Re: Abysmal state of GTK build

[Payas Relekar]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

> What makes you think the GTK developers will be able to dictate what
> people will use?

While I hope for otherwise, and this is not the place to discuss this,
general trend in Linux land over past decade or so is that once Gnome
blesses something as default, it tends to be blessed by others as well.

> Remember that if the world revolved around their decisions, we would all
> be clowns occupying a peanut gallery.

:) I tend to agree here, but this discussion is veering off-topic.

>> That is unfortunate. Considering HiDPI + mixed DPI support is
>> non-existent in X11, I was really hoping Wayland feature bulimia to be
>> solved/on-way-to-be-solved problem by now.
>
> Why do you think that's so?  On X, the X server says nothing about the
> scale of a window, screen, or the part of a screen taken by a monitor.
> A program can simply rescale itself as it moves across different
> outputs.
>
> I think the reason people think HiDPI support doesn't work on X is that
> it doesn't work in Xwayland, which is strictly a problem with that, and
> is not seen on bare-metal X.

I only have personal experience, so apologies in advance if I miss
something obvious. I use Plasma desktop (used Gnome for years before)
on my laptop as no-frills feature rich Desktop Environment. I do not
like messing around with Xresources and like things to Just Work™.

My laptop display is plain old 15" 1080p, but usually connect with
external monitor (27" 4K). On X11 there is no option for external
display except 1080p so all the pixels go to waste. Only on Wayland can
I select 4K and different DPI settings (125% on laptop display + 175% on
external). From what I've read this is fairly consistent with other
people's experiences.

As you mention, there is probably a way to get X11 to behave the same,
but if this option is not straightforward enough to be implemented and
made available by a DE as config-loaded as Plasma then we can safely
consider it to be out of skill/interest of majority of computer users.

>> That is fair. From what I understand Wayland support on non-Linux
>> systems is still imperfect at best so X11 support is here to
>> stay. But, can we have it as non-default and get away with it for the
>> most part?
>
> No.  AFAIK it was recently discovered that less than 10% of Firefox
> users on non-macOS Unix systems were using Wayland or Xwayland.

Good point. But this discussion focuses more on future that status quo.

>> Apologies for simple (and possibly stupid) questions, but GTK
>> situation has more thorns than I previously thought. Considering WSL2
>> will have more people using Emacs via Wayland/Pgtk making defaults
>> more important.
>
> I don't think supporting the PGTK build on MS Windows is a good idea at
> all.

Oh no, perhaps I misspoke. WSL2 is basically a Linux VM that comes built
into Windows 11. The Emacs runs on Linux, uses Linux sys-calls to talk
to Linux kernel, and renders PGTK build on Wayland. The VM then uses a
custom RDP to integrate Emacs window with the parent Windows OS.

I only mentioned it because this particular implementation of RDP only
works with Wayland natively and X11 applications are second class via
XWayland.

I can provide some more resources if you'd like, but generally searching
WSL2 and following links to MS documentation is sufficient.


Having said all of the above, I am not an Emacs maintainer. Po/Eli/Lars
have much better understanding and obvious say for good reasons. I am
only here to provide alternate perspective.

Thanks,
Payas

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