As pointed out in This Week in GNOME, there’s been some continued work on Variable Rate Refresh for the GNOME desktop. The VRR setting within GNOME Settings continues to be iterated on as the developers iron out how they’d like to present the Variable Rate Refresh setting for users. The developers have been discussing how to best present the option as to avoid confusion as well as how it makes the most technical sense as far as the option goes.
Edit: “Variable Refresh Rate - Roadmap” - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3125
Great. I heard there were flickering issues under some niche scenarios, due to the cursor and the content being displayed becoming out of sync with one another, that were previously preventing the merge of this feature.
I’m assuming it’s been solved?
The “Preserve battery healthy by keeping charge between 20% and 80%” is a nice option though.
The Steam Deck is what got me to finally try modern KDE and eventually switch to it. I recently moved my gaming PC to Fedora 39, and considered trying Gnome again for variety’s sake until I remembered that it currently does not natively support VRR, so this is good news.
I think I prefer Plasma at this point, and I’m excited with Plasma 6 around the corner, but my desktop PC is basically a gaming appliance, so I think the relative simplicity of Gnome might be nice to run on there eventually as these features catch up. I like to have variety in what I’m running anyways. I appreciate that it gives me a wider perspective on my preferences.
I find GNOME’s “must be perfect” approach to accepting new code counterintuitive.
One of the largest benefits of having a clean architecture is increased velocity and extensibility. What’s the point in nitpicking over perfection when it takes literally years to merge a feature, arguably one considered basic and essential by today’s standards?
KDE is on the other side of this pendulum, integrating everything and resulting in a disjointed, buggy disaster.
Where’s the middle way? It used to be XFCE. What is it now?
I definitely get what you mean, and sometimes agree, but tbh I’m glad Gnome is an option for those who want a DE that is uncompromisingly UX-focused and straight up won’t accept changes until they’re damn sure it’ll be production-ready.
And while they’ve been relatively slow in getting adaptive refresh working, they’ve been very quick with some other things. Idk why it took them this long to sort out the cursor occasionally becoming out of sync with displayed content’s refresh rate, but there must be a reason for it.
Gnome was at the forefront with Wayland, PulseAudio, they’ve been the biggest pusher of Portals, pretty much all of their GTK4 apps have been designed to also be compatible with mobile devices. Accessibility features on Gnome are pretty great for a Linux DE.
As a general rule, I’d say their development process works well, despite there being the occasional holdup.
And while Plasma obviously isn’t as bug-free as Gnome, it’s come a long way since the Plasma 4/early Plasma 5 days. I still don’t feel I can depend on it the same as I could for Gnome or Cinnamon, but don’t underestimate their progress — since like 5.15/5.16 they’ve really got their act together.
Quality control is important for a project that is going to be supported for long time, and used by many. Slow but steady is a right approach for open source project, IMO.
KDE is very stable.
Lol
The lack of VRR in GNOME is what had me change to KDE. I prefer GNOME in many ways, but I was tired of having to use the vrr patches to keep the functionality.
If you are using Arch, it can be enabled (though it’s still experimental) [1]
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Variable_refresh_rate#GNOME
Have you tried it? How is stability?
This. As soon as GNOME gets VRR & HDR, I think I’m going back. Also, I’ve read Steam has great integration with KDE, does anyone know how exactly?
I wish GNOME had DRM on Wayland, kinda annoying to always have to switch to Xorg for VR
