Decided, after years of circling around it, that I would finally Make A Serious Go at using Godot.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

Decided, after years of circling around it, that I would finally Make A Serious Go at using Godot. Downloaded 4.6dev3.

It does not support 1.5x DPI on Linux (GNOME Wayland). This implies neither do the games.

Instantly unimpressed. The first thing I want out of a game engine is to create a working display surface :/

[mcc@mastodon.social]

It is so incredibly defeating for every instance of "I will use this new tool" meaning "well, before I use it, I should spend an hour trying to figure out how to tease it into supporting Mutter, and filing bugs if it cannot support Mutter.

EDIT: "--display-driver wayland". Why is this not the default?

[mcc@mastodon.social]

Is there a way to get Godot as a Flatpak?

[lovegame@mastodon.social]

@mcc i think this might be the hardest problem in computer science. not godot but for my electron based web game i ended up just forcing it to run on the x emulation layer to avoid a weird wayland window sizing bug

[miodvallat@hostux.social]

@mcc Maybe if you wait long enough.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@lovegame Yes so this is the problem, if you are using GNOME, if you use 1.5x DPI (in other words: "if you own a Lenovo laptop, all of which are 1.5x DPI") running in X means the entire screen runs with a blur filter on it. One could construct an argument this is not the game maker's fault, Electron's fault or even Wayland's fault, but solely GNOME's fault for making things worse for no reason, but it's how things are.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@mcc what does "support Mutter" mean in this context? just… works-without-obvious-defects-on-GNOME-on-Wayland? Or something more specific?

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@glyph Moving from general to specific

"Somehow, Mutter finds a way to break every fucking thing I interact with"

"Somehow, Mutter finds a way to break every fucking thing I interact with, usually for reasons related to 1.5x DPI"

"Mutter XWayland is fundamentally broken insofar as it does a Categorically Wrong Thing on literally every X11 app whenever you are running with a non-integral DPI scale"

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@mcc gotcha. so this is not exactly in empirical point-by-point contrast to, like, KWin, but more just trying to have a personal experience of a computer that works even a little bit for your development tools

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@glyph There are more than two problems that Mutter has but KWin does not have. However, the "1.5x DPI is broken in Mutter XWayland" issue is the critical one, because

- Every Lenovo laptop I have encountered in the last 20 years has 1.5x DPI.
- Lenovo has consistently been the cheapest minimally-reliable laptop provider during this time.
- The X->Wayland transition has been rocky
- The most solution for that rockiness most apps pick is "well, we'll just run in XWayland a little longer"

[dotstdy@mastodon.social]

@glyph @mcc it's a direct contrast with kwin, for this specific issue, but not for all issues. in short xwayland on gnome does an extremely bad upscale by default for fractional scales, and does a very bad downscale if you turn on all the experimental flags. kwin simply lets you turn the scaling off entirely, letting the application handle it own its own, which is what you want most of the time in practice.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@dotstdy @glyph yeah, there are two things happening—

1. Most X programs simply *do the right thing with scaling*, if you run them in X. I am not sure what the mechanism is but the mechanism exists and works.

2. Certain specific categories of app (video games, particularly) are entirely DPI agnostic and therefore not scaling at all produces good behavior.

Disturbingly, Microsoft Windows wins out over Linux here by simply giving you a per-app checkbox.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@mcc @lovegame I don't know how or why this works, but I reinstalled Fedora with the "cinnamon spin" (it might work by just installing cinnamon, but I can't say it will because I have not tried that on regular Fedora or any other distro) and running cinnamon on X allows for correct fractional DPI scaling with no blurring. The only quirk so far is QT5 programs need their cursor scale to be explicitly set in an environment variable.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@aeva @lovegame Oh. And Cinnamon is using Mutter?

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@mcc @lovegame I thought X was going to be out of reach because I also need highdpi to be supported correctly, but it turns out that isn't always true apparently? When I figure out how to run "window maker" with a fractional DPI scale, I will be unstoppable.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@mcc @lovegame allegedly it uses a fork of mutter called muffin

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@aeva @lovegame Can I give my GNOME… a muffin…

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@mcc @lovegame I have no idea. I would recommend asking your gnome if they have any allergies that might be applicable first.

[dotstdy@mastodon.social]

@mcc @glyph unfortunately gnome is allergic to any solution which involves a setting. universally wrong for everybody is the philosophy there, a perfect compromise.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@mcc I take offense at that. I own a Lenovo laptop and the display density is 284 dpi (4K resolution on a 15.6in display) which calls for a 2.5 scaling, not 1.5 ;-)