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Fedora dev: “HN feedback on what they want from their Desktop – We got it”

blogs.gnome.org

11–20 of 155 posts

Re: Fedora dev: “HN feedback on what they want from their Desktop – We got it”

#11
post #6

I'm using a 4k screen and a HiDPI thinkpad (T460p) for my workstation and it works amazingly well even today. Was a wild ride since Skylake + 4k + docking station became stable only recently with Linux 4.9, but scaling always worked. Here's what it takes: Xft DPI and hinting settings (font rendering): # .Xresources Xft.dpi: 144 Xft.hinting: 1 Xft.hintstyle: hintslight Xft.antialias: 1 Xcursor.size: 48 Xcursor.theme:…

The reduced-resolution thing has been a trick for ages, I just refused to use the 4k screen I paid a premium for at half res with horrid (seriously, horrid complete with artifacts and fuzz, I even patched xrandr to disable bi-cubic filtering trying to make it ok and still couldn't stand it) looking text aliasing. I'm impressed you'd call that "pretty much perfect and comparable (if not better) to macOS with a recent…

I think you misunderstood the scaling part. I'm scaling down from 4k to 1080p for my old monitors.

The 4k screen is at its native resolution. Anything else would be sinful :)

Re: Fedora dev: “HN feedback on what they want from their Desktop – We got it”

#12
post #2

Pretty cool to see some acknowledgement from the Fedora crowd, but almost everything listed here is "maybe in a future release" rather than being present now.

The nVidia driver stuff worked for me about 3 years ago through rpmfusion. So in addition to working on things for the future, they're supporting the people who built the stuff that already works.

Re: Fedora dev: “HN feedback on what they want from their Desktop – We got it”

#13
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reduced-resolution thing has been a trick for ages, I just refused to use the 4k screen I paid a premium for at half res with horrid (seriously, horrid complete with artifacts and fuzz, I even patched xrandr to disable bi-cubic filtering trying to make it ok and still couldn't stand it) looking text aliasing. I'm impressed you'd call that "pretty much perfect and comparable (if not better) to macOS with a recent…

I think you misunderstood the scaling part. I'm scaling down from 4k to 1080p for my old monitors. The 4k screen is at its native resolution. Anything else would be sinful :)

That was amongst the fixes I found on stack overflow, and it was nearly identical as far as issues. Maybe I'd have been ok with comparing that to Windows (where some programs do get scaled down if you start them on a high res screen and move them to a low res screen), but macOS is the definition of perfect handling of multiple monitors. These tricks don't come close to that experience for me, let alone exceed it...

Re: Fedora dev: “HN feedback on what they want from their Desktop – We got it”

#14
post #6

I'm using a 4k screen and a HiDPI thinkpad (T460p) for my workstation and it works amazingly well even today. Was a wild ride since Skylake + 4k + docking station became stable only recently with Linux 4.9, but scaling always worked. Here's what it takes: Xft DPI and hinting settings (font rendering): # .Xresources Xft.dpi: 144 Xft.hinting: 1 Xft.hintstyle: hintslight Xft.antialias: 1 Xcursor.size: 48 Xcursor.theme:…

The reduced-resolution thing has been a trick for ages, I just refused to use the 4k screen I paid a premium for at half res with horrid (seriously, horrid complete with artifacts and fuzz, I even patched xrandr to disable bi-cubic filtering trying to make it ok and still couldn't stand it) looking text aliasing. I'm impressed you'd call that "pretty much perfect and comparable (if not better) to macOS with a recent…

He hasn't scaled the 4k screen. You can tell because it's eDP or Embedded Display Port. That's something they use on laptops for the internal screen.

Re: Fedora dev: “HN feedback on what they want from their Desktop – We got it”

#15
post #2

Pretty cool to see some acknowledgement from the Fedora crowd, but almost everything listed here is "maybe in a future release" rather than being present now.

I mean, if they were present now, people wouldn't have been asking for it, would they?

Re: Fedora dev: “HN feedback on what they want from their Desktop – We got it”

#16
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstood the scaling part. I'm scaling down from 4k to 1080p for my old monitors. The 4k screen is at its native resolution. Anything else would be sinful :)

That was amongst the fixes I found on stack overflow, and it was nearly identical as far as issues. Maybe I'd have been ok with comparing that to Windows (where some programs do get scaled down if you start them on a high res screen and move them to a low res screen), but macOS is the definition of perfect handling of multiple monitors. These tricks don't come close to that experience for me, let alone exceed it...

Downscaling works fine for me, so I don't know what I'm missing :)

It's probably going to look better with Wayland's per-screen DPI setting, but in the meantime, it's good enough (tm) for me.

Why Linux font rendering exceeds the macOS experience for me: I like the FreeType rendering much better than macOS - less "blurry". Probably comes down to taste. Unless I'm mistaken, macOS scales down for non-integer sizes while Gnome can be configured to render at a fractional value.

Obviously it's much more polished in macOS (otherwise I wouldn't have had to type out the tutorial above), but I'm using Linux for other reasons beyond that and having good font rendering is just a plus - it used to much, much worse.

Re: Fedora dev: “HN feedback on what they want from their Desktop – We got it”

#17
The GNOME Tweak tool can help configuring GNOME for HiDPI settings through scaling factors. Also changing fonts, themes and such.

The default GNOME themes are functional but I never enjoyed them much. Sam Hewitt made an excellent theme for GNOME, including a full icon and cursor set. It really does improve the look and feel of GNOME.

https://snwh.org/paper

Re: Fedora dev: “HN feedback on what they want from their Desktop – We got it”

#18
Don't get me wrong, warts regarding high DPIs have existed for far too long and definitely need some love, but I'm a bit sadder the few complaints I see about design direction were not taken on board.

Running what appears to be a touch UI (definition: very few buttons, those that exist are large, lots of dead space, information density very low) with a mouse feels shockingly unproductive, and at least personally, conveys the impression of working with a mobile app toy rather than a workstation used for getting work done.

GNOME3's launcher: http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/GNOME-3-16-...

You can't look at this and not see shades of iOS's Springboard. Very touch friendly on small mobile device screens, very wasteful on large ones, like the kind most of us have at our desks.

...and like the kind that most of G3's users will be running it on.

I'm forced to write off G3 as yet another misguided attempt to unify touch and mouse UIs, in an attempt to appeal to the kind of newbie user that wouldn't even be running G3 in the first place.

Re: Fedora dev: “HN feedback on what they want from their Desktop – We got it”

#20
post #15
post #2

Pretty cool to see some acknowledgement from the Fedora crowd, but almost everything listed here is "maybe in a future release" rather than being present now.

I mean, if they were present now, people wouldn't have been asking for it, would they?

If anything, Fedora is closest to having it working. It's not like it already works on other distros.
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