[HN Gopher] May Update: Connection Established
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       May Update: Connection Established
        
       Author : fheld
       Score  : 53 points
       Date   : 2021-05-15 14:05 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.pine64.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.pine64.org)
        
       | nazgulsenpai wrote:
       | I got my PineBook Pro last week and was honestly surprised at the
       | solid build quality. It's a really neat little device and has
       | been a blast to tinker with.
       | 
       | I'm really glad this community exists and has been fun to watch
       | it grow.
        
         | idle_zealot wrote:
         | I got a PBP around when they first started shipping. I mostly
         | love it, but there's a strange drift on the trackpad that
         | discourages me from using it more. I wonder if that was just an
         | issue on early units. Have you noticed that the trackpad seems
         | to have issues?
        
           | nazgulsenpai wrote:
           | I haven't had any problems with the trackpad. It's not a
           | great trackpad, but it works and no drift.
        
       | GranPC wrote:
       | I'm personally very excited about Megapixels (the camera app)
       | being ported to GTK4. With GTK4's graphics acceleration support,
       | I expect that the UI of these phones will get a lot smoother once
       | most of the apps are running on GTK4.
        
         | deivid wrote:
         | I'm migrating my toy HN app to GTK4 as well, it's not always
         | free performance though, the pp GPU is extremely bad, even
         | worse than the CPU. My app actually was slower on GTK4,
         | although removing rounded corners and shadows as the devs
         | recommended actually made it a lot faster than the GTK3
         | version.
        
           | GranPC wrote:
           | Hmm... I wonder if those expensive effects could be cached to
           | a texture atlas to mitigate the performance impact. Hopefully
           | the devs are looking into it!
        
         | Mediterraneo10 wrote:
         | What I can't figure out is how Phosh on PinePhone could take 5
         | seconds just to open a window e.g. to turn wifi on/off, when
         | the Nokia N900, also a GTK-based system and running on more
         | primitive hardware, managed to have a very snappy and
         | responsive UI. Surely this can't be a matter of mere graphics
         | acceleration, there must be a great deal of bloat in all the
         | underlying libraries.
        
           | swiley wrote:
           | Idk why phosh is so slow on the pinephone. Just about any
           | other (x11 anyway) DE was fast on it even before the updated
           | drivers a few months ago.
           | 
           | I think the other issue though is that on the nokia GTK was
           | still built with software rendering in mind whereas modern
           | graphics toolkits tend to do the "everything has OpenGL and
           | stuff without it can use LLVMPIPE" thing which results in
           | very poor performance on incompatible hardware (along with
           | less than optimal drawing in order to fit the abstraction.)
        
             | deivid wrote:
             | Something I also want to investigate -- CPU is at 100% on 1
             | core for 5~ seconds when launching anything. Not even
             | waiting for IO, it's mostly user time
        
               | megous wrote:
               | There were some shader caching patches mainlined recently
               | to mesa, I think, and some improvements went to gtk4,
               | too.
               | 
               | https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-
               | Lim...
        
       | ocdtrekkie wrote:
       | Missed my chance to grab the first "production" PineTimes, glad
       | to see another batch is coming soon. It really feels like the
       | ecosystem they're building is starting to come together at this
       | point.
        
         | edoceo wrote:
         | I got an extra but, you have to pick up in Seattle.
        
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       (page generated 2021-05-15 23:01 UTC)