5 ms·

I gave Linux a honest shot when my previous macbook keyboard died, however I could not make it work. - Last time I tried, Linux could not do proper fractional

by eknkc 4y ago

I gave Linux a honest shot when my previous macbook keyboard died, however I could not make it work. - Last time I tried, Linux could not do proper fractional scaling. I use 4k 27" displays and wish to use 1.5x scaling. macOS does it perfectly, Windows does it perfectly. Linux does all kinds of shitty stuff. Never could get it working properly. You either get blurry scaling or screen tearing and shit. - Scroll inertia thing is fucked on Linux. Trackpads are not fun to use. - I love clipboard managers, keeping history of clipboard, allowing search in previous entries etc. All solutions on Linux have been simply bad. And as far as I can tell, it is not even possible to properly do it on wayland. - Laptops do not sleep properly. I tried 2 different devices, more than once they heated up in my backpack. I can't have that. Note that I'm not a foreigner to Linux. I've been running and loving Linux servers my entire life and I can get around stuff pretty fine. I just don't have the stamina to deal with desktop linux.

geethree 4y ago
Re: scaling Genuinely curious did xrandr not work for you? I have the same setup and use 1.5 scaling. (Ubuntu focal).
- grogenaut 4y ago
  When you get to multi displays with different native dot pitches you start running into issues. I have not been able to easily get my laptop to handle it's 4k internal monitor and a 2560x1440 external smoothly. Issues occur when I unplug the monitor and debugging microscopic 4k fonts isn't fun. Nor is 75 arcane commands from the internet and 14 ui tools that don't quite do what I need. This happens on Mac and windows but on windows I just use force resolution on the Nvidia driver to add one extra mode, and on Mac switch res x did it. So sadly Mac is my main good travel PC option.
  - geethree 4y ago
    Yeah I need to tweak a bit between xrandr scaling and xdg dpi, then force specific apps as well. Not ideal, but enough tweaking got it done.
aatd86 4y ago
That's a strange statement to make. Usually, one would try a given distribution, not Linux itself, without even going into considering the flavors of window managers (gnome, kde...) . You must have tried Linux really quickly :p tongue-in-check Or you were running headless xD
yulaow 4y ago
Curios, I tried a macbook in the first month after the launch of the 16inches with m1pro/max and I found fractional scaling in macos for my two 27 1440p display _extremely_ bad, especially fonts were renderized so bad it was hurting my eyes and almost unreadable, while on linux the rendering was immediately perfect
- yunyu 4y ago
  I assume most people needing fractional scaling on Mac are doing it with hidpi displays, where differences in text rendering aren’t visible and layout correctness is way more important. I have a 4k display scaled to 5k resolution to get more real estate, and there’s no difference in text clarity at that PPI.
singhrac 4y ago
I very much agree with all of this. I tried to use desktop Linux for years, and besides the UX issues you mentioned above, I also just found every desktop environment (I tried Gnome at length, grew up on KDE/Xfce) mildly clunky and lacking some essentially design spirit. Not everyone's cup of tea, I guess.
gfaster 4y ago
On a couple of your points: - fractional scaling is a known sore spot, but it seems like it's getting better fast. Wayland finally has fractional scaling and the upcoming release of KDE is coming with proper fractional scaling support. - The laptop sleep setting is some that can be (sometimes) fixed by changing a bios setting (called something along the lines of 'Sleep State'). It's part of a Microsoft + Intel initiative to make PCs "more like smartphones," with all the extra "user friendliness" you would expect from that.
jchw 4y ago
If you are on Wayland, fractional scaling should be working fine as of 2022. It'll be a little blurry in some cases until everything is native Wayland and fractional scaling is supported through all apps and compositors, but at the very least window geometries should be being scaled correctly unilaterally when you run Wayland today, heterogenous DPI, fractional DPI, whatever. Can't comment on scroll inertia. Libinput has been working pretty well with my assortment of trackpads. Touch input seems ok on Wayland too, using an ITHC based device. Have not had the sleep problem with Linux lately. Actually, the problem has kind of reversed - nowadays, this problem is more associated with Windows, thanks to Windows Modern Standby being impossible to disable on newer Intel processors. Still, sleep may be broken if you are using an NVIDIA based device. All I can say is, NVIDIA is one thing better avoided with Linux today. Obviously, if you want your best shot, using hardware that is designed and tested only on other OSes that has merely reverse engineered support in Linux is not going to give it to you, though I understand why people are not willing to fork the cash over to one of the few vendors like System76 that actually do a reasonable job. You got me on clipboard management, that sucks today. I'm pretty sure it's not impossible in Wayland, but it'll need compositor support. KDE on X11 used to have great clipboard management; dunno what the status of that is in 2022, as I used KDE most in the KDE3 days. Clipboard management is hard for valid reasons though. Just like on all other operating systems, clipboard isn't really a place that data lives, it's an IPC layer. When you copy, nothing happens except for the advertisement that something has been copied to the clipboard. Sometimes clipboard operations hang if an app becomes unresponsive, and the act of "pasting" is not necessarily without side-effects. This makes active clipboard management pretty hard to get right, if it's possible at all with today's designs. The biggest problem is LOSING the clipboard when an app closes, in some environments. That really does need to be fixed. That said, believe it or not, it happens on Windows too, just, thankfully, not in most common scenarios.
agilob 4y ago
>Last time I tried, Linux could not do proper fractional scaling. I use 4k 27" displays and wish to use 1.5x scaling. macOS does it perfectly Depends on when you used it last time. On Linux we have two graphic systems, Xorg that doesn't support it, and Wayland that supports it out of box. Some distros switched to Wayland years ago, others still prefer Xorg as the default option, just change to Wayland during installation. I have 2 screens, each with different resolution and it's all fine. >- Scroll inertia thing is fucked on Linux. Trackpads are not fun to use. This is highly configurable on Plasma (KDE). I would say, too many possible options are given, but it's not as bad as on Windows where on one laptop double tab is double click, on another it means scroll-click. Plasma tries to fit everyone, but requires some turning like this. >- I love clipboard managers, keeping history of clipboard, allowing search in previous entries etc. All solutions on Linux have been simply bad. And as far as I can tell, it is not even possible to properly do it on wayland. We're back to Plasma, you can configure global clipboard and screen-independent clipboard, they would also share history and clipboard recorded is enabled on default. >- Laptops do not sleep properly. I tried 2 different devices, more than once they heated up in my backpack. I can't have that. This still suck very much, welcome to systemd integration layers that need to be done as root and you never know if it's working until you test it after a reboot.
- nagisa 4y ago
  Wayland by itself does not* support fractional scaling out of the box, or at least it didn’t until November of 2022 when the prerequisite protocol extensions were merged to the project. And AFAIU clients (applications) still need to implement this protocol. Something like wxwidgets or old gtk versions probably won’t ever get to implementing it. * Some compositors employ some workarounds to achieve this, like the scaling tricks where they render to a larger buffer and then downscale it…
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    A number of distros patched it in before it was merged… a long time ago. I’ve never had an issue with fractional scaling.
- 4y ago
agartner 4y ago
Fractional scaling and no screen tearing are the main reasons I chose to adopt Wayland (sway) ~2 years ago.
goosedragons 4y ago
The sleep thing is not unique to Linux at all. I've had that happen with my MBP, Windows laptops are affected by it too. It's just modern shitty standby. The best way to avoid that is to buy a device that still supports S3 sleep, many ThinkPads still do with the BIOS setting being labeled "Linux". I've found fractional scaling OK on Linux doing it with Xrandr. It works the same way MacOS does it. A bit of a bear to setup although Ubuntu has had it easy to use in their version of Gnome since 20.04.
xur17 4y ago
> Last time I tried, Linux could not do proper fractional scaling. I use 4k 27" displays and wish to use 1.5x scaling. macOS does it perfectly, Windows does it perfectly. Linux does all kinds of shitty stuff. Never could get it working properly. You either get blurry scaling or screen tearing and shit. This is a bit of a workaround, but I've been using it for close to 5 years on Gnome / Ubuntu with a lot of success: You can install gnome-tweaks, and modify the text scaling factor to fractional numbers (ex: I have it set to 1.4 on a 2560x1400 14" screen). The vast majority of applications use this to scale both text, and icons (chrome, terminal, file editor, desktop, etc). And I realize as I type this that it's a "workaround", which kind of reiterates your point about it being difficult to use. That said, I personally feel like macOS has similar issues (docker, desktop handling, slightly.. different bash tools, etc), and a lot of it is a matter of using something you're not used to.
- bluedino 4y ago
  Windows doesn't do it perfectly. Every day I run into some application that's blurry or out of whack.
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    This is because the application devs didn’t call the function to enable it. It’s literally 1-2 lines of code and a quick Google search, but you have to know about it.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    None of the apps I use under Windows have trouble with it. I don't run anything that hasn't received updates recently, though.
fsflover 4y ago
> - Laptops do not sleep properly. I tried 2 different devices If you tried to install Linux on two random devices designed for Windows and they do not work flawlessly, then I am not surprised. My Librem 15, which came with Linux preinstalled, has 100% reliable sleep.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  It doesn’t even work on windows. S0 modern standby just flat out doesn’t work and will drain your laptop to 0 while it’s not being used.
diffeomorphism 4y ago
- that scaling scenario (same factor on multiple displays) works perfectly in my experience. What admittedly could use more work is mixed scaling, which works fine on wayland and okayish on X. - I thought that was a patents thing? - Compared to what? The clipboard managers on windows seemed all pretty bad. - yeah, better than windows (e.g. see the linus tech tips rant about it), but s3sleep is much better still. Luckily many higher priced ones offer that as an option in the UEFI settings.

by eknkc 4y ago

geethree 4y ago

Re: scaling Genuinely curious did xrandr not work for you? I have the same setup and use 1.5 scaling. (Ubuntu focal).

grogenaut 4y ago
When you get to multi displays with different native dot pitches you start running into issues. I have not been able to easily get my laptop to handle it's 4k internal monitor and a 2560x1440 external smoothly. Issues occur when I unplug the monitor and debugging microscopic 4k fonts isn't fun. Nor is 75 arcane commands from the internet and 14 ui tools that don't quite do what I need. This happens on Mac and windows but on windows I just use force resolution on the Nvidia driver to add one extra mode, and on Mac switch res x did it. So sadly Mac is my main good travel PC option.
- geethree 4y ago
  Yeah I need to tweak a bit between xrandr scaling and xdg dpi, then force specific apps as well. Not ideal, but enough tweaking got it done.

aatd86 4y ago

That's a strange statement to make. Usually, one would try a given distribution, not Linux itself, without even going into considering the flavors of window managers (gnome, kde...) . You must have tried Linux really quickly :p tongue-in-check Or you were running headless xD

yulaow 4y ago

Curios, I tried a macbook in the first month after the launch of the 16inches with m1pro/max and I found fractional scaling in macos for my two 27 1440p display _extremely_ bad, especially fonts were renderized so bad it was hurting my eyes and almost unreadable, while on linux the rendering was immediately perfect

yunyu 4y ago
I assume most people needing fractional scaling on Mac are doing it with hidpi displays, where differences in text rendering aren’t visible and layout correctness is way more important. I have a 4k display scaled to 5k resolution to get more real estate, and there’s no difference in text clarity at that PPI.

singhrac 4y ago

I very much agree with all of this. I tried to use desktop Linux for years, and besides the UX issues you mentioned above, I also just found every desktop environment (I tried Gnome at length, grew up on KDE/Xfce) mildly clunky and lacking some essentially design spirit. Not everyone's cup of tea, I guess.

gfaster 4y ago

On a couple of your points: - fractional scaling is a known sore spot, but it seems like it's getting better fast. Wayland finally has fractional scaling and the upcoming release of KDE is coming with proper fractional scaling support. - The laptop sleep setting is some that can be (sometimes) fixed by changing a bios setting (called something along the lines of 'Sleep State'). It's part of a Microsoft + Intel initiative to make PCs "more like smartphones," with all the extra "user friendliness" you would expect from that.

jchw 4y ago

If you are on Wayland, fractional scaling should be working fine as of 2022. It'll be a little blurry in some cases until everything is native Wayland and fractional scaling is supported through all apps and compositors, but at the very least window geometries should be being scaled correctly unilaterally when you run Wayland today, heterogenous DPI, fractional DPI, whatever. Can't comment on scroll inertia. Libinput has been working pretty well with my assortment of trackpads. Touch input seems ok on Wayland too, using an ITHC based device. Have not had the sleep problem with Linux lately. Actually, the problem has kind of reversed - nowadays, this problem is more associated with Windows, thanks to Windows Modern Standby being impossible to disable on newer Intel processors. Still, sleep may be broken if you are using an NVIDIA based device. All I can say is, NVIDIA is one thing better avoided with Linux today. Obviously, if you want your best shot, using hardware that is designed and tested only on other OSes that has merely reverse engineered support in Linux is not going to give it to you, though I understand why people are not willing to fork the cash over to one of the few vendors like System76 that actually do a reasonable job. You got me on clipboard management, that sucks today. I'm pretty sure it's not impossible in Wayland, but it'll need compositor support. KDE on X11 used to have great clipboard management; dunno what the status of that is in 2022, as I used KDE most in the KDE3 days. Clipboard management is hard for valid reasons though. Just like on all other operating systems, clipboard isn't really a place that data lives, it's an IPC layer. When you copy, nothing happens except for the advertisement that something has been copied to the clipboard. Sometimes clipboard operations hang if an app becomes unresponsive, and the act of "pasting" is not necessarily without side-effects. This makes active clipboard management pretty hard to get right, if it's possible at all with today's designs. The biggest problem is LOSING the clipboard when an app closes, in some environments. That really does need to be fixed. That said, believe it or not, it happens on Windows too, just, thankfully, not in most common scenarios.

agilob 4y ago

>Last time I tried, Linux could not do proper fractional scaling. I use 4k 27" displays and wish to use 1.5x scaling. macOS does it perfectly Depends on when you used it last time. On Linux we have two graphic systems, Xorg that doesn't support it, and Wayland that supports it out of box. Some distros switched to Wayland years ago, others still prefer Xorg as the default option, just change to Wayland during installation. I have 2 screens, each with different resolution and it's all fine. >- Scroll inertia thing is fucked on Linux. Trackpads are not fun to use. This is highly configurable on Plasma (KDE). I would say, too many possible options are given, but it's not as bad as on Windows where on one laptop double tab is double click, on another it means scroll-click. Plasma tries to fit everyone, but requires some turning like this. >- I love clipboard managers, keeping history of clipboard, allowing search in previous entries etc. All solutions on Linux have been simply bad. And as far as I can tell, it is not even possible to properly do it on wayland. We're back to Plasma, you can configure global clipboard and screen-independent clipboard, they would also share history and clipboard recorded is enabled on default. >- Laptops do not sleep properly. I tried 2 different devices, more than once they heated up in my backpack. I can't have that. This still suck very much, welcome to systemd integration layers that need to be done as root and you never know if it's working until you test it after a reboot.

nagisa 4y ago
Wayland by itself does not* support fractional scaling out of the box, or at least it didn’t until November of 2022 when the prerequisite protocol extensions were merged to the project. And AFAIU clients (applications) still need to implement this protocol. Something like wxwidgets or old gtk versions probably won’t ever get to implementing it. * Some compositors employ some workarounds to achieve this, like the scaling tricks where they render to a larger buffer and then downscale it…
- withinboredom 4y ago
  A number of distros patched it in before it was merged… a long time ago. I’ve never had an issue with fractional scaling.
4y ago

agartner 4y ago

Fractional scaling and no screen tearing are the main reasons I chose to adopt Wayland (sway) ~2 years ago.

goosedragons 4y ago

The sleep thing is not unique to Linux at all. I've had that happen with my MBP, Windows laptops are affected by it too. It's just modern shitty standby. The best way to avoid that is to buy a device that still supports S3 sleep, many ThinkPads still do with the BIOS setting being labeled "Linux". I've found fractional scaling OK on Linux doing it with Xrandr. It works the same way MacOS does it. A bit of a bear to setup although Ubuntu has had it easy to use in their version of Gnome since 20.04.

xur17 4y ago

> Last time I tried, Linux could not do proper fractional scaling. I use 4k 27" displays and wish to use 1.5x scaling. macOS does it perfectly, Windows does it perfectly. Linux does all kinds of shitty stuff. Never could get it working properly. You either get blurry scaling or screen tearing and shit. This is a bit of a workaround, but I've been using it for close to 5 years on Gnome / Ubuntu with a lot of success: You can install gnome-tweaks, and modify the text scaling factor to fractional numbers (ex: I have it set to 1.4 on a 2560x1400 14" screen). The vast majority of applications use this to scale both text, and icons (chrome, terminal, file editor, desktop, etc). And I realize as I type this that it's a "workaround", which kind of reiterates your point about it being difficult to use. That said, I personally feel like macOS has similar issues (docker, desktop handling, slightly.. different bash tools, etc), and a lot of it is a matter of using something you're not used to.

bluedino 4y ago
Windows doesn't do it perfectly. Every day I run into some application that's blurry or out of whack.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  This is because the application devs didn’t call the function to enable it. It’s literally 1-2 lines of code and a quick Google search, but you have to know about it.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  None of the apps I use under Windows have trouble with it. I don't run anything that hasn't received updates recently, though.

fsflover 4y ago

> - Laptops do not sleep properly. I tried 2 different devices If you tried to install Linux on two random devices designed for Windows and they do not work flawlessly, then I am not surprised. My Librem 15, which came with Linux preinstalled, has 100% reliable sleep.

Gigachad 4y ago
It doesn’t even work on windows. S0 modern standby just flat out doesn’t work and will drain your laptop to 0 while it’s not being used.

diffeomorphism 4y ago

- that scaling scenario (same factor on multiple displays) works perfectly in my experience. What admittedly could use more work is mixed scaling, which works fine on wayland and okayish on X. - I thought that was a patents thing? - Compared to what? The clipboard managers on windows seemed all pretty bad. - yeah, better than windows (e.g. see the linus tech tips rant about it), but s3sleep is much better still. Luckily many higher priced ones offer that as an option in the UEFI settings.