• BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    The actual answer in on Stack exchange in their comments.

    https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/740319/why-is-gnome-fractional-scaling-1-7518248558044434-instead-of-1-75

    It is related to a mix of actual display resolution vs conversions to virtual resolutions (the scaled resolution), and use of single precision floating point calculations.

    Essentially my understanding is what it is doing is storing the value needed to convert your actual resolutions number of pixels (2160p) to a virtual resolution number of pixels (2160/1.75 horizontally) but that gets you fractions of a virtual pixel. So instead of 1.75 it scaled by 1.75182… to get to a whole number of virtual pixels to work with. Then on top of that the figure is slightly altered from what we’d expect by floating point errors.

    If you take the actual horizontal resolution 2190 and divide it by the virtual resolution it’s trying to use 1233 pixels, you need a conversion value of 1.75182… to convert to it so you don’t get fractions of a pixel. If you used 1.75 you’d get 1234.2857… pixels. So gnome is storing the fraction that gets you a clean conversion in pixels to about 4 decimal places of a pixel.

    Full credit to rakslice at Stack Exchange who also goes into the detail.

    • gian @lemmy.grys.it
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      10 months ago

      True, but it is not that difficult to trucante (or round) the value at the second decimal value.

    • ⲇⲅⲇ@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      Gnome is coded with JavaScript (lmao 🤣) so yeah, I Think you are right.

      EDIT: Actually, even if JavaScript and other languages have this issue, the value 1.7518248558044434 has not this issue. There is another reply that explains it and makes totally sense. But still pretty lame to know the desktop runs with JavaScript. (Yeah, I hate Gnome)

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        It’s not a “language” issue it’s a “computer” issue. This math is being done on the CPU.

        IEEE 754

        Some languages do provide for “arbitrary precision math” (Java’s BigDecimal for example) but it’s slower to do that. Not what you want if you’re multiplying a 4k matrix every millisecond.

          • priapus@sh.itjust.works
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            10 months ago

            Closer to 50/50, and other parts of the GNOME desktop like mutter, are largely C. Saying the entire GNOME desktop is mostly JS is silly.

              • priapus@sh.itjust.works
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                10 months ago

                You’re right, they said the desktop shell, which is still incorrect, but I guess a little less incorrect. My bad.

                • ⲇⲅⲇ@lemmy.ml
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                  10 months ago

                  Well, I started this thread saying it runs on JavaScript, and I mean that they need JS for most of the interactions with the desktop, like gesture or mouse events. 😞 Even if most of the code is C, we all know we need to write much many lines of code of C to do the same with JS, so most of the logics on GNOME is computed by JS. We need some rust here. 🦀 🦀 🦀 🦀

            • kbal@fedia.io
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              10 months ago

              On the other hand, saying that there’s way too much javascript in it is objectively factual.

              • priapus@sh.itjust.works
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                10 months ago

                You don’t get to decide what too much JS in the project is unless you actually work on and have in depth knowledge of the project. I dont like JS, but it has its uses.

                Many people are conflating modern electron bloatware with ‘JS bad’, but things are not that simple.

            • priapus@sh.itjust.works
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              10 months ago

              That page also shows that there is more C. That page is also specifically the shell, not all of the desktop.

              • ⲇⲅⲇ@lemmy.ml
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                10 months ago

                There is less than 4% more code in C than JavaScript. That’s pretty much, many features on the gnome-desktop is using JavaScript too, like gestures and mouse events.

        • ⲇⲅⲇ@lemmy.ml
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          10 months ago

          Okay, but still needs JavaScript, they are slowly trying to remove or improve it. But it is a fact that it also runs on JavaScript. 🤣

          • priapus@sh.itjust.works
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            10 months ago

            Using JavaScript isn’t inherently a bad thing. JavaScript can be very useful when used for scripting. Obviously anything with a new for performance will be done in C.

            • ⲇⲅⲇ@lemmy.ml
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              10 months ago

              JavaScript isn’t the best language to make a desktop interface in my opinion, it can be very efficient, but you can see in bugs (at least in the past) how bad performance it had, and they needed to re-factor it to replace to C or improve the JavaScript. I’m just laughing and making fun of it using JavaScript, not saying it is slow, Gnome is pretty fast nowadays.

            • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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              10 months ago

              Javascript was a toy created in the mid 90s to make dumb interactive animations and have some sort of dynamic aspect to a web page. The world starting to code entire desktop programs and servers in it was a giant, horrific, societal mistake.