[Qt-interest] Is the "raster vs native" issue on X11 still an issue?

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 04.03.10 23:50:10, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
> About two years back, this blog was posted:
> 
> http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/10/22/so-long-and-thanks-for-the-blit/
> 
> In some Linux distributions, there's talk about changing the default 
> from "native" to "raster", even though raster sometimes results in minor 
> graphics glitches.  But are the issues from 2008 still relevant today?

We enforced raster in KDevelop4 as soon as a Qt with it was released as
text-drawing was extremely slow for us with native on X11. We've
switched back to native a few months ago because we're now requiring a
newer Qt version that has quite some speed fixes for native. There's no
noticeable difference anymore between native and raster for our
application. However native has a very important upside: It works a lot
better with remote X11 connection (XDMCP or ssh -X).

The other problem is that raster means a QPixmap is not anymore a thin
wrapper around X11 pixmap, this can easily break Qt apps that expect the
two to be same (kwin for example enforces native for itself so it
doesn't hit this).

IMHO enabling raster by default in a distro poses a risk, so the
distro-packagers should really check wether there are enough benefits
from it. (i.e. many bugreports complaining about painting-speed of Qt
apps even with newer Qt4.5/4.6 versions)

Andreas

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