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The Long Road to Linux-Only
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Brian_K_White 5y agohttps://archive.is/HbhUe https://archive.is/HbhUe
- scrps 5y agoIt might be an HN hug of death but the site is down.
- indigodaddy 5y agoThe site had intermittent 503's for me even before I posted it to HN, but yeah HN front page certainly wouldn't help the matter..
- nextaccountic 5y agoWhat's odd is that detection of headphone jack worked in every distro and DE I've ever used (currently Arch Linux with pulseaudio and Gnome 3 on Wayland) Gnome 3 on Wayland, by the way, was the only one that got fractional scaling right in my tests, with perfectly crisp fonts, after fiddling with gsettings Well, at least for Wayland apps (XWayland gets blurry, unfortunately). I've heard people say that KDE on Xorg is okay, but, it feels a bit blurry still (or maybe it's because it has another default fonts), specially in browsers.
- ylyn 5y ago> What's odd is that detection of headphone jack worked in every distro and DE I've ever used (currently Arch Linux with pulseaudio and Gnome 3 on Wayland) This needs the kernel driver to get it right. It doesn't depend so much on what userspace audio server you use. In the end they all use ALSA.
- phendrenad2 5y agoNo offense, but every complaint about something not functioning under Linux gets this exact response. "It worked for me, on my completely different hardware". And this is the core of the problem, two people using the same hardware and experiencing the same problem rarely meet online. Really sells System 76 and other Linux-focused hardware.
- nextaccountic 5y agoThis is true, sorry. I'm just saying it felt odd because over a number of different computers, a lot of things didn't work right, but this specific thing always did. I didn't even know it could not work right.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoAnd that's where Intel screwed up. It could have devoted .001% of quarterly revenues to fund ten years of linux hardware compatibility testing and driver development. It would have hedged against Microsoft in numerous ways: business dependence, forcing the hardware utilization Intel always accused Windows of ignoring, probably would have given them a functional beachhead in netbooks, mobile phones, and kept them abreast of other developments like ARM. Google could have also done this for pennies to hedge Microsoft. IBM could have used it to push back into consumer hardware. But the ship has sailed for Google with Android and ChromeOS. IBM is dying. Intel is the only one that is still has some market incentive.
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoTo this day wayland does not do fractional scaling. It just blurries individual windows a la macOS. The only toolkit around here that can do actual fractional scaling is Qt. Which is why all gtk based DEs like xfce are at a disadvantage.
- cycomanic 5y agoThat's not true, fractional scaling works fine both in sway and gnome on wayland. There was an issue with fractional scaling of xwayland windows, which caused blurriness, but I think this has been fixed a while ago (I can't see the blurriness anymore).
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoGtk does not do fractional scaling at all. It just does integer scaling then relies on the compositor to zoom in/out the window as necessary. This results in blurriness and poor performance. Qt can do true arbitrary fractional scaling, which has other problems.
- nextaccountic 5y ago> Gtk does not do fractional scaling at all. It just does integer scaling then relies on the compositor to zoom in/out the window as necessary. This results in blurriness and poor performance. Are you sure? Maybe you mean on X11? I'm running Gnome on Wayland and with this setting: > gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']" I get not blurriness at all. I'm actually kind of paranoid about this issue so can you maybe point me to some online docs describing this issue?
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoThis is a toolkit problem, it has nothing to do with wayland or x11. See https://developer.gnome.org/gdk3/stable/gdk3-Windows.html#gdk-window-get-scale-factor https://developer.gnome.org/gdk3/stable/gdk3-Windows.html#gd... , gtk just supports integers as an scaling factor. The mutter setting you are mentioning just enables framebuffer scaling (ie bitmap, http://blog.3v1n0.net/informatica/linux/gnome-fractional-and-multi-monitor-scaling-hackfest-the-report/ http://blog.3v1n0.net/informatica/linux/gnome-fractional-and... ). It will first ask gtk to render at the next integer scale then zoom out the resulting bitmap as necessary. This definitely results in blurriness that I do not see on windows (but you can see on macOS). Compare Qt which does support true fractional scaling albeit as I was saying this leads to another significant problem https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qt.html#HighDpiScaleFactorRoundingPolicy-enum https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qt.html#HighDpiScaleFactorRoundingPol... , but it does often result in a level of sharpness that cannot be matched, and it is trivial to see when you compare gtk with qt programs.
- cable2600 5y agoWith Windows 10 ending support in 2025 and Windows 11 needing the newest hardware, some people might be forced to go to Linux.
- kk6mrp 5y agoWhich people would be forced to go to Linux?
- timbit42 5y agoThe ones who don't want, or can't afford, to buy new hardware.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoAnd own hardware that is perfectly fine for everything but the latest Battlefield 15: Broforce now with .00001% improved graphics.
- cable2600 5y agoPlenty of corporations are still on Windows XP, Vista, and 7 because they cannot afford new PCs every time Microsoft issues an OS upgrade. Security support ended for their versions of Windows and it may be smarter to convert to Linux instead of buy all New PCs. Only requirement of Linux is a 486 or higher.
- ofrzeta 5y agoI have everything working on my Thinkpad, including bluetooth keyboard (ok, sometimes I have to restart the bluetooth daemon after the machine returns from sleep), hybrid sleep mode, dual screen setup, headphone jack, camera, wifi, VPN with networkmanager ... I swear I will never touch the config, update the distro or anything again.
- indigodaddy 5y agowhich distro?
- peakaboo 5y agoSame here. Thinkpad x6 worked perfectly. Now I'm on a Thinkpad T14s that also works perfectly. Arch Linux.
- krylon 5y agoI'm definitely biased, on my private machines, GNU/Linux has been my OS of choice for more than twenty years now, except for ~3.5 years of using a Mac. Having said that, I really, really like MATE, especially because it doesn't change much. It's a great desktop, IMHO, so I want it to stay that way. Hardware/driver support is a bit flaky sometimes, but it's much better than it was 20 years ago. And having worked as a Windows admin for a couple of years, I know from first-hand experience Windows has its own share of problems, and personally, I am much happier with GNU/Linux.
- xvilka 5y agoIt depends on hardware so much... I usually try to stick with Dell laptops because they often work more than others to test and improve the hardware support, but some laptops in the past worked out of the box just fine, for some laptops I filled 5 different kernel bugs and only 6 months later most were fixed. Thus it's kind of random.
- criddell 5y agoI like Linux just fine, but I could never get by with just Linux. There are too many other applications that I want to run that aren't available on Linux. Also, I'm a developer and none of my users are on Linux. That means I use Linux just for infrastructery-type stuff.
- okamiueru 5y agoIt saddens me a bit that, mostly, the reason anyone wants or needs Windows is because of software exclusivity, which, by and large, has little to do with limitations or features of the os. I can only imagine how better off the world would be if all those resources were not spent on something proprietary. Maybe this is a unpopular opinion, certainly a subjective one, I'll admit. I'll add to it that I feel MacOS is probably the worst actor to this effect, as it scratches the "not-Windows" itch, while, to my experience also being a very underperforming OS. Software availability shouldn't be the deciding factor, and for all other things, you are mostly worse off these days.
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- ziml77 5y agoQuite an aggressive opening there against doing the output switching in software. I would be annoyed if it happened in hardware since it means losing flexibility. In software, the output can be set per-application and you don't need to have physical access to the port to swap between devices. One good use I know of that can only work by doing the switching in software is something that some voice communication software does. They will have 2 output device selections, one for call audio and one for ringer audio. Without that, you'd have to be sure to unplug your headset every time you get up from your computer.
- dataflow 5y ago> against doing the output switching in software I don't think that was their position? "Switching the audio output should have been the default behavior, with a possible software command to revert it"
- ziml77 5y agoNope, look at the diagram. He's talking about the connection to the speakers physically being broken when the headphone plug is inserted into the jack. Here's a drawing that demonstrates how the circuit changes when the plug is inserted: https://www.electronicspecifier.com/cms/images/inline-2018-05/figure5mayblogcui.jpg https://www.electronicspecifier.com/cms/images/inline-2018-0...
- egypturnash 5y agothe long road to ranting about how some “snowflakes” had issues with RMS
- CRConrad 5y agoWhat's worst is, he's "defending RMS for saying" something RMS never actually said. From TFA: > He dared believe not all of Epstein’s victims were unwilling No, that's not what he said. He said they may have "presented as" willing, i.e. having been compelled by Epstein to pretend they were. He never said (AFAIK; at least not in this discussion) they actually were willing. This is sad for two reasons: 1) RMS is probably better of without defenders that defend stuff he didn't even do; especially when they're as ranty as this. 2) Getting something this basic wrong here colours one's impression of the whole piece; how wrong is he on everything else he said? Which might have been interesting, since the subject matter in itself is stuff that could affect many of us.
- aappleby 5y agoThis was a good article until I got to this bullshit - "There are only two genders, male/female, masculine/feminine, and only two pronouns, he/she, him/her, and the whole transgender, gender-fluid and other crappy “gender studies” (don’t blame Foucault, blame Judith Butler!) is pure postmodern propaganda initiated by people who should be anally raped by rabid monkeys!" Yeah, you're an asshole and I no longer care about your article.
- alyandon 5y agoYeah, you're an asshole and I no longer care about your article. You made it much further than I did. Even as a (nominally) rational human being, I really don't see how I'm supposed to be obligated to take the opinions of anyone that would write such things seriously. He does make some rather valid points with respect to the types of things you have to be willing to deal with if you choose to run Linux as your primary OS.
- sunstone 5y agoThe pronoun 'they' is perfectly fine and gender neutral.
- cycomanic 5y agoI mean maybe there is some truth to the headphone jack woes, but a lot of the other stuff is rubbish. I mean he (likely based on the other stuff he wrote) claims (very strongly) that wayland was written because of licence disagreements and libreoffice as well. It really would help to do some research when making such claims.
- mickotron 5y agoSolus is my distro. After using Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu, Solus has been stable and reliable for many years. My daily driver on desktop and laptop.