Desktop experience deteriorating, who should I file the bugs with?

gintanto · 2025-04-29 15:43:04

My question: when I find bugs, should I be filing them with the Arch maintainers as a "please revert to a stable version of package X that doesn't have this bug", or should I always go upstream to request "please fix this bug and push a release asap so Arch can pick it up"?

This isn't really a rant, more like "grumble" but I'm using Arch for my daily driver for years, and in the last few months my desktop experience has been getting more and more buggy. I know Arch is a bleeding-edge distribution, so I expect some bumps, but usually someone fixes stuff fairly quickly and the bumps smooth out and I don't need to get involved much. My current list of annoyances are:

* Gnome Shell leaks memory, forcing me to restart my session every 2 weeks or so
* My login session stopped setting the SSH_AUTH_SOCK variable. I manually corrected it with ~/.config/environment.d/ssh-agent.conf but I imagine this is annoying for lost of people, and will break again when upstream decides to change the keyring socket again
* SciTE text editor resets the scroll position of one tab when another tab views a file with fewer lines than the cursor position on the first tab
* New version of GIMP (major version 3) has visual glitches in the UI and a lot of annoying workflow changes and I wish I could go back to version 2 until they get all this figured out

Again, this is sort of an etiquette question - should I bother the Arch maintainers asking for a stable version, or is instability expected and Arch maintainers would prefer I go direct to upstream?

Scimmia · 2025-04-29 15:51:32

If the bug is an upstream bug, file it upstream. Unless it's a major issue that makes big things unusable, Arch isn't likely to downgrade.

After upstream fixes it, Arch may apply the fix, if the issue is big enough.

Last edited by Scimmia (2025-04-29 15:52:41)

V1del · 2025-04-29 15:53:37

Basically all of that stuff belongs to upstream and should be reported there. Unless you can compile it yourself and note that the bug doesn't happen and is something specific to a given package. Just an eyeball on these symptoms, most of them sound upstream related.

FWIW -- and I'm certainly somewhat biased, but history has shown it time and time again -- if you want a "stable" experience that minimizes regressions GNOME is one of the worst desktops to use. They inherently and intentionally do not care about interoperability with other environments, they will break things because "GNOME core doesn't need this, so no one needs this", their extension system is intentionally not stable and extensions can and will cause issues on each version upgrade, depending on how deeply they inject themselves into the shell.

There's not much Arch can and will do about these. GIMP 3 was released as stable so it is the current stable release. It's also the first release after a massive multi-year porting effort. The correct way to get issues resolved is reporting them upstream and testing fixes as they become available.

Last edited by V1del (2025-04-29 15:55:02)

seth · 2025-04-29 15:56:56

Upstream - if you want to run a system where regressions have (likely) been ironed out, run debian stable.

1. could be gnome or the graphcis card driver?
2. sounds like gnome
3 & 4 are kinda obvious, I'll shamelessly plug https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/sqriptor-git

gintanto · 2025-04-29 17:54:47

seth wrote:

I'll shamelessly plug https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/sqriptor-git

I see a mention on the github page that a downside of SciTE is that it exposes all the scintilla variables to the user... I kind of like that feature. Does sqriptor let you fully customize the highlight colors and file associations, and have an easy way to share config files between systems? And support overrides per-directory?

One other annoyance I have with SciTE since forever is that it can't sort/reorganize tabs. Was half-inclined to contribute that feature myself, but never got around to it.

gintanto · 2025-04-29 18:30:05

V1del wrote:

if you want a "stable" experience that minimizes regressions GNOME is one of the worst desktops to use. They inherently and intentionally do not care about interoperability with other environments, they will break things because "GNOME core doesn't need this, so no one needs this", their extension system is intentionally not stable and extensions can and will cause issues on each version upgrade, depending on how deeply they inject themselves into the shell.

I'd have to agree there... I just hate to give up the feature where I hit the window key and all my windows scatter for easy selection *or* start typing the name of a program to run it. I put up with a lot of crap just to keep that one feature... Actually I have a second killer feature now where the printscreen capture tool starts with a box and lets you drag the edges before capturing. It saves me from having to open GIMP half the time to crop my screenshot before pasting into a webapp. And, it starts with the box at the previous coordinates, so if you want to capture long vertical content you can scroll and take a second screenshot with exactly the same edges as the previous one, making it easy to stitch them together. But I'd ditch gnome in a heartbeat if I could get these features in KDE.

seth · 2025-04-29 19:55:20

Does sqriptor let you fully customize the highlight colors and file associations, and have an easy way to share config files between systems? And support overrides per-directory?

No, you can configure the syntax highlight colors and applies them in a sane™ way. You can also indicate the filetype w/ a mime hint inside the file.
Yes you can copy the config file around.
No you can't override stuff per directory. I'd not even know why.
But if there's a sane usecase there's not much preventing preference of a PWD config - or extending the vim command support (present for eg. indention rules)

One other annoyance I have with SciTE since forever is that it can't sort/reorganize tabs.

Since that's only one ::setMovable(true) away I might actually implement such feature request, but this should happen on github

gintanto · 2025-04-30 14:01:39

seth wrote:

No you can't override stuff per directory. I'd not even know why.

I work on a lot of projects. Some use tab indenting. Some use 2-space. One (with a 25 year history) uses 3-space. I would not want to have to declare the indent settings inside every single file. Several projects use Perl's Template toolkit (.tt) for html templates. It's nice to have those automatically highlight as html, but Template toolkit could be used for other types of files, so this wouldn't be a reasonable default system-wide. I add the customization for file associations at the base of the templates directory for the projects where I know .tt are html. I do this for various other projects that have unusual file extensions present.

I add SciTEDirectory.properties to my global ~/.config/git/gitignore so that I can toss these files around everywhere and have the defaults take effect for the project I'm working on without needing to add them to version control and bother other developers who aren't using SciTE.

seth · 2025-04-30 14:37:02

<!-- vim: ft=html:ts=3 -->
<!-- vim: noet -->

ft isn't implemented as vim hint (maybe could be…) is now but having

<!--  mime/html -->

at the head will help (just noticed a bug/problem because html has not line comments, thanks, fixed)

Last edited by seth (2025-04-30 15:20:02)

poljpocket · 2025-05-28 10:35:47

gintanto wrote:

I just hate to give up the feature where I hit the window key and all my windows scatter for easy selection *or* start typing the name of a program to run it. I put up with a lot of crap just to keep that one feature... Actually I have a second killer feature now where the printscreen capture tool starts with a box and lets you drag the edges before capturing. It saves me from having to open GIMP half the time to crop my screenshot before pasting into a webapp. And, it starts with the box at the previous coordinates, so if you want to capture long vertical content you can scroll and take a second screenshot with exactly the same edges as the previous one, making it easy to stitch them together. But I'd ditch gnome in a heartbeat if I could get these features in KDE.

KWin has an "Overview" function which does exactly what GNOME does. It's default keybind is Meta+W which you can easily change to just be Meta (I use it like this). And it also allows you to just type the program you want to run, just like GNOME does. To be frank, it will first search all open windows with a fallback to the krunner search if there are no results which factually lets you do what you wanted AND MORE.

Spectacle can be configured to remember the rectangular region chosen previously. It's in "General", then "Remember selected area". I think the default is to remember the area until Spectacle is closed. Spectacle has an annotation feature you can use before taking the screenshot altogether and it has a built-in edit function to crop or annotate after you've taken the screenshot. No need for GIMP ever.

I think you can ditch GNOME then

Last edited by poljpocket (2025-05-28 10:38:07)

Arch Linux

#1 2025-04-29 15:43:04

Desktop experience deteriorating, who should I file the bugs with?

#2 2025-04-29 15:51:32

Re: Desktop experience deteriorating, who should I file the bugs with?

#3 2025-04-29 15:53:37

Re: Desktop experience deteriorating, who should I file the bugs with?

#4 2025-04-29 15:56:56

Re: Desktop experience deteriorating, who should I file the bugs with?

#5 2025-04-29 17:54:47

Re: Desktop experience deteriorating, who should I file the bugs with?

#6 2025-04-29 18:30:05

Re: Desktop experience deteriorating, who should I file the bugs with?

#7 2025-04-29 19:55:20

Re: Desktop experience deteriorating, who should I file the bugs with?

#8 2025-04-30 14:01:39

Re: Desktop experience deteriorating, who should I file the bugs with?

#9 2025-04-30 14:37:02

Re: Desktop experience deteriorating, who should I file the bugs with?

#10 2025-05-28 10:35:47

Re: Desktop experience deteriorating, who should I file the bugs with?

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