I also can not confirm this.
(Edit: I can confirm this, see my next post).
When setting the wires to dotted there is a zoom level that the dots are very small and not very well visible, but when I zoom out further they appear as solid lines.
I tried this with and without anti-aliasing and with different line widths.
There also used to be a “canvas” setting in KiCad. Something with “Legacy” and “Modern”, but I do not see this anymore in KiCad-nightly V5.99. On linux, the “legacy” canvas was already removed a long time ago. Is there still a setting for this on some operating systems?
Application: KiCad Schematic Editor
Version: 5.99.0-unknown-ef74421922~134~ubuntu20.04.1, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.4
libcurl/7.68.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1f zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.21.0 (+libidn2/2.2.0) libssh/0.9.3/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.40.0 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Linux 5.4.0-88-generic x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK, xfce, x11
Build Info:
Date: Oct 2 2021 07:45:57
wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 3.24
Boost: 1.71.0
OCC: 7.5.2
Curl: 7.68.0
ngspice: 31
Compiler: GCC 9.3.0 with C++ ABI 1013
Build settings:
KICAD_USE_OCC=ON
KICAD_SPICE=ON
You just beat me to it.
I just discovered that the “accelerated” and “Fallback” graphics have moved from the main menu to the preferences, and with the "Fallback Graphics** settings dashed lines become very thin and dotted lines disappear when zooming out.
Almost any visual difference between accelerated and fallback, at least when the difference is “functional”, is a bug. They don’t look exactly identical, but they should show the same information content.
No. Maybe in the future (v7?) KiCad will change to another graphics library alltogether which handles the backround hw/sw automatically. At the moment fallback exists for machines which don’t have hardware/drivers for OpenGL, but it has been coded separately and therefore needs extra mainenance.
The current thinking is to move to a backend that supports other stuff (DirectX, Vulkan, etc) in addition to OpenGL and use whichever graphics library works best on a given platform by default. At some point we may stop supporting non-accelerated graphics (i.e. remove the Cairo option) but that hasn’t been determined yet.
It’s even worse when the OS OE decides to force their solution only within their walls (looking at you Apple and “Metal”). Not that I care, Linux user with an AMD GPU so that is someone else’s problem for buying I to that ecosystem
The Pi supports OpenGL ES just fine. If we moved to a multi-backend 3D library as is planned, it should have no problem running on the Pi or any other SoC with a GPU.
Actually OpenGL ES wouldn’t even be needed in new SoCs for KiCad because they support Vulkan, at least RPi does (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Vulkan_driver). By the time v7 will be released all decent newish devices which can run KiCad will probably support Vulkan. Not that OpenGL ES vs. Vulkan would make any difference for KiCad, but still…
