop, I can confirm that they still haven't fixed type ahead in Nautilus. Another point is that their Alt-Tab has a strange auto-grouping behaviour that totally breaks my workflow. (I have multiple terminal windows open and switching between them is a pain, it has to be seen to be believed).

Two big annoyances, and reading that type-ahead thread quoted above is quite an experience. Being in my 30s, it's been a long time I've felt such an enormous disgust at the amount of neglect and arrogance that is being displayed there.

And I strongly disagree with that sentiment "it's ours, go make your own if you don't like it". Point is, I do not want to use their crappy product but I have to, due to political forces that extend from Red Hat to what my employer has installed on that computer in the lab that I have to deploy and test my software on.

If I had a choice, I would prefer to install there my simple arcane plain window manager, xterm (fast and crisp), and just enough junk so I can do my work. My Thinkpad X220 with this setup is actually pleasant to use and has required basically 0 maintenance in the last 6 years.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#147

Post by MayeulC »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #115
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.

It's not wayland-native, though.

I use it with sway on a laptop that doesn't support OpenGL well enough for other terminals, it's okay, but I miss some features, and other <indows could snoop on it. I also had to install xwayland for it.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#148

Post by jeppesen-io »

enriquto wrote: post #81

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.…

Hey, use what you like!

As the terminal is the most used app for many here, it's natural for many to care about the small details.

Aesthetics and speed are important to me and to that end Kitty is my choice. Not that there's anything wrong with xterm

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#149

Post by MayeulC »

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…

I settled on kitty, personally. I quite like it, and its image supports works very well with ranger!

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#150

Post by matheusmoreira »

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.

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