This would be a minor release in KDE
And file manager changes, settings changes, account integration changes, notification system changes, changes to a handful of their other core apps, compositor improvements, memory optimisations, a new rendering system, hardened security for their image viewer, and a bunch of accessibility improvements.
But, you know, if your attention span only allows you to focus on a new wallpaper, then sure.
But if you want to get into the weeds a bit:
I love how the complaint makes even less sense when you look at the KDE mega announcement from yesterday. The third thing listed is a new wallpaper.
Love KDE, but they have some really annoying users.
It is a fairly minor release for gnome. The problem with KDE is that it has so many features that it is harder to use and setup. It also doesn’t have a focus on stability.
Certainly not what I’ve experienced. But it’s definitely a lot better than it was 2 years ago.
I’m not sure what you mean??
KDE is usable out of the box, and very easy to use.
Not for me. I want my desktop to be functional and I don’t really customize all that much.
While most changes (file manager improvements, etc.) are cool to have and are just improvements to the overall experience, what’s up with the “fractional scaling and Mutter improvements”?
Why does nobody explain them more? At least for me, fractional scaling is the first thing that comes to my mind when thinking about what Gnome needs the most.
And performance improvements are also good to hear, but in which aspect? Triple dynamic buffering?
Does anyone have further information?
Yeah, but it sucks. Most XWayland-apps are blurry. So, I have the choice between not being able to read something because of my screen resolution at 100% scale, or activating fractional scaling and having half of my apps blurry.
There was the talk about font scaling a while ago, where UI elements also scale with the font size. Has something happened there?
I think the blurry of XWayland apps won’t be solved in this release, there were some news that may be combined with the settings and make Xwayland apps to be able to scale themselves like in KDE, if I understood it correctly
This release changes the ngl renderer to be the default renderer.
The intent of this change is to get wider testing and verify that
the new renderers are production-ready. If significant problems
show up, we will revert this change for 4.14.
You can still override the renderer choice using the GSK_RENDERER
environment variable.
Since ngl can handle fractional scaling much better than the old gl
renderer, we allow fractional scaling by default with gl now. If you
are using the old gl renderer (e.g. because your system is limited to
GLES2), you can disable fractional scaling by setting the GDK_DEBUG
environment variable to include the gl-no-fractional key.
This is what I’ve found here
This submitted article is far from a comprehensive changelog, and kinda glosses over some stuff, as you say.
Looks like a boring update but being boring is kinda the thing I appreciate in GNOME. It’s all about expectations.
When is not sucking going to be added as a feature?
KDE devs have taken steps to make more Gnome-like software. A new generation of Gnome devs in the distant future could go full circle ^
It seems like a polishing release to me. Nice of see.
