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As a long-time Linux user who fairly recently dropped the Windows partition entirely, I do think the remaining chafing points are these: * UI framework balkani

As a long-time Linux user who fairly recently dropped the Windows partition entirely, I do think the remaining chafing points are these: * UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. And now you don't just have different versions of GTK vs QT to keep track off, but also X vs Wayland, and their various compatibility layers. * Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this. * Anything to do with configuring webcams feels like you're suddenly in thrown back 20 years into the past. It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy. * Audio filtering is a pain to set up.

amelius 9mo ago
> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. At least things look more or less the same over time. With commercial offerings one day you open your laptop and suddenly everything looks different and all the functions are in a different submenu because some designer thought it was cool or some manager needed a raise. > It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy. LLMs are actually very useful for Linux configuration problems. They might even be the reason so many users made the switch recently.
- tracker1 9mo ago
  They're pretty good for most things, yes... but man was it rough figuring out getting my IP allocation routing right on my Proxmox server. The system is issued a primary IP, and need to route my subnet through that to my VMs... wasn't too bad once I got it working... I'd also wanted a dnat for "internal" services, and that's where it got tricky. I need to refresh myself as I'm wanting to move from a /29 to a /28 ... mostly been lazy about not getting it done, but actually mqking progress oo some hobby stuff with Claude Code... definitely a force multiplier, but I'm not quite at a "vibe code" level of trust, so it's still a bit of a slog.
  - pdntspa 9mo ago
    You could just let the VMs be normal IPs on the network....
    - tracker1 9mo ago
      Where would those IPs route to/from if it didn't have a configured default gateway exactly? The machine got a single IP, I had to route the CIDR block using that IP as the gateway in the host OS. The VMs wouldn't just get assigned additional real IPs.
- tomnipotent 9mo ago
  KDE & Gnome are both guilty of the same.
- bsimpson 9mo ago
  Pair-programming Nix with Gemini has taught me a lot about the assistive power of LLMs. They're still slow and annoying at languages I'm good at. But it's really handy to be able to take one I'm not (like Nix or even C++) and say "write me a patch that does …" Applying a lot of the same thinking/structuring skills, but not tripping on the syntax.
whateverboat 9mo ago
- Yes. I think big players in Linux should start supporting core functionalities in GNOME and KDE, and make it polished for laptops and desktops and that would be very cool. For a long time, KDE had a problem of having too many things under its umbrella. Now, with separation of Plasma Desktop and Applications, focusing on Plasma Desktop and KDE PIM should be a good step. - Kind of ties to the old point: KDE on Wayland does this extremely well. - You're back to 20 years because problems are exactly from 20 years ago. Vendors refusing to support linux with d rivers. - Audio filtering? Interesting. I know people who use Pipewire + Jack quite reasonably. But may be you have usecase I am now aware of? Would be happy to hear some.
- int_19h 9mo ago
  It would help if Gnome wasn't so hostile towards proper cross-DE interop. A famous quote by a Gnome dev goes, "I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an Xfce app unfortunately" They seem to genuinely believe that their way is the right way and everyone else is "holding it wrong" so there's no need for things that would make cross-DE apps easier (or even possible).
unyttigfjelltol 9mo ago
I had to dump a perfectly fine c.2012 workstation recently because of video driver limitations. Could no longer stay current on my flavor of Linux (OpenSUSE) and have better than hideous display resolution limited to just one monitor. NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers are great, but the limited support lifecycle plus poor open source coverage is actually making Linux turn fine systems into trash just the way Windows used to do.
- pixl97 9mo ago
  >poor open source coverage is actually making Linux turn fine systems into trash just the way Windows used to do. I'd blame Linux as a very small percentage of the problem here. This is on NVIDIA ensuring their hardware doesn't last to long and forcing you to throw it away eventually. Open source can make the monitor 'work' but really aren't efficient, and really can never be efficient because NVIDIA doesn't release the needed information and directly competes with their proprietary driver.
- tracker1 9mo ago
  Couldn't you swap out for a now lower level AMD GPU? An RX 6600 should be under $200 and likely at least as good as what you were running... unless you were doing specific CUDA workloads. Even on PCIe 2/3, it should be fine.
WillAdams 9mo ago
Hardware support for esoteric things such as the new generation of Wacom EMR is still awkward --- I was able to get the previous gen working on a ThinkPad X61T using Lubuntu --- wish that there was such an easy way to try out Linux on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360....
tliltocatl 9mo ago
> * UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous me I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works". > It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Drivers are a pain point and will probably stay so until the market share is too large for the hardware vendors to ignore. Which probably aren't happening any time soon, sadly.
- marginalia_nu 9mo ago
  This is not a driver issue I'm talking about. It's a "best way to adjust the white balance is with this GTK+-2.0 app that hasn't seen maintenance since the Bush administration" issue.
  - tliltocatl 9mo ago
    Yes, this one is quite a problem as well.
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
  > I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works". The UI framework for macOS has not changed in any substantial design-update-requiring ways since OS X was first released. They did add stuff (animations as a core concept, most notably). The UI framework for Windows has changed even less, though it's more of a mess because there are several different ones, with an unclear relationship to each other. win32 won't hurt though, and it hasn't changed in any significant ways since dinosaurs roamed the silicon savannahs. The UI framework for Linux ... oh wait, there isn't one.
jsheard 9mo ago
> Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this. I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly, macOS also does the hack where they simulate fractional scales by rendering with an integer scale at a non-native resolution then scaling it down.
- delta_p_delta_x 9mo ago
  > I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly Windows is the only one that does this properly. Windows handles high pixel density on a per-application, per-display basis. This is the most fine-grained. It's pretty easy to opt in on reasonably modern frameworks, too; just add in the necessary key in the resource manifest; done. [1] Linux + Xorg has a global pixel density scale factor. KDE/Qt handles this OK; GNOME/GTK break when the scaling factor is not an integer multiple of 96 and cause raster scaling. Linux + Wayland has per-display scaling factors, but Chromium, GNOME, and GTK break the same way as the Xorg setup. KDE/Qt are a bit better, but I'm quite certain the taskbar icons are sharper on Xorg than they are on Wayland. I think this boils down to subpixel rendering not being enabled. And of course, every application on Linux in theory can handle high pixel density, but there is a zoo of environment variables and command-line arguments that need to be passed for the ideal result. On macOS, if the pixel density of the target display is at least some Apple-blessed number that they consider 'Retina', then the 'Retina' resolutions are enabled. At resolutions that are not integer multiples of the physical resolution, the framebuffer is four times the resolution of the displayed values (twice in each dimension), and then the final result is raster-scaled with some sinc/Lanczos algorithm back down to the physical resolution. This shows up as ringing artifacts, which are very obvious with high-contrast, thin regions like text. On non-retina resolutions, there is zero concept of 'scaling factor' whatsoever; you can choose another resolution, but it will be raster-scaled (usually up) with some bi/trilinear filtering, and the entire screen is blurry. The last time Windows had such brute-force rendering was in Windows XP, 25 years ago. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/hidpi/setting-the-default-dpi-awareness-for-a-process https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/hidpi/settin...
  - 9mo ago
helterskelter 9mo ago
> * Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this. This sounds like you're using some old software. GNOME and sway have clean fractional scaling without blurring, though that hasn't always been the case (it used to be terrible).
jhasse 9mo ago
I'm using KDE with Wayland and 2 non-standard DPI monitors (one at 100% the other at 150% scale). No workarounds needed, nothing is blurry. I think your experience comes from GNOME which lacks behind in this regard.
- mixmastamyk 9mo ago
  Mint/cinnamon here at 150%, X11, not blurry. It’s FUD.
  - vladvasiliu 9mo ago
    The issue with X11 is that it's not dynamic. Think using a laptop, which you sometimes connect to a screen on which you require a different scale. X11 won't handle different scales, and it also won't switch from one to the other without restarting it.
    - simoncion 9mo ago
      > The issue with X11 is that it's not dynamic. No, it is. Maybe you're using an ancient (or misconfigured) Xorg? Or maybe you've never used a GTK program? One prereq is that you have a daemon running that speaks the ~20 year old XSETTINGS protocol (such as 'xsettingsd'). Another prereq is that you have a DE and GUI toolkit new enough to know how to react to scaling changes. [0] Also, for some damn reason, QT and FLTK programs need to be restarted in order to render with the new screen scaling ratio, but GTK programs pick up the changes immediately. Based on my investigation, this is a deficiency in how QT and FLTK react to the information they're being provided with. At least on my system, the KDE settings dialog that lets you adjust screen scaling only exposes a single slider that applies to the entire screen. However, I've bothered to look at (and play with) what's actually going on under the hood, and the underlying systems totally expose per-display scaling factors... but for some reason the KDE control widget doesn't bother to let you use them. Go figure. [0] I don't know where the cutoff point is, but I know folks have reported to me that their Debian-delivered Xorg installs totally failed to do "non-integer" scaling (dynamic or otherwise), but I've been able to do this on my Gentoo Linux machines for quite some time.
tracker1 9mo ago
On UI frameworks... mostly agree, I say this as a COSMIC user even... so many apps still don't show up right in the tray, but it's getting a bit better, I always found KDE to be noisy, and don't like how overtly political the Gnome guys are. So far Wayland hasn't been bad, X apps pretty much just work, even if they don't scale right. I'm on a very large OLED 3440x1440 display and haven't had too many issues... some apps seem to just drop out, I'm not sure if they are on a different workspace or something as I tend to just stick to single screen, single display. I need to take the time to tweak my hotkeys for window pinning. I'll usually have my browser to half the screen and my editor and terminal on the other half... sometimes stretching the editor to 2/3 covering part of the browser. I'm usually zoomed in 25-30% in my editor and browser... I'd scale the UI 25% directly, like on windows or mac, but you're right it's worse. For webcams, I don't use anything too advanced, but the Nexigo cams I've been using lately have been working very well... they're the least painful part of my setup, and even though I tend to use a BT headset, I use the webcam mic as switching in and out of stereo/mono mode for the headset mic doesn't always work right in Linux. On audio filtering, I can only imagine... though would assume it's finally starting to get better with whatever the current standard is (pipewire?), which from what I understand is closer to what mac's interfaces are. I know a few audio guys and they hate Windows and mostly are shy to even consider Linux.
jraph 9mo ago
> Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry Not blurry for me on KDE and I wouldn't tolerate blurry, I'd prefer the imperfect solution of using bigger fonts.
- pimeys 9mo ago
  KDE Plasma 6 might be the only desktop that does this right on Linux.
- craftkiller 9mo ago
  I've also been running fractional scaling on Sway for many years now and native wayland applications are not blurry. X11 apps run through XWayland will be blurry, but I don't have any legacy X11 apps remaining on my system.
Orygin 9mo ago
> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess I thought you were talking about Windows there. There are 4 (5?) different UI paradigms within Windows, and doing one thing sometimes requires you to interact with each of them. At least on Linux, with GTK/KDE, you can pick a camp and have a somewhat consistent experience, with a few outliers. Plus many apps now just use CSD and fully integrate their designs to the window, so it's hopeless to have every window styling be consistent. I never had to mind X vs Wayland when starting user applications tho.
- reddalo 9mo ago
  >many apps now just use CSD If there's something I hate about Linux, it's CSD (Client-Side Decorations, in case people don't know what it is). If I wanted all my apps to look different from each other, I'd use macOS. I want a clean desktop environment, with predictable window frames that are customizable and they all look the same. CSD destroys that.
  - BizarroLand 9mo ago
    Conversely, I don't want all of my apps to look identical to each other. I want to be able to tell with a submoment of a glance what app I am working on or looking for without having to cognitively engage to locate it, breaking my state of flow in the process.
    - int_19h 9mo ago
      That's what the title bar is for?
    - uKVZe85V 9mo ago
      You're defeating your own point. CSD in practice breaks a basic feature of the desktop : knowing at first glance which of the windows will receive whatever you type on the keyboard. For eons the standard was: the only one with the title bar showing the theme accent color. That is consistent, predictable, keeps the user in the flow. With CSD each app does whatever inconsistent thing they can fancy. You type and oops deleted something in the wrong window. Alas now even many default SSD setups fail at this (selected and non-selected windows look pretty much the same) and keyboard-first workflow is much hindered.
uiframeworks 9mo ago
[dead]
vladvasiliu 9mo ago
> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. Amen. But, which OS doesn't have this problem? I'm currently running windows on a work laptop and even freaking first-party apps have a different look and behave differently from one another. Teams can't even be assed to use standard windows notifications! And don't get me started on electron apps, of which most apps are nowadays, each coming with their own look and feel. Also, have you tried switching from light to dark mode, say at night? The task manager changes only partially. The explorer copy info window doesn't even have a dark mode! On outlook the window controls don't change colour, so you end up with black on black or white on white. You can't possibly hold up windows as a model of uniform UI. So while I agree that this situation is terrible, I wouldn't pin it on the linux ecosystem(s). > Every other major OS can deal with [high dpi]. Don't know about mac os, but on Windows it's a shitshow. We use some very high DPI displays at work which I have to run at 200%, every other screen I use is 100%. Even the freaking start menu is blurry! It only works well if I boot the machine with the high-dpi display attached. If I plug it in after a while (think going to work with the laptop asleep), the thing's blurry! Some taskbar icons don't adapt, so I sometimes have tiny icons, or huge cropped ones if I unplug the external monitor. Plasma doesn't do this. IME KDE/Plasma 6 works perfectly with mixed DPI (but I admit I haven't tried "fractional" scales). The only app which doesn't play ball 100% is IntelliJ (scaling works, it's sharp, but the mouse cursor is the wrong size). > Audio filtering is a pain to set up. What do you mean? I've been using easyeffects for more than five years now to apply either a parametric EQ to my speakers or a convolver to my headphones. Works perfectly for all the apps, or I can choose which apps it should alter. The PEQ adds a bit of a latency, but applications seem to be aware of it, so if I play videos (even youtube on firefox with gpu decoding!) it stays in sync. It detects the output and loads presets accordingly. I also don't have to reboot when I connect some new audio device, like BT headphones (well, technically, on Windows I don't anymore, either, since for some reason it can't connect to either of my headphones at all). I would love to have something similar on windows, but the best I found isn't as polished. It also doesn't support dark mode, so it burns my eyes at night.
- KerrAvon 9mo ago
  macOS and Windows have a much smaller set of variants, and tend to ship a single UI with everything included with OS. Even the best single desktop Linux distros will ship divergent KDE and Gnome apps. If you want essentially perfect high-DPI support out of the box and can afford higher end displays, use macOS. It just works. I see the comments above about scaling, and to that, I say: most people will never notice. However, a Win32 app being the wrong scale? They'll notice that. But the real display weak point of Linux right now vs Windows is HDR for gaming. That's a real shitshow and it tends to just work on Windows.
colordrops 9mo ago
Fractional scaling on Wayland is only blurry for X apps, and even then, most apps have Wayland support at this point, so for the remaining apps, just turn off Xwayland scaling, and using native scaling through env vars and flags, and no more blurriness.
jdc0589 9mo ago
the scaling and UI framework issues are by far my biggest pain point. I will inevitably end up with an app with tiny and/or blurry UI elements every few weeks and have to spend a ton of time figuring out the correct incantation to make it better. This is on a pretty clean/fresh install of current ubuntu desktop
craftkiller 9mo ago
> Audio filtering is a pain to set up. Like noise filtering for your microphone? It was pretty trivial to set up: https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice
insane_dreamer 9mo ago
I use Linux as my daily driver, with a Mac laptop. I only use Windows when I absolutely have to (i.e., testing), and usually through a VM. Some other rough edges in Linux I've encountered: - a/v support in various apps. We use Slack for everything (I can't just use something else) and a/v support is pretty bad to where my video frame rate is now ~1Hz and screen share shows a black rectangle. I think that's mostly Slack's fault as Google Hangouts works fine, but it's probably low on their priority list. - sleep / hibernation is still sometimes flakey. occasionally it won't wake up after hibernating overnight, and I have to hard reboot (losing any open files though that's not an issue) - power management on laptops (and therefore battery life) is still worse than Windows, and way worse than Mac. I tried Framework + Linux for a while and really wanted to love it, but switched to a Mac and am not going back (still run Linux on desktop). There is nothing out there that compares to the M-series MacBooks. - occasional X/Wayland issues, as mentioned
bsimpson 9mo ago
I'm a lifelong Mac user, but a gaming handheld has gotten me into some of these topics. I dual-boot SteamOS and Windows. On SteamOS, my 5.1 stereo just works. On Windows, apparently there was some software package called DTS Live (and/or Dolby Live) needed to wrap the audio stream in a container that the stereo understands. There was a time when there was a patent pool on the AC-3 codec (or something like that - I'm handwaving because I don't know all the details). So Microsoft stopped licensing the patent, and now you just can't use AC-3 on Windows. I spent an evening installing something called Virtual CABLE and trying to use it to juryrig my own Dolby Live encoder with ffmpeg… Never got it to work. It's easy to fall deep into the tinkerhole on Linux, which has kept me away for a long time, but as mainstream platforms get more locked down, or stop supporting things they decide should be obsolete, it's nice to have a refuge where you're still in control, and things still work. (Insert meme about the Windows API in Proton being a more stable target than actual Windows.)

amelius 9mo ago

> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. At least things look more or less the same over time. With commercial offerings one day you open your laptop and suddenly everything looks different and all the functions are in a different submenu because some designer thought it was cool or some manager needed a raise. > It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy. LLMs are actually very useful for Linux configuration problems. They might even be the reason so many users made the switch recently.

tracker1 9mo ago
They're pretty good for most things, yes... but man was it rough figuring out getting my IP allocation routing right on my Proxmox server. The system is issued a primary IP, and need to route my subnet through that to my VMs... wasn't too bad once I got it working... I'd also wanted a dnat for "internal" services, and that's where it got tricky. I need to refresh myself as I'm wanting to move from a /29 to a /28 ... mostly been lazy about not getting it done, but actually mqking progress oo some hobby stuff with Claude Code... definitely a force multiplier, but I'm not quite at a "vibe code" level of trust, so it's still a bit of a slog.
- pdntspa 9mo ago
  You could just let the VMs be normal IPs on the network....
  - tracker1 9mo ago
    Where would those IPs route to/from if it didn't have a configured default gateway exactly? The machine got a single IP, I had to route the CIDR block using that IP as the gateway in the host OS. The VMs wouldn't just get assigned additional real IPs.
tomnipotent 9mo ago
KDE & Gnome are both guilty of the same.
bsimpson 9mo ago
Pair-programming Nix with Gemini has taught me a lot about the assistive power of LLMs. They're still slow and annoying at languages I'm good at. But it's really handy to be able to take one I'm not (like Nix or even C++) and say "write me a patch that does …" Applying a lot of the same thinking/structuring skills, but not tripping on the syntax.

whateverboat 9mo ago

- Yes. I think big players in Linux should start supporting core functionalities in GNOME and KDE, and make it polished for laptops and desktops and that would be very cool. For a long time, KDE had a problem of having too many things under its umbrella. Now, with separation of Plasma Desktop and Applications, focusing on Plasma Desktop and KDE PIM should be a good step. - Kind of ties to the old point: KDE on Wayland does this extremely well. - You're back to 20 years because problems are exactly from 20 years ago. Vendors refusing to support linux with d rivers. - Audio filtering? Interesting. I know people who use Pipewire + Jack quite reasonably. But may be you have usecase I am now aware of? Would be happy to hear some.

int_19h 9mo ago
It would help if Gnome wasn't so hostile towards proper cross-DE interop. A famous quote by a Gnome dev goes, "I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an Xfce app unfortunately" They seem to genuinely believe that their way is the right way and everyone else is "holding it wrong" so there's no need for things that would make cross-DE apps easier (or even possible).

unyttigfjelltol 9mo ago

I had to dump a perfectly fine c.2012 workstation recently because of video driver limitations. Could no longer stay current on my flavor of Linux (OpenSUSE) and have better than hideous display resolution limited to just one monitor. NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers are great, but the limited support lifecycle plus poor open source coverage is actually making Linux turn fine systems into trash just the way Windows used to do.

pixl97 9mo ago
>poor open source coverage is actually making Linux turn fine systems into trash just the way Windows used to do. I'd blame Linux as a very small percentage of the problem here. This is on NVIDIA ensuring their hardware doesn't last to long and forcing you to throw it away eventually. Open source can make the monitor 'work' but really aren't efficient, and really can never be efficient because NVIDIA doesn't release the needed information and directly competes with their proprietary driver.
tracker1 9mo ago
Couldn't you swap out for a now lower level AMD GPU? An RX 6600 should be under $200 and likely at least as good as what you were running... unless you were doing specific CUDA workloads. Even on PCIe 2/3, it should be fine.

WillAdams 9mo ago

Hardware support for esoteric things such as the new generation of Wacom EMR is still awkward --- I was able to get the previous gen working on a ThinkPad X61T using Lubuntu --- wish that there was such an easy way to try out Linux on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360....

tliltocatl 9mo ago

> * UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous me I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works". > It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Drivers are a pain point and will probably stay so until the market share is too large for the hardware vendors to ignore. Which probably aren't happening any time soon, sadly.

marginalia_nu 9mo ago
This is not a driver issue I'm talking about. It's a "best way to adjust the white balance is with this GTK+-2.0 app that hasn't seen maintenance since the Bush administration" issue.
- tliltocatl 9mo ago
  Yes, this one is quite a problem as well.
PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
> I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works". The UI framework for macOS has not changed in any substantial design-update-requiring ways since OS X was first released. They did add stuff (animations as a core concept, most notably). The UI framework for Windows has changed even less, though it's more of a mess because there are several different ones, with an unclear relationship to each other. win32 won't hurt though, and it hasn't changed in any significant ways since dinosaurs roamed the silicon savannahs. The UI framework for Linux ... oh wait, there isn't one.

jsheard 9mo ago

> Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this. I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly, macOS also does the hack where they simulate fractional scales by rendering with an integer scale at a non-native resolution then scaling it down.

delta_p_delta_x 9mo ago
> I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly Windows is the only one that does this properly. Windows handles high pixel density on a per-application, per-display basis. This is the most fine-grained. It's pretty easy to opt in on reasonably modern frameworks, too; just add in the necessary key in the resource manifest; done. [1] Linux + Xorg has a global pixel density scale factor. KDE/Qt handles this OK; GNOME/GTK break when the scaling factor is not an integer multiple of 96 and cause raster scaling. Linux + Wayland has per-display scaling factors, but Chromium, GNOME, and GTK break the same way as the Xorg setup. KDE/Qt are a bit better, but I'm quite certain the taskbar icons are sharper on Xorg than they are on Wayland. I think this boils down to subpixel rendering not being enabled. And of course, every application on Linux in theory can handle high pixel density, but there is a zoo of environment variables and command-line arguments that need to be passed for the ideal result. On macOS, if the pixel density of the target display is at least some Apple-blessed number that they consider 'Retina', then the 'Retina' resolutions are enabled. At resolutions that are not integer multiples of the physical resolution, the framebuffer is four times the resolution of the displayed values (twice in each dimension), and then the final result is raster-scaled with some sinc/Lanczos algorithm back down to the physical resolution. This shows up as ringing artifacts, which are very obvious with high-contrast, thin regions like text. On non-retina resolutions, there is zero concept of 'scaling factor' whatsoever; you can choose another resolution, but it will be raster-scaled (usually up) with some bi/trilinear filtering, and the entire screen is blurry. The last time Windows had such brute-force rendering was in Windows XP, 25 years ago. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/hidpi/setting-the-default-dpi-awareness-for-a-process https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/hidpi/settin...
- 9mo ago

helterskelter 9mo ago

> * Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this. This sounds like you're using some old software. GNOME and sway have clean fractional scaling without blurring, though that hasn't always been the case (it used to be terrible).

jhasse 9mo ago

I'm using KDE with Wayland and 2 non-standard DPI monitors (one at 100% the other at 150% scale). No workarounds needed, nothing is blurry. I think your experience comes from GNOME which lacks behind in this regard.

mixmastamyk 9mo ago
Mint/cinnamon here at 150%, X11, not blurry. It’s FUD.
- vladvasiliu 9mo ago
  The issue with X11 is that it's not dynamic. Think using a laptop, which you sometimes connect to a screen on which you require a different scale. X11 won't handle different scales, and it also won't switch from one to the other without restarting it.
  - simoncion 9mo ago
    > The issue with X11 is that it's not dynamic. No, it is. Maybe you're using an ancient (or misconfigured) Xorg? Or maybe you've never used a GTK program? One prereq is that you have a daemon running that speaks the ~20 year old XSETTINGS protocol (such as 'xsettingsd'). Another prereq is that you have a DE and GUI toolkit new enough to know how to react to scaling changes. [0] Also, for some damn reason, QT and FLTK programs need to be restarted in order to render with the new screen scaling ratio, but GTK programs pick up the changes immediately. Based on my investigation, this is a deficiency in how QT and FLTK react to the information they're being provided with. At least on my system, the KDE settings dialog that lets you adjust screen scaling only exposes a single slider that applies to the entire screen. However, I've bothered to look at (and play with) what's actually going on under the hood, and the underlying systems totally expose per-display scaling factors... but for some reason the KDE control widget doesn't bother to let you use them. Go figure. [0] I don't know where the cutoff point is, but I know folks have reported to me that their Debian-delivered Xorg installs totally failed to do "non-integer" scaling (dynamic or otherwise), but I've been able to do this on my Gentoo Linux machines for quite some time.

tracker1 9mo ago

On UI frameworks... mostly agree, I say this as a COSMIC user even... so many apps still don't show up right in the tray, but it's getting a bit better, I always found KDE to be noisy, and don't like how overtly political the Gnome guys are. So far Wayland hasn't been bad, X apps pretty much just work, even if they don't scale right. I'm on a very large OLED 3440x1440 display and haven't had too many issues... some apps seem to just drop out, I'm not sure if they are on a different workspace or something as I tend to just stick to single screen, single display. I need to take the time to tweak my hotkeys for window pinning. I'll usually have my browser to half the screen and my editor and terminal on the other half... sometimes stretching the editor to 2/3 covering part of the browser. I'm usually zoomed in 25-30% in my editor and browser... I'd scale the UI 25% directly, like on windows or mac, but you're right it's worse. For webcams, I don't use anything too advanced, but the Nexigo cams I've been using lately have been working very well... they're the least painful part of my setup, and even though I tend to use a BT headset, I use the webcam mic as switching in and out of stereo/mono mode for the headset mic doesn't always work right in Linux. On audio filtering, I can only imagine... though would assume it's finally starting to get better with whatever the current standard is (pipewire?), which from what I understand is closer to what mac's interfaces are. I know a few audio guys and they hate Windows and mostly are shy to even consider Linux.

jraph 9mo ago

> Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry Not blurry for me on KDE and I wouldn't tolerate blurry, I'd prefer the imperfect solution of using bigger fonts.

pimeys 9mo ago
KDE Plasma 6 might be the only desktop that does this right on Linux.
craftkiller 9mo ago
I've also been running fractional scaling on Sway for many years now and native wayland applications are not blurry. X11 apps run through XWayland will be blurry, but I don't have any legacy X11 apps remaining on my system.

Orygin 9mo ago

> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess I thought you were talking about Windows there. There are 4 (5?) different UI paradigms within Windows, and doing one thing sometimes requires you to interact with each of them. At least on Linux, with GTK/KDE, you can pick a camp and have a somewhat consistent experience, with a few outliers. Plus many apps now just use CSD and fully integrate their designs to the window, so it's hopeless to have every window styling be consistent. I never had to mind X vs Wayland when starting user applications tho.

reddalo 9mo ago
>many apps now just use CSD If there's something I hate about Linux, it's CSD (Client-Side Decorations, in case people don't know what it is). If I wanted all my apps to look different from each other, I'd use macOS. I want a clean desktop environment, with predictable window frames that are customizable and they all look the same. CSD destroys that.
- BizarroLand 9mo ago
  Conversely, I don't want all of my apps to look identical to each other. I want to be able to tell with a submoment of a glance what app I am working on or looking for without having to cognitively engage to locate it, breaking my state of flow in the process.
  - int_19h 9mo ago
    That's what the title bar is for?
  - uKVZe85V 9mo ago
    You're defeating your own point. CSD in practice breaks a basic feature of the desktop : knowing at first glance which of the windows will receive whatever you type on the keyboard. For eons the standard was: the only one with the title bar showing the theme accent color. That is consistent, predictable, keeps the user in the flow. With CSD each app does whatever inconsistent thing they can fancy. You type and oops deleted something in the wrong window. Alas now even many default SSD setups fail at this (selected and non-selected windows look pretty much the same) and keyboard-first workflow is much hindered.

uiframeworks 9mo ago

[dead]

vladvasiliu 9mo ago

> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. Amen. But, which OS doesn't have this problem? I'm currently running windows on a work laptop and even freaking first-party apps have a different look and behave differently from one another. Teams can't even be assed to use standard windows notifications! And don't get me started on electron apps, of which most apps are nowadays, each coming with their own look and feel. Also, have you tried switching from light to dark mode, say at night? The task manager changes only partially. The explorer copy info window doesn't even have a dark mode! On outlook the window controls don't change colour, so you end up with black on black or white on white. You can't possibly hold up windows as a model of uniform UI. So while I agree that this situation is terrible, I wouldn't pin it on the linux ecosystem(s). > Every other major OS can deal with [high dpi]. Don't know about mac os, but on Windows it's a shitshow. We use some very high DPI displays at work which I have to run at 200%, every other screen I use is 100%. Even the freaking start menu is blurry! It only works well if I boot the machine with the high-dpi display attached. If I plug it in after a while (think going to work with the laptop asleep), the thing's blurry! Some taskbar icons don't adapt, so I sometimes have tiny icons, or huge cropped ones if I unplug the external monitor. Plasma doesn't do this. IME KDE/Plasma 6 works perfectly with mixed DPI (but I admit I haven't tried "fractional" scales). The only app which doesn't play ball 100% is IntelliJ (scaling works, it's sharp, but the mouse cursor is the wrong size). > Audio filtering is a pain to set up. What do you mean? I've been using easyeffects for more than five years now to apply either a parametric EQ to my speakers or a convolver to my headphones. Works perfectly for all the apps, or I can choose which apps it should alter. The PEQ adds a bit of a latency, but applications seem to be aware of it, so if I play videos (even youtube on firefox with gpu decoding!) it stays in sync. It detects the output and loads presets accordingly. I also don't have to reboot when I connect some new audio device, like BT headphones (well, technically, on Windows I don't anymore, either, since for some reason it can't connect to either of my headphones at all). I would love to have something similar on windows, but the best I found isn't as polished. It also doesn't support dark mode, so it burns my eyes at night.

KerrAvon 9mo ago
macOS and Windows have a much smaller set of variants, and tend to ship a single UI with everything included with OS. Even the best single desktop Linux distros will ship divergent KDE and Gnome apps. If you want essentially perfect high-DPI support out of the box and can afford higher end displays, use macOS. It just works. I see the comments above about scaling, and to that, I say: most people will never notice. However, a Win32 app being the wrong scale? They'll notice that. But the real display weak point of Linux right now vs Windows is HDR for gaming. That's a real shitshow and it tends to just work on Windows.

colordrops 9mo ago

Fractional scaling on Wayland is only blurry for X apps, and even then, most apps have Wayland support at this point, so for the remaining apps, just turn off Xwayland scaling, and using native scaling through env vars and flags, and no more blurriness.

jdc0589 9mo ago

the scaling and UI framework issues are by far my biggest pain point. I will inevitably end up with an app with tiny and/or blurry UI elements every few weeks and have to spend a ton of time figuring out the correct incantation to make it better. This is on a pretty clean/fresh install of current ubuntu desktop

craftkiller 9mo ago

> Audio filtering is a pain to set up. Like noise filtering for your microphone? It was pretty trivial to set up: https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice

insane_dreamer 9mo ago

I use Linux as my daily driver, with a Mac laptop. I only use Windows when I absolutely have to (i.e., testing), and usually through a VM. Some other rough edges in Linux I've encountered: - a/v support in various apps. We use Slack for everything (I can't just use something else) and a/v support is pretty bad to where my video frame rate is now ~1Hz and screen share shows a black rectangle. I think that's mostly Slack's fault as Google Hangouts works fine, but it's probably low on their priority list. - sleep / hibernation is still sometimes flakey. occasionally it won't wake up after hibernating overnight, and I have to hard reboot (losing any open files though that's not an issue) - power management on laptops (and therefore battery life) is still worse than Windows, and way worse than Mac. I tried Framework + Linux for a while and really wanted to love it, but switched to a Mac and am not going back (still run Linux on desktop). There is nothing out there that compares to the M-series MacBooks. - occasional X/Wayland issues, as mentioned

bsimpson 9mo ago

I'm a lifelong Mac user, but a gaming handheld has gotten me into some of these topics. I dual-boot SteamOS and Windows. On SteamOS, my 5.1 stereo just works. On Windows, apparently there was some software package called DTS Live (and/or Dolby Live) needed to wrap the audio stream in a container that the stereo understands. There was a time when there was a patent pool on the AC-3 codec (or something like that - I'm handwaving because I don't know all the details). So Microsoft stopped licensing the patent, and now you just can't use AC-3 on Windows. I spent an evening installing something called Virtual CABLE and trying to use it to juryrig my own Dolby Live encoder with ffmpeg… Never got it to work. It's easy to fall deep into the tinkerhole on Linux, which has kept me away for a long time, but as mainstream platforms get more locked down, or stop supporting things they decide should be obsolete, it's nice to have a refuge where you're still in control, and things still work. (Insert meme about the Windows API in Proton being a more stable target than actual Windows.)