11 ms·

This is why running something like VSCode on your Mac with the remote ssh dev setup is the best of all worlds. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote

by tbrock 6y ago

This is why running something like VSCode on your Mac with the remote ssh dev setup is the best of all worlds. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview Virtualized Linux on x86 AND being able to run VSCode on your Mac for great fonts, WiFi, screen etc without having to fuss with drivers. Of course ssh and tmux also work well for this purpose.

dijit 6y ago
Ugh, I don't want to descend into "that thread" again, but Wifi/Screen have not been an issue on linux (as long as you don't use nvidia) in over 10 years. Mixed scale DPI screens are not a problem if you use Wayland, which is basically the default now. Font rendering though? YMMV.
- acdibble 6y ago
  If you use fractional scaling on Wayland, Chromium-based applications will render blurry. Obviously it's a Chromium issue but it's been around for a while and is a bad experience.
  - rathboma 6y ago
    This just got patched, so electron apps are slowly able to update and fix this. VSCode has a beta version with the fix already
- josephg 6y ago
  Linux generally works great. I'm typing this on a linux mint, using mixed scale DPI screens and generally it all works pretty well. I think all my hardware is fully supported - I haven't had to mess with drivers at all. ... Well, not recently. There were some zen3 bugs in the stable kernel releases a few months ago, but it all works fine now. And thats sort of the theme everywhere. Its super fast and I love it, and its mostly stable and mostly great. But tiny bugs shine through all over. I've been totally spoiled by Apple's spit and polish. For example, I get random graphics bugs after waking from sleep sometimes. Sometimes my mouse cursor is either invisible or for some reason duplicated, so I see a second stationary cursor hovering over my windows. And for some reason my second display doesn't vsync, so I get obvious tearing when I scroll or move windows around. I use a trackpad, and smooth scrolling works properly in most apps. But Firefox needs an obscure XInput environment variable to make it work. (That trick is only mentioned deep some a bug tracker). Smooth scrolling doesn't work at all in IntelliJ. Intellij also doesn't let me use the Meta key (Cmd / Start) as a shortcut modifier - so my muscle memory for navigation is all messed up and I can't rebind keys to fix it. I hate how Ctrl+C is copy everywhere except the terminal, which needs me to Ctrl+Shift+C instead. Etc etc. Forever. Its unbelievably responsive compared to my 2016 MBP though. If you haven't upgraded in awhile and you can afford it, its a fantastic time to get a new system. But linux on the desktop still isn't entirely pain free. Way better than it was a few years ago though.
  - pta2002 6y ago
    Do you know what that firefox variable is? It's the only reason I'm not using firefox right now.
    - callahad 6y ago
      Probably MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 (note the '2' at the end) ...or use Wayland where smooth scrolling should work by default
- eknkc 6y ago
  Nope, you people are living in a fairy tale. I’d love to have a decent linux desktop installation. I spent hours yesterday and gave up. I have a laptop running Ubuntu and connected to my 4k monitor in front of me. Has an Intel gpu. I do not even want to use multiple displays, I’m gonna go with the external only. Wayland can do fractional scaling but then VsCode, Firefox, Discord and whatever apps I tried became blurry shit. Firefox has an environment variable to fix it. VsCode has an experimental build and command line flags. I have no idea about Discord. I don’t care if its the app developers fault. It is just plain bad. X11 can do fractional scaling but fonts are a little blurry for some reason and I have the worst screen tearing I’ve ever seen in my life. It is unusable. macOS and Windows do this perfectly. It is not something you think about. Windows has some weird looking apps here and there but the shittyneas is not even close.
  - dijit 6y ago
    I don't know what to tell you, maybe I won the lottery on hardware. (though, admittedly I buy computers with linux support in mind). Everything works completely flawlessly for me (even nice font rendering, though idk if I did something manual for that). For context, I have (currently) a precision 5520 laptop; I run arch with sway, I have a big USB-C 4k at work and 2*16:10 FHD Dell USB-C monitors at home. The only issues I have with linux is that I don't have Microsoft Office, and Zoom+Wayland is buggy as hell.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - devit 6y ago
    Don't use fractional scaling. Use the closest integer scaling and adjust default font sizes (and if needed other sizes like window title height or panel height). It's also best if you just don't buy monitors that have dpis that are not close to integer multiples of 96.
    - eknkc 6y ago
      Yeah I tried this but I used 1x ui scaling + 1.5x font scaling. It works but then all the buttons and stuff are tiny. Maybe I should try 2x gui scaling and 0.75 font size? Never occured to me that I could go below 1 on the scales, it might work. edit: 2x on wayland is still blurry. 1x + 2x font works but as I said, tiny buttons and stuff. Still, my point is; why the fuck am I dealing with this?
- derriz 6y ago
  Not according to my experience with a top-spec Dell XPS "developer edition" with Ubuntu pre-installed about 2 years ago. Not only did I have intermittant Wifi connection drops but I was never able to get multi-monitor mixed DPI to work at all with or without Wayland. Even closing the lid/entering sleep mode was broken - the battery would continue to be drained (at about half the rate of non-sleep mode but still unusable).
  - chestervonwinch 6y ago
    Was the sleep issue not resolved by a BIOS update? Tangentially, I want to mention that the archlinux wiki is a terrific catalog of machines and their known quirks (and sometimes, fixes for the quirks!).
- barrucadu 6y ago
  Wayland is "basically the default now"? Since when?
- seabrookmx 6y ago
  > Wayland, which is basically the default now In Fedora maybe. Not in most distros. And recall many apps have to run under xwayland for compatibility so all of those apps won't support scaling properly. It's still not there yet. Battery life also takes a huge hit on the Dell XPS and HP Elitebooks I've tried, even after trying to apply some tweaks (not that I should need to). For this reason I use Windows+WSL on laptops even though I'd prefer Ubuntu.
vehemenz 6y ago
This is pretty neat, but I think the overhead saved with complete remote development might be cancelled out by using VSCode instead of a JetBrains IDE. People are advocating remote development heavily, so there must be some *huge* benefit that I don't understand. So much so that people are willing to give up amazing features of an IDE. To get VSCode to a usable state requires 16 third-party plugins, and you're left with about 1/3 of JetBrains functionality, in which the features aren't quite as good. YMMV I guess?
- oblio 6y ago
  And Jetbrains is working on a solution: https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/03/11/projector-is-out/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/03/11/projector-is-out/ It's still beta so they have a lot of work to do.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    Oh wow, I'm a JetBrains fan, but didn't know about this - if it delivers in the same way as the remote extensions for VSCode, it's going to be great! Have you tried the Projector beta yet?
    - oblio 6y ago
      Yes. It's based on toolkit remoting. Think RDP.
    - crummy 6y ago
      I have. It's very impressive but not ready for daily use IMO. (I tested it with IntelliJ). However, the 2012.1 releases now support running code on via WSL2 or SSH, which is closer to VS Code's setup. https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2021/02/intellij-idea-2021-1-eap-5/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2021/02/intellij-idea-2021-1...
- dangoor 6y ago
  I think Jetbrains IDEs can do the same thing: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/go/creating-a-remote-server-configuration.html#config https://www.jetbrains.com/help/go/creating-a-remote-server-c...

by tbrock 6y ago

dijit 6y ago

Ugh, I don't want to descend into "that thread" again, but Wifi/Screen have not been an issue on linux (as long as you don't use nvidia) in over 10 years. Mixed scale DPI screens are not a problem if you use Wayland, which is basically the default now. Font rendering though? YMMV.

acdibble 6y ago
If you use fractional scaling on Wayland, Chromium-based applications will render blurry. Obviously it's a Chromium issue but it's been around for a while and is a bad experience.
- rathboma 6y ago
  This just got patched, so electron apps are slowly able to update and fix this. VSCode has a beta version with the fix already
josephg 6y ago
Linux generally works great. I'm typing this on a linux mint, using mixed scale DPI screens and generally it all works pretty well. I think all my hardware is fully supported - I haven't had to mess with drivers at all. ... Well, not recently. There were some zen3 bugs in the stable kernel releases a few months ago, but it all works fine now. And thats sort of the theme everywhere. Its super fast and I love it, and its mostly stable and mostly great. But tiny bugs shine through all over. I've been totally spoiled by Apple's spit and polish. For example, I get random graphics bugs after waking from sleep sometimes. Sometimes my mouse cursor is either invisible or for some reason duplicated, so I see a second stationary cursor hovering over my windows. And for some reason my second display doesn't vsync, so I get obvious tearing when I scroll or move windows around. I use a trackpad, and smooth scrolling works properly in most apps. But Firefox needs an obscure XInput environment variable to make it work. (That trick is only mentioned deep some a bug tracker). Smooth scrolling doesn't work at all in IntelliJ. Intellij also doesn't let me use the Meta key (Cmd / Start) as a shortcut modifier - so my muscle memory for navigation is all messed up and I can't rebind keys to fix it. I hate how Ctrl+C is copy everywhere except the terminal, which needs me to Ctrl+Shift+C instead. Etc etc. Forever. Its unbelievably responsive compared to my 2016 MBP though. If you haven't upgraded in awhile and you can afford it, its a fantastic time to get a new system. But linux on the desktop still isn't entirely pain free. Way better than it was a few years ago though.
- pta2002 6y ago
  Do you know what that firefox variable is? It's the only reason I'm not using firefox right now.
  - callahad 6y ago
    Probably MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 (note the '2' at the end) ...or use Wayland where smooth scrolling should work by default
eknkc 6y ago
Nope, you people are living in a fairy tale. I’d love to have a decent linux desktop installation. I spent hours yesterday and gave up. I have a laptop running Ubuntu and connected to my 4k monitor in front of me. Has an Intel gpu. I do not even want to use multiple displays, I’m gonna go with the external only. Wayland can do fractional scaling but then VsCode, Firefox, Discord and whatever apps I tried became blurry shit. Firefox has an environment variable to fix it. VsCode has an experimental build and command line flags. I have no idea about Discord. I don’t care if its the app developers fault. It is just plain bad. X11 can do fractional scaling but fonts are a little blurry for some reason and I have the worst screen tearing I’ve ever seen in my life. It is unusable. macOS and Windows do this perfectly. It is not something you think about. Windows has some weird looking apps here and there but the shittyneas is not even close.
- dijit 6y ago
  I don't know what to tell you, maybe I won the lottery on hardware. (though, admittedly I buy computers with linux support in mind). Everything works completely flawlessly for me (even nice font rendering, though idk if I did something manual for that). For context, I have (currently) a precision 5520 laptop; I run arch with sway, I have a big USB-C 4k at work and 2*16:10 FHD Dell USB-C monitors at home. The only issues I have with linux is that I don't have Microsoft Office, and Zoom+Wayland is buggy as hell.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- devit 6y ago
  Don't use fractional scaling. Use the closest integer scaling and adjust default font sizes (and if needed other sizes like window title height or panel height). It's also best if you just don't buy monitors that have dpis that are not close to integer multiples of 96.
  - eknkc 6y ago
    Yeah I tried this but I used 1x ui scaling + 1.5x font scaling. It works but then all the buttons and stuff are tiny. Maybe I should try 2x gui scaling and 0.75 font size? Never occured to me that I could go below 1 on the scales, it might work. edit: 2x on wayland is still blurry. 1x + 2x font works but as I said, tiny buttons and stuff. Still, my point is; why the fuck am I dealing with this?
derriz 6y ago
Not according to my experience with a top-spec Dell XPS "developer edition" with Ubuntu pre-installed about 2 years ago. Not only did I have intermittant Wifi connection drops but I was never able to get multi-monitor mixed DPI to work at all with or without Wayland. Even closing the lid/entering sleep mode was broken - the battery would continue to be drained (at about half the rate of non-sleep mode but still unusable).
- chestervonwinch 6y ago
  Was the sleep issue not resolved by a BIOS update? Tangentially, I want to mention that the archlinux wiki is a terrific catalog of machines and their known quirks (and sometimes, fixes for the quirks!).
barrucadu 6y ago
Wayland is "basically the default now"? Since when?
seabrookmx 6y ago
> Wayland, which is basically the default now In Fedora maybe. Not in most distros. And recall many apps have to run under xwayland for compatibility so all of those apps won't support scaling properly. It's still not there yet. Battery life also takes a huge hit on the Dell XPS and HP Elitebooks I've tried, even after trying to apply some tweaks (not that I should need to). For this reason I use Windows+WSL on laptops even though I'd prefer Ubuntu.

vehemenz 6y ago

This is pretty neat, but I think the overhead saved with complete remote development might be cancelled out by using VSCode instead of a JetBrains IDE. People are advocating remote development heavily, so there must be some *huge* benefit that I don't understand. So much so that people are willing to give up amazing features of an IDE. To get VSCode to a usable state requires 16 third-party plugins, and you're left with about 1/3 of JetBrains functionality, in which the features aren't quite as good. YMMV I guess?

oblio 6y ago
And Jetbrains is working on a solution: https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/03/11/projector-is-out/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/03/11/projector-is-out/ It's still beta so they have a lot of work to do.
- GordonS 6y ago
  Oh wow, I'm a JetBrains fan, but didn't know about this - if it delivers in the same way as the remote extensions for VSCode, it's going to be great! Have you tried the Projector beta yet?
  - oblio 6y ago
    Yes. It's based on toolkit remoting. Think RDP.
  - crummy 6y ago
    I have. It's very impressive but not ready for daily use IMO. (I tested it with IntelliJ). However, the 2012.1 releases now support running code on via WSL2 or SSH, which is closer to VS Code's setup. https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2021/02/intellij-idea-2021-1-eap-5/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2021/02/intellij-idea-2021-1...
dangoor 6y ago
I think Jetbrains IDEs can do the same thing: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/go/creating-a-remote-server-configuration.html#config https://www.jetbrains.com/help/go/creating-a-remote-server-c...