Hi all - just wondering, is anyone else experiencing where GNOME/GTK Flatpak apps have started looking extremely blurry since, presumably, all the GNOME updates in snapshot 20230920? This is both with apps that were installed prior to that snapshot, and looked fine, and with newly installed apps. Anyone have a quick lead on a possible change that may have caused it / what might now need done to fix?
Thanks - I guess I’d be surprised that this is an old issue, considering everything was working as expected up until the most recent version upgrades…but maybe it just happened to hit me?
Two other things have come up since I made this post: I realized it was only happening on the Wayland session - everything is fine on X11 - and at least one other person has experienced this just now. Perhaps all a symptom of some fragile interconnection of protocols between the KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK “worlds” as they exist in Flatpak?
I use openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma.
I also have this issue now – the fonts in GTK ftatpak apps have became non-antialised after the 20230920 snapshot, I believe. That’s the one where flatpak package was updated, so I believe this is the culprit.
However, the issue is deeper than just the fonts not being antialised – the whole system intagration of GTK flatpak apps appears to be broken in recent snapshots for me: the theme fallbacks to adwaita, but respects the dark theme preference; the cursor fallbacks to adwaita cursor when interacting with GTK flatpak apps – and it’s two times larger! And i’m not even talking about the fonts and icon themes. Libadwaita applications no longer use the preset that I set in Gradience, and fonts look terrible too. Qt and QML flatpak apps, including Kirigami apps, look like they should.
I did a rollback to a snapshot with an old version of flatpak, and it all went back to normal. After an upgrade, the the system integration issue happens again.
So, what do we do now? Wait for upstream fixes? Or is it openSUSE Tumbleweed problem?
Based on this comment from someone who seems to be very deep into the flatpak / xdg-desktop-portal world, this would seem to be A) upstream and B) kind of a gnarly one.
Honestly, for as much as I have advocated for Wayland in general, this was a straw that broke the camel’s back (which had already been burdened pretty heavily by a recent increase in the number of plasmashell crashes - up to multiple times per day) for me, and I’m back to X11 for the time being. With the right compositor settings, everything seems pretty good, and I can wait for the massive number of Wayland-related fixes coming in Qt6 / Plasma 6.
Been a software engineer for 30+ years (retired a couple years ago).
This is opinion of course - for me, Wayland is not ready for prime time. X11 runs fine on the 2 desktops and two laptops. Whatever “special features” Wayland might offer isn’t offset by the constant challenges. (the question will normally come up “are you using Wayland or X11?”).
We all want to accomplish various tasks, whether it’s work or pleasure, vs spending time hoping to find a fix.
Please don’t confuse others. Wayland is ready for prime time for most people. It still has some disadvantages, such as the lack of colour profiles, whick makes it unusable for some professional artists. Various issues are naturally appearing (rather seldom) because it’s under active development, unlike X11. There are no “constant challenges” like you say. We are on the front line because we are running a rolling release, so regressions reach us first. It’s not exclusive to flatpak and xdg-portal: for example, a month ago a snapshot updated my preferred image viewer - qwiew - to the new version and it just stopped opening. It was fixed after a couple of days. It was absolutely fine because I’m aware that i’m running a rolling distribution. It is fine now, because I know it’s absolutely going to be fixed pretty soon. No need to criticize wayland for the fact that it’s under active develolment!
I’m saddened by the fact that this type of criticism is always brought up when people talk about issues with wayland. It’s like people who assume that if software recieves bug fixes, it is buggy and should be avoided. Some people say that all the time about KDE… But @myswtest, you had been in software development for 30 years, you definetely know about the constantly changing environment of software projects. I’m just worried that people who use X11 because of opinions like yours will have a lot pf problems later on because of the lack of feature parity between X11 and wayland. And it could be happening soon because of the shift in DE development.
I use Plasma/X11 because, as @myswtest says, Plasma/Wayland is not ready for prime time. But when I occasionally use Gnome, I go with Wayland.
As best I can tell, based on forum comments, people are trying out Wayland with KDE. A few are staying with it, but most go back to X11. When Plasma6 comes out, expect people to give Wayland another try.
I’ve been running Plasma Wayland as a daily driver for the better part of five years. It does everything I need it to. Sure, it was rough for a while, but I have zero need, nor interest in switching back to X11 for anything. Ever again.
