What I really like about #GNOME46 is that it turned out to be a great release for old and low-end devices. One of my test devices is Thinkpad T400. That hardware is over 15 years old and actually got faster over the last few years - especially this release.
One of my favorite improvements here, headed by Christian Hergert, was the boost to VTE. Terminals using #gtk4 are now much faster and responsive. I mean, damn, even switching tabs doesn't trigger a full redraw!
@rmader On that topic, any thoughts about the implications of the NGL renderer for older devices?
@tbernard It doesn't work on GL(ES) 2.x, so these devices will stick to the old GL renderer. IIUC the idea is to keep that around and - as long as people test and file issues - keep running. But yeah, they will slowly be left behind when it comes to more newish stuff like good fractional scale support. the T400 can make it to the 20 years mark still being supported and running smoothly.
@rmader Ah interesting, that's good to know. I guess the problem is devices old enough for NGL to be slow, but new enough to not get the fallback. Would be nice to have some numbers on how many devices are affected by that
@tbernard @rmader so far we've gotten the most complains in #postmarketos with msm8953 (https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon_450/625/626/632_(MSM8953) ) devices, which triggered: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6576 That's probably just a data-point, but might be fun to know? We also had a family of older devices that we had to directly revert to the old renderer, so in similar status as the T400. So far otherwise nobody massively complained :)
@pabloyoyoista @tbernard Yeah, granted, there's also some fallout with the new GTK renderer. I wonder if on these devices still got faster with GTK 4.14 when sticking to the old renderer, though - because of the switch to GLES (over big GL) by default and new features like the Wayland offloading (even though not many apps make use of that yet).