4 ms·

I really like KDE. The philosophy that an DE can have extra functionality rather than the standard "if it doesn't run on a 10 year old ThinkPad, it's trash." O

by Jonnax 7y ago

I really like KDE. The philosophy that an DE can have extra functionality rather than the standard "if it doesn't run on a 10 year old ThinkPad, it's trash." Of course I'm being a bit unreasonable since the majority of desktop users likely are running vms and accessing it it over VNC/xRDP/Guacamole. And so require something snappy. I'm running KDE Neon on a Lenovo T450 and an XPS 13. And the experience is great. However high dpi is hell to configure, still not happy with it.

fenaer 7y ago
How did you configure high DPI for the xps 13? I couldn't figure it out and gave up.
Vogtinator 7y ago
> However high dpi is hell to configure, still not happy with it. If it's about the HiDPI autodetection you should try Tumbleweed, Qt has many HiDPI related fixes there and sddm works OOTB.
quantummkv 7y ago
> However high dpi is hell to configure, still not happy with it. You should check out the Wayland session. They have fractional scaling working perfectly there
- scrollaway 7y ago
  Yeah X11 is unusable with HiDPI. Works great on Wayland.
  - jcelerier 7y ago
    typing this from a 4k screen under X11, everything looks fine... https://imgur.com/tyXOG0X https://imgur.com/tyXOG0X
    - scrollaway 7y ago
      Maybe because you got used to it. There's a bunch of awful scaling issues with that screenshot. The taskbar is unusable, a bunch of icons in your music player are wrongly scaled, and there's a bunch of text layout brokenness. I also suspect you've had to configure things quite a bit to reach this layout. I see for example your zoom-level is non-default in Chrome. I had to do the same when I was using X11 with a 3.8k screen. And it still sucks. Wayland makes the scaling seamless and perfect for all native apps.
      - jcelerier 7y ago
        > Maybe because you got used to it. There's a bunch of awful scaling issues with that screenshot. The taskbar is unusable, a bunch of icons in your music player are wrongly scaled, and there's a bunch of text layout brokenness. could you detail ? the taskbar is exactly at the right size for me. The only thing I see that is blatantly bad is the text on the left sidebar of the media player. > I also suspect you've had to configure things quite a bit to reach this layout The only thing I do is setting Xft.dpi = 144 in my .Xresources. > I see for example your zoom-level is non-default in Chrome. that is because I keep playing with my middle button when I'm reading :) before taking the screenshot I had it at 250%
        raphi011 7y ago
        Hi - I've tried this on my machine with 4K display running Plasma Wayland but unfortunately my xwayland programs are still blurry. Was this really the only thing you've done? EDIT: just realized that you're not using wayland ..
        jcelerier 7y ago
        yes, and plasma neither - it has its own scaling method which does not use xft.dpi afaik
- jhoechtl 7y ago
  > They have fractional scaling working perfectly there Hear, hear! So you are not using firefox? All the XWayland apps are blurry. KDE/Plasma apps are crisp. But to be fair, Gnome had experimental fractional scaling on Wayland two years ago.
est31 7y ago
> extra functionality rather than the standard "if it doesn't run on a 10 year old ThinkPad, it's trash." Actually, nowadays KDE is one of the most lightweight DEs out there. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-prediction-kde-will-steal-the-lightweight-linux-desktop-crown-in-2020 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-... The view that KDE is bloated was accurate years ago, but nowadays it's outdated.
jraph 7y ago
> if it doesn't run on a 10 year old ThinkPad, it's trash. And Plasma probably runs quite well on a 10 year old ThinkPad anyway. I run one of the latest versions of Plasma on an old x86 tablet with 1 GB of ram, a slow SSD and an Intel Atom CPU. It's just a bit slow to boot, but this was improved on the last release (I could not test it on the tablet though). It is quite lightweight, but you probably shouldn't install the kde-full package on an old computer.
Symbiote 7y ago
I have KDE with HiDPI set up on a desktop, and that works fine. I wrote this a year ago, and included a screenshot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17420889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17420889 Multi-DPI may well still be an issue.
opencl 7y ago
I use KDE on a 9 year old thinkpad and it runs reasonably well, at least much better than GNOME.
jhoechtl 7y ago
> However high dpi is hell to configure, still not happy with it. Plasma 5.17 on Wayland gained fractional scaling support. Works good for KDE apps, blurry on XWayland apps such as Thunderbird and Firefox. However, when you start GDK_BACKEND=wayland firefox firefox isn't usable, but sharp. Still a long way to go as it seems.
ta999999171 7y ago
Running it on an almost-10 y/o ThinkPad, careful mate.

by Jonnax 7y ago

fenaer 7y ago

How did you configure high DPI for the xps 13? I couldn't figure it out and gave up.

Vogtinator 7y ago

> However high dpi is hell to configure, still not happy with it. If it's about the HiDPI autodetection you should try Tumbleweed, Qt has many HiDPI related fixes there and sddm works OOTB.

quantummkv 7y ago

> However high dpi is hell to configure, still not happy with it. You should check out the Wayland session. They have fractional scaling working perfectly there

scrollaway 7y ago
Yeah X11 is unusable with HiDPI. Works great on Wayland.
- jcelerier 7y ago
  typing this from a 4k screen under X11, everything looks fine... https://imgur.com/tyXOG0X https://imgur.com/tyXOG0X
  - scrollaway 7y ago
    Maybe because you got used to it. There's a bunch of awful scaling issues with that screenshot. The taskbar is unusable, a bunch of icons in your music player are wrongly scaled, and there's a bunch of text layout brokenness. I also suspect you've had to configure things quite a bit to reach this layout. I see for example your zoom-level is non-default in Chrome. I had to do the same when I was using X11 with a 3.8k screen. And it still sucks. Wayland makes the scaling seamless and perfect for all native apps.
    - jcelerier 7y ago
      > Maybe because you got used to it. There's a bunch of awful scaling issues with that screenshot. The taskbar is unusable, a bunch of icons in your music player are wrongly scaled, and there's a bunch of text layout brokenness. could you detail ? the taskbar is exactly at the right size for me. The only thing I see that is blatantly bad is the text on the left sidebar of the media player. > I also suspect you've had to configure things quite a bit to reach this layout The only thing I do is setting Xft.dpi = 144 in my .Xresources. > I see for example your zoom-level is non-default in Chrome. that is because I keep playing with my middle button when I'm reading :) before taking the screenshot I had it at 250%
      - raphi011 7y ago
        Hi - I've tried this on my machine with 4K display running Plasma Wayland but unfortunately my xwayland programs are still blurry. Was this really the only thing you've done? EDIT: just realized that you're not using wayland ..
        jcelerier 7y ago
        yes, and plasma neither - it has its own scaling method which does not use xft.dpi afaik
jhoechtl 7y ago
> They have fractional scaling working perfectly there Hear, hear! So you are not using firefox? All the XWayland apps are blurry. KDE/Plasma apps are crisp. But to be fair, Gnome had experimental fractional scaling on Wayland two years ago.

est31 7y ago

> extra functionality rather than the standard "if it doesn't run on a 10 year old ThinkPad, it's trash." Actually, nowadays KDE is one of the most lightweight DEs out there. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-prediction-kde-will-steal-the-lightweight-linux-desktop-crown-in-2020 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-... The view that KDE is bloated was accurate years ago, but nowadays it's outdated.

jraph 7y ago

> if it doesn't run on a 10 year old ThinkPad, it's trash. And Plasma probably runs quite well on a 10 year old ThinkPad anyway. I run one of the latest versions of Plasma on an old x86 tablet with 1 GB of ram, a slow SSD and an Intel Atom CPU. It's just a bit slow to boot, but this was improved on the last release (I could not test it on the tablet though). It is quite lightweight, but you probably shouldn't install the kde-full package on an old computer.

Symbiote 7y ago

I have KDE with HiDPI set up on a desktop, and that works fine. I wrote this a year ago, and included a screenshot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17420889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17420889 Multi-DPI may well still be an issue.

opencl 7y ago

I use KDE on a 9 year old thinkpad and it runs reasonably well, at least much better than GNOME.

jhoechtl 7y ago

> However high dpi is hell to configure, still not happy with it. Plasma 5.17 on Wayland gained fractional scaling support. Works good for KDE apps, blurry on XWayland apps such as Thunderbird and Firefox. However, when you start GDK_BACKEND=wayland firefox firefox isn't usable, but sharp. Still a long way to go as it seems.

ta999999171 7y ago

Running it on an almost-10 y/o ThinkPad, careful mate.