3 ms·

So far, I'm very impressed with 20.04 on my personal laptop (a Thinkpad L390). HiDPI works better out-of-the-box (I didn't actually need to enable scaling manua

by davb 6y ago

So far, I'm very impressed with 20.04 on my personal laptop (a Thinkpad L390). HiDPI works better out-of-the-box (I didn't actually need to enable scaling manually, but did have to add a Chrome and Teams .desktop file with --force-device-scale-factor=1.2). Power management is much better out-of-the-box too (I've gone from 2-3h battery to 4-8h depending on workload, rivalling what I see under Windows). But you're right about Snaps. I love the concept (easier distribution, fewer dependency issues especially if you're a few years into the lifecycle of an LTS release) but they're not, in my opinion, production-ready yet so it's frustrating to see them pushed by Ubuntu. The main issues we have are the slow startups compared to non-snap apps (which is felt more acutely on old hardware with spinning disks) and the fact that they don't work if /home lives on an NFS server. That rules out their use for many academic and enterprise deployments.

usr1106 6y ago
oh, I am suprised you praise HiDPI support. I could not make emacs work resonably. It does not react on the widely documented Xft and GDK_DPI_SCALE settings as in other distros. I am on Xubuntu though if that makes a difference. And I have not tried for a couple of weeks. There have been many package updates since I tried last.
- davb 6y ago
  I actually tried installing xubuntu-desktop first (and then plain old xfce) as I fancied switching back to them after a few years using Gnome. But you're definitely right that out-of-the-box, XFCE HiDPI support was lacking. Widgets (panels, icons, etc) and fonts all scaled fairly independently, and I gave us after manually resizing a few elements. On Ubuntu 20.04 (with Gnome), it just worked (with the exception of Chromium/CEF/Blink based applications like Chrome and Teams, which needed the aforementioned command line argument to scale them). I actually had to undo most of the scaling changes that came across with my restored home folder. The one other thing I had to change was the Terminal font as the default was a little too small to use comfortably on my laptop screen - I opted for Liberation Mono Regular, 12pt (px?) with 1.10x height. As a former long-time XFCE proponent, I recommend you give Ubuntu + Gnome a try. It's the best it's been since the Gnome 2 days, and is no-where near as power hungry as it has been in recent years. The most power-hungry application I'm running is Evolution, where the webkit process that renders HTML email frequently gets out of control and burns 40% CPU until I restart it (I'd use Thunderbird but the Lightning plugin https://github.com/ExchangeCalendar/exchangecalendar https://github.com/ExchangeCalendar/exchangecalendar to handle Exchange calendar stopped working with recent versions of Thunderbird some months ago).
- m463 6y ago
  I haven't tried 20.04, but this is the "dconf dump /" setting in 18.04 that got emacs in the ballpark: [org/gnome/desktop/interface] text-scaling-factor=1.5
amaccuish 6y ago
I've noticed the battery life too! And I've always been running mainline kernels ahead of what the ubuntu repos provide.

by davb 6y ago

usr1106 6y ago

oh, I am suprised you praise HiDPI support. I could not make emacs work resonably. It does not react on the widely documented Xft and GDK_DPI_SCALE settings as in other distros. I am on Xubuntu though if that makes a difference. And I have not tried for a couple of weeks. There have been many package updates since I tried last.

davb 6y ago
I actually tried installing xubuntu-desktop first (and then plain old xfce) as I fancied switching back to them after a few years using Gnome. But you're definitely right that out-of-the-box, XFCE HiDPI support was lacking. Widgets (panels, icons, etc) and fonts all scaled fairly independently, and I gave us after manually resizing a few elements. On Ubuntu 20.04 (with Gnome), it just worked (with the exception of Chromium/CEF/Blink based applications like Chrome and Teams, which needed the aforementioned command line argument to scale them). I actually had to undo most of the scaling changes that came across with my restored home folder. The one other thing I had to change was the Terminal font as the default was a little too small to use comfortably on my laptop screen - I opted for Liberation Mono Regular, 12pt (px?) with 1.10x height. As a former long-time XFCE proponent, I recommend you give Ubuntu + Gnome a try. It's the best it's been since the Gnome 2 days, and is no-where near as power hungry as it has been in recent years. The most power-hungry application I'm running is Evolution, where the webkit process that renders HTML email frequently gets out of control and burns 40% CPU until I restart it (I'd use Thunderbird but the Lightning plugin https://github.com/ExchangeCalendar/exchangecalendar https://github.com/ExchangeCalendar/exchangecalendar to handle Exchange calendar stopped working with recent versions of Thunderbird some months ago).
m463 6y ago
I haven't tried 20.04, but this is the "dconf dump /" setting in 18.04 that got emacs in the ballpark: [org/gnome/desktop/interface] text-scaling-factor=1.5

amaccuish 6y ago

I've noticed the battery life too! And I've always been running mainline kernels ahead of what the ubuntu repos provide.