RaspberryPi OS Bullseye Support about imaginary-teleprompter HOT 6 CLOSED

Because Bullseye uses GTK3 instead of GTK2 for its desktop apps, I think there would be a performance drop if you upgrade to either version. Nevertheless, if you make use of both the in-frame and external prompter, animations will be less jerky if you upgrade to the 64 bit version and make use of the 64 bit binary, because the 64 bit architecture increase precision when it comes to syncing the prompter instances.

Here's the link to the arm64 download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/teleprompter-imaginary-films/files/2.4/imaginary-teleprompter-2.4.0-arm64.tar.xz/download

from imaginary-teleprompter.

I see what you mean. The animation is not as smooth as the 32bit version/os, perhaps due to the current lack of hardware acceleration?

from imaginary-teleprompter.

I doubt that it's due to lack of hardware acceleration. Unfortunately, GTK 3 is drastically less efficient than GTK 2. Qt 5 is sightly less efficient than GTK 2 but much more efficient than GTK 3. The PIXEL desktop, which RPi OS brings, is based of LXDE. LXDE's authors stopped developing LXDE and moved on to create LXQT for this performance reason. The Raspberry Pi foundation instead of following along, decided to upgrade the LXDE codebase to work with GTK 3. While I don't know why they chose to do this, I imagine it's because of the effort that it would take to learn an entirely different toolkit, and recreate PIXEL's optimizations on a framework they might not have had experience on.

Unfortunately, every single Linux distribution that used a desktop environment built on top of GTK 2 and moved to GTK 3 has suffered from performance loss and RAM usage increase; which is most noticeable on low end devices like the Raspberry Pi. This is why most arm distributions only support the Raspberry Pi 4. Running a GTK 3 based version of Ubuntu MATE on the Raspberry Pi 3 didn't leave enough free RAM to run some basic applications. Running a web browser with a tab on YouTube and a PDF document next to it would easily crash the system.

The Raspberry Pi's GPUs aren't also very powerful... Certain lightweight environments such as the Enlightenment Desktop will run faster using a Software Renderer instead of OpenGL, because the GPU doesn't have enough throughput to process its visual effects. The same is true about running KDE Plasma on the Rasapberry Pi 4. Using XRenderer instead of OpenGL helps free GPU cycles so they can be used by other software.

from imaginary-teleprompter.

You can try running openSUSE Leap or Tumbleweed, with the Enlightenment Desktop, for the Raspberry Pi. I don't think there's any other desktop environment based off modern libraries that is as lightweight as the Enlightenment desktop is. Make sure to use software rendering on the desktop for it to be usable:

Raspberry Pi 400

https://en.opensuse.org/HCL:Raspberry_Pi400

Raspberry Pi 4

https://en.opensuse.org/HCL:Raspberry_Pi4

Raspberry Pi 3

https://en.opensuse.org/HCL:Raspberry_Pi3

You could also try the LXQT image, which offers a more traditional desktop. LXQT 1.0 was released about two weeks ago, so use the openSUSE Tumbleweed image instead of the openSUSE Leap if you decide to try LXQT.

from imaginary-teleprompter.

Thank you for the input. Will you continue development with Buster or are you migrating your apps to Bullseye or other os'?

from imaginary-teleprompter.

It's too early to say for the next release of Imaginary Teleprompter. We'll target Bullseye as the base, but I think there's a good chance that it will continue to work on Buster.

Due to the age of Buster packages, QPrompt on the other hand cannot run there. The 1.0.0-beta-005 update I released two days ago contains a deb package for arm64, that is built for and works only on Ubuntu 21.04 because Bullseye wasn't out when I wrote that part of the build script. Now that Bullseye is out, I'll try to make the same package to work for both distros. If that isn't possible, I'll target Bullseye only for now. If I manage to solve a problem with building RPMs, I might target Fedora on arm too.

from imaginary-teleprompter.