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Thanks for the contributions! Unfortunately the state of Linux as a desktop OS in the past decade has missed entirely the hardware developments. No proper supp

Thanks for the contributions! Unfortunately the state of Linux as a desktop OS in the past decade has missed entirely the hardware developments. No proper support for scaling for hidpi monitors, scrolling with precision mice/touch pads, no touch UI, UI is that still not deep enough and casually requires the user to spawn a terminal, graphics drivers that are still not stable and do not support the latest standards like hdr. I wish there was a for profit company that would focus on making a polished desktop linux distro. There is only that much that the oss community can provide for free, but it is simply not enough.

Nursie 7y ago
> No proper support for scaling for hidpi monitors I'm sitting here with a 4k 32" monitor and a 1920x1200 24 inch side by side, scaled perfectly so both are pretty and readable, in xfce, and when moving things between screens nothing changes size, or re-renders weirdly, or can't be resized due to invisible boundaries, or ... It's better than windows or MacOS can manage with the same setup. I'm not sure what you count as 'proper', and yes I had to write a two-line script with xrandr commands so ease of use isn't massively present. But the underlying system absolutely has great scaling support. Graphics drivers are also fine these days, I've not had any problems with my mouse either. Hardware in general "just works" better than windows these days, with older devices supported and no drivers to hunt down on the web. I'm not trying to claim it's better for you, only you can decide that. But it works great for a lot of people.
- kccqzy 7y ago
  > I'm sitting here with a 4k 32" monitor and a 1920x1200 24 inch You didn't understand the problem mentioned by GP. Neither of your monitors requires HiDPI scaling. Your first monitor has approximately 138 dpi and the second a paltry 94 dpi. Compare that to a 2012 MacBook Pro that has a 15.4-inch display with a 2880x1800 resolution. That's 221 dpi. The hallmark of a HiDPI is that its DPI is so high that you need to render UI elements at 2x or more (though sometimes 1.5x also works), so that originally a one-pixel line becomes two pixels wide. This requires support not just in drivers and the OS, but the application. ArchLinux has an entire wiki page discussing application support: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI
  - Nursie 7y ago
    > Neither of your monitors requires HiDPI scaling I beg to differ, 4k/32 does need scaling to my eyes. I don't want things to be that tiny. Not every application needs to support scaling, so long as the GUI framework they use does, and the window manager does (XFCE has support, which I have activated) that makes the 4K screen more usable to me (while allowing the full res to be used for smooth rendering), then I use xrandr to scale the lower-dpi screen back down so elements are the same size across both. Sure, there are a few apps that don't behave brilliantly, but they aren't things I use much. Like I said, it works better for me than MacOS or Windows (I have both, and a 2103 Retina MBP I still use).
    - Nursie 7y ago
      Of course I meant a 2013 rMBP, I'm not a time traveller :) I'm still impressed that it can do its scaling stuff on a 4K screen, using onboard intel iris graphics. It's been a great investment that little machine.
- gradstudent 7y ago
  I'm not sure if 1900x1200 counts as hidpi. I have a 4K screen and I find the experience at native resolutions awful. Please install Dia and tell me about your wonderful experiences with that program. Provided you can see any of the icons that is. Then tell me why the scaling isn't across the entire operating system but app specific. For stuff like this, Linux is bullshit. For many desktop usecases, Linux is bullshit. After a Skype call I need to kill the app else the process takes my CPU usage to 100%. Why? God knows. Probably the same reason my lock screen sometimes shows a password prompt when I press 'Esc' or 'Enter' and sometimes it requires me to click the mouse. Did I mention I spent the last nine months without a working microphone because the drivers for my new Thinkpad hadn't made their way into any major distribution?? Don't get me wrong. I love Linux. I'd take its broken ass over Windows any day of the week. But fuck me if I don't miss macOS.
  - Nursie 7y ago
    > I'm not sure if 1080p counts as hidpi Pretty sure it doesn't :) That '1200p' screen I have certainly isn't in need of scaling for usability, but I have scaled it to match the size of screen elements on my 4k screen next to it. I've been going back and forth between MacOs and linux a lot lately, been using my Mac as my work laptop for the last couple of years, now that I'm working remotely 100% I figured I'd switch over to linux. Honestly not having much issue with it, bar the odd "Teams has decided it can't use your headset microphone, for reasons" error. Never even heard of Dia, let alone had call to use it. Just installed it and yes, for unknown reasons it doesn't seem to scale does it? Which is odd given it's presumably a gtk3 app and others do scale just fine. Looks like GIMP is another one that's not onboard yet. My daily use at the moment is IntelliJ, MS Teams, Skype, Firefox and Steam. I guess gedit, meld and a few other utilities. They all seem to be fine. Perhaps my relatively constrained set of requirements is why I'm happy with it.
teekert 7y ago
Please try Ubuntu 20.04 for a month, report back here. I think it addresses most of your issues.
- alias_neo 7y ago
  Ubuntu 20.04 (Gnome) is the first version of Ubuntu that's ever been able to scale different density monitors to different scales. It always had the options there in previous versions, but it only ever honoured the value you set on a single monitor. Now, I can have my 4K monitor at 200% while I leave my laptop at 100% (1080p) and it works perfectly. If only it handled Bluetooth audio devices better it'd be perfect; Currently, I can't connect a pair of truly-wireless earbuds and play audio out of them without using Blueman to mess around with the audio sink settings etc each time I connect them. On my desktop, with Manjaro (KDE) and an Intel AX200 WiFi/Bluetooth I can connect both the earbuds (with no additional tweaking) and for example an Xbox One S Bluetooth controller (with the minor tweak of disabling etrm), and they both work perfectly. I'm not sure how much of that is related to Gnome/KDE but Ubuntu really could do with some better Bluetooth device handling, especially for audio devices.
  - Nursie 7y ago
    > Ubuntu 20.04 (Gnome) is the first version of Ubuntu that's ever been able to scale different density monitors to different scales. You can do it on pretty much any modern X on linux using xrandr, FYI, it's just not easily done in a settings app. I've been doing this with xfce for a while.
    - alias_neo 7y ago
      Nice to know, thanks. You say X, does that mean not Wayland/X-Wayland?
      - vetinari 7y ago
        Wayland does that out of the box; unfortunately most people do not run Wayland, either because they prefer WM/DE that is X11 only (xfce, etc), or just because. On X11, scaling of entire framebuffer (i.e. scaling macOS style) is a standard xrandr functionality, but it was never exposed to UI. It has some drawbacks that macOS never had to solve (how it behaves over remote x11/vnc/etc, or memory requirements for framebuffer, for example), that make it unsuitable as a general solution. It is basically one of the hacks complained in this threads.
kilroy123 7y ago
I too have thought for a long time there needs to be a for-profit company that focuses on a polished Linux distro. Sure there is Canonical but IMHO they're not doing such a great job on the polish side of things. There is system76 with "Pop OS!" but I would like to see a company who's entire focus is on release a very slick OS _only_.
- mcv 7y ago
  I think we really need the system76 approach. The only way to make a profit on a desktop Linux is to take the Apple approach of selling hardware with the OS preinstalled and tuned for that hardware. By all means make the OS downloadable separately, share with the community and all that, but to make a profit, you need to sell hardware. And the hardware needs to be good.
  - dastx 7y ago
    > And the hardware needs to be good. So I am about to start a new job, and the new workplace was about to send a new Macbook Pro out to me, which I didn't want. So I went to do some research for a laptop with any Linux distro preinstalled so that I could go back to them and tell them I'd rather have this. I found out that there is no decent laptop with Linux preinstalled. System76 has some decent systems, but they didn't come close to what the likes of Dell and Lenovo offer with Windows. For now System76 seems to show most potential in this area though, so it will be interesting to see what they do going forward.
    - commoner 7y ago
      Dell's developer edition laptops have Ubuntu preinstalled and are well-received: https://www.dell.com/linux https://www.dell.com/linux Lenovo's upcoming ThinkPad laptops include some models with preinstalled Fedora as an option: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22968280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22968280
      - dastx 7y ago
        The Dell XPS developer edition is a great little laptop, however, my issue with it was that it only came in 13" size. My ex-collegue had one and played around with it for a bit, it was great except for the screen size. The announcement regarding Lenovo's upcoming ThinkPad laptops coming with Fedora pre-installed came a literally 1 or 2 days after I'd already ordered the P1 Gen 2, which according to Canonical is certified[0] to run Linux correctly, and it's the reason I went for that. Regardless, the next generation would have left me without a laptop for the job. [0] https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201908-27280 https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201908-27280
Youden 7y ago
> scrolling with precision mice It's been years coming but it's getting there: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/merge_requests/72 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/merge_reque...
endlos 7y ago
My desktop scaling is set to 1.4 in Kubuntu, and it looks gorgeous.

Nursie 7y ago

> No proper support for scaling for hidpi monitors I'm sitting here with a 4k 32" monitor and a 1920x1200 24 inch side by side, scaled perfectly so both are pretty and readable, in xfce, and when moving things between screens nothing changes size, or re-renders weirdly, or can't be resized due to invisible boundaries, or ... It's better than windows or MacOS can manage with the same setup. I'm not sure what you count as 'proper', and yes I had to write a two-line script with xrandr commands so ease of use isn't massively present. But the underlying system absolutely has great scaling support. Graphics drivers are also fine these days, I've not had any problems with my mouse either. Hardware in general "just works" better than windows these days, with older devices supported and no drivers to hunt down on the web. I'm not trying to claim it's better for you, only you can decide that. But it works great for a lot of people.

kccqzy 7y ago
> I'm sitting here with a 4k 32" monitor and a 1920x1200 24 inch You didn't understand the problem mentioned by GP. Neither of your monitors requires HiDPI scaling. Your first monitor has approximately 138 dpi and the second a paltry 94 dpi. Compare that to a 2012 MacBook Pro that has a 15.4-inch display with a 2880x1800 resolution. That's 221 dpi. The hallmark of a HiDPI is that its DPI is so high that you need to render UI elements at 2x or more (though sometimes 1.5x also works), so that originally a one-pixel line becomes two pixels wide. This requires support not just in drivers and the OS, but the application. ArchLinux has an entire wiki page discussing application support: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI
- Nursie 7y ago
  > Neither of your monitors requires HiDPI scaling I beg to differ, 4k/32 does need scaling to my eyes. I don't want things to be that tiny. Not every application needs to support scaling, so long as the GUI framework they use does, and the window manager does (XFCE has support, which I have activated) that makes the 4K screen more usable to me (while allowing the full res to be used for smooth rendering), then I use xrandr to scale the lower-dpi screen back down so elements are the same size across both. Sure, there are a few apps that don't behave brilliantly, but they aren't things I use much. Like I said, it works better for me than MacOS or Windows (I have both, and a 2103 Retina MBP I still use).
  - Nursie 7y ago
    Of course I meant a 2013 rMBP, I'm not a time traveller :) I'm still impressed that it can do its scaling stuff on a 4K screen, using onboard intel iris graphics. It's been a great investment that little machine.
gradstudent 7y ago
I'm not sure if 1900x1200 counts as hidpi. I have a 4K screen and I find the experience at native resolutions awful. Please install Dia and tell me about your wonderful experiences with that program. Provided you can see any of the icons that is. Then tell me why the scaling isn't across the entire operating system but app specific. For stuff like this, Linux is bullshit. For many desktop usecases, Linux is bullshit. After a Skype call I need to kill the app else the process takes my CPU usage to 100%. Why? God knows. Probably the same reason my lock screen sometimes shows a password prompt when I press 'Esc' or 'Enter' and sometimes it requires me to click the mouse. Did I mention I spent the last nine months without a working microphone because the drivers for my new Thinkpad hadn't made their way into any major distribution?? Don't get me wrong. I love Linux. I'd take its broken ass over Windows any day of the week. But fuck me if I don't miss macOS.
- Nursie 7y ago
  > I'm not sure if 1080p counts as hidpi Pretty sure it doesn't :) That '1200p' screen I have certainly isn't in need of scaling for usability, but I have scaled it to match the size of screen elements on my 4k screen next to it. I've been going back and forth between MacOs and linux a lot lately, been using my Mac as my work laptop for the last couple of years, now that I'm working remotely 100% I figured I'd switch over to linux. Honestly not having much issue with it, bar the odd "Teams has decided it can't use your headset microphone, for reasons" error. Never even heard of Dia, let alone had call to use it. Just installed it and yes, for unknown reasons it doesn't seem to scale does it? Which is odd given it's presumably a gtk3 app and others do scale just fine. Looks like GIMP is another one that's not onboard yet. My daily use at the moment is IntelliJ, MS Teams, Skype, Firefox and Steam. I guess gedit, meld and a few other utilities. They all seem to be fine. Perhaps my relatively constrained set of requirements is why I'm happy with it.

teekert 7y ago

Please try Ubuntu 20.04 for a month, report back here. I think it addresses most of your issues.

alias_neo 7y ago
Ubuntu 20.04 (Gnome) is the first version of Ubuntu that's ever been able to scale different density monitors to different scales. It always had the options there in previous versions, but it only ever honoured the value you set on a single monitor. Now, I can have my 4K monitor at 200% while I leave my laptop at 100% (1080p) and it works perfectly. If only it handled Bluetooth audio devices better it'd be perfect; Currently, I can't connect a pair of truly-wireless earbuds and play audio out of them without using Blueman to mess around with the audio sink settings etc each time I connect them. On my desktop, with Manjaro (KDE) and an Intel AX200 WiFi/Bluetooth I can connect both the earbuds (with no additional tweaking) and for example an Xbox One S Bluetooth controller (with the minor tweak of disabling etrm), and they both work perfectly. I'm not sure how much of that is related to Gnome/KDE but Ubuntu really could do with some better Bluetooth device handling, especially for audio devices.
- Nursie 7y ago
  > Ubuntu 20.04 (Gnome) is the first version of Ubuntu that's ever been able to scale different density monitors to different scales. You can do it on pretty much any modern X on linux using xrandr, FYI, it's just not easily done in a settings app. I've been doing this with xfce for a while.
  - alias_neo 7y ago
    Nice to know, thanks. You say X, does that mean not Wayland/X-Wayland?
    - vetinari 7y ago
      Wayland does that out of the box; unfortunately most people do not run Wayland, either because they prefer WM/DE that is X11 only (xfce, etc), or just because. On X11, scaling of entire framebuffer (i.e. scaling macOS style) is a standard xrandr functionality, but it was never exposed to UI. It has some drawbacks that macOS never had to solve (how it behaves over remote x11/vnc/etc, or memory requirements for framebuffer, for example), that make it unsuitable as a general solution. It is basically one of the hacks complained in this threads.

kilroy123 7y ago

I too have thought for a long time there needs to be a for-profit company that focuses on a polished Linux distro. Sure there is Canonical but IMHO they're not doing such a great job on the polish side of things. There is system76 with "Pop OS!" but I would like to see a company who's entire focus is on release a very slick OS _only_.

mcv 7y ago
I think we really need the system76 approach. The only way to make a profit on a desktop Linux is to take the Apple approach of selling hardware with the OS preinstalled and tuned for that hardware. By all means make the OS downloadable separately, share with the community and all that, but to make a profit, you need to sell hardware. And the hardware needs to be good.
- dastx 7y ago
  > And the hardware needs to be good. So I am about to start a new job, and the new workplace was about to send a new Macbook Pro out to me, which I didn't want. So I went to do some research for a laptop with any Linux distro preinstalled so that I could go back to them and tell them I'd rather have this. I found out that there is no decent laptop with Linux preinstalled. System76 has some decent systems, but they didn't come close to what the likes of Dell and Lenovo offer with Windows. For now System76 seems to show most potential in this area though, so it will be interesting to see what they do going forward.
  - commoner 7y ago
    Dell's developer edition laptops have Ubuntu preinstalled and are well-received: https://www.dell.com/linux https://www.dell.com/linux Lenovo's upcoming ThinkPad laptops include some models with preinstalled Fedora as an option: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22968280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22968280
    - dastx 7y ago
      The Dell XPS developer edition is a great little laptop, however, my issue with it was that it only came in 13" size. My ex-collegue had one and played around with it for a bit, it was great except for the screen size. The announcement regarding Lenovo's upcoming ThinkPad laptops coming with Fedora pre-installed came a literally 1 or 2 days after I'd already ordered the P1 Gen 2, which according to Canonical is certified[0] to run Linux correctly, and it's the reason I went for that. Regardless, the next generation would have left me without a laptop for the job. [0] https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201908-27280 https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201908-27280

Youden 7y ago

> scrolling with precision mice It's been years coming but it's getting there: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/merge_requests/72 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/merge_reque...

endlos 7y ago

My desktop scaling is set to 1.4 in Kubuntu, and it looks gorgeous.