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Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

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Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#251

Post by microtonal »

algesten wrote: post #96
ryanmarsh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use a high DPI display? How is that? I'm reticent to give up my 5k screen and crisp text when programming but I'd love to use Linux as my daily driver (as much as I like macOS).

It's a complete mess. I tried to switch from macOS to Linux Ubuntu running wayland gnome. HiDPI is sort of ish there. Spotify definitely isn't and weird stuff going on in other apps too. The touch pad is not even remotely comparable with macOS. No inertia scrolling and overall a clumsy feeling. Shearing when scrolling is common. The entire UI stutters if I compile some rust in the background. Key bindings are inconsi…

I tried to switch from macOS to Linux Ubuntu running wayland gnome. HiDPI is sort of ish there.

I have been using GNOME with a 4k monitor a year or so. It works fine, including most exceptions. The exception are Gtk+2 applications such as The GIMP and Inkscape. Heck, even Tk applications are scaling. The really big downside is that fractional scaling is not well-supported under GNOME on Wayland (I don't care that it is technically a hack on macOS, it works).

Spotify definitely isn't

spotify --force-device-scale-factor=2.0 works great on my machine.

Shearing when scrolling is common.

For me this has improved when I switched from NVIDIA to AMD. The open source amdgpu driver is great.

Key bindings are inconsistent and all over the place.

Yes, this is very annoying. Even within GNOME applications it is anyone's guess what the shortcuts are. And they are not very discoverable since they have removed menus. To preserve vertical space. On 24" screens.

Debian just released a glibc that completely broke electron.

I take it that you are running Debian unstable?

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#252

Post by microtonal »

truncate wrote: post #119
ryanmarsh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use a high DPI display? How is that? I'm reticent to give up my 5k screen and crisp text when programming but I'd love to use Linux as my daily driver (as much as I like macOS).

I've Dell XPS 13 4k display and its perfect for single screen (or if all your screen have same resolution). The only issue is when you are using multiple screen, it wont scale properly, i.e. stuff on one screen would look unproportionally larger or smaller. Yes you can use `xrandr --scale` or something on particular screen, but it just spins my CPU like crazy and makes fonts blurry. So if I've to use multiple screen,…

I've Dell XPS 13 4k display and its perfect for single screen (or if all your screen have same resolution). The only issue is when you are using multiple screen, it wont scale properly, i.e. stuff on one screen would look unproportionally larger or smaller.

Mixed DPI screens work fine on Wayland.

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#253

Post by michaelmrose »

wingworks wrote: post #223
ayoisaiah wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is resizing windows on Linux far away from Mac or Windows? I think you're exaggerating

Maybe it's just the way I do it, but most of the distros I've tried I always seem to have difficulty trying to click on the 1x1px spot to resize a window from the corner. Most of the time I'd miss it and have to try again. The most recent example I can think of that I had this issue with is Ubuntu MATE last week. And I get it, this is a very nitpicky issue, but in my mind, it's a basic operation that both macOS and W…

In this case you are basically missing a feature

https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/6963sa/plasma_tip_you_...

If you watch the gif in plasma basically you hold down the alt key and right click and drag to resize from anywhere on the window. Likewise you hold down the alt and left click and drag anywhere on the window to move it around.

Further there are hotkeys to place the window on a segment of the screen example: the left/right/top/bottom half or one of the corners. I think there is a function for sizing it to thirds as well. For me this virtually replaced any manual resizing even before I swapped to using a tiling wm where there is zero resizing.

I just tested this on cinnamon and this works there too. I don't know if it works in mate.

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#254

Post by pmarreck »

peteretep wrote: post #212
dnautics wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have run exclusively Linux and mostly on laptops for 15 years and it's been about 10 years since I have had problems with packages clashing, except for python pip. (I don't use python though)

Does it sleep nicely on closing the lid?

OK why is MacOS still the ONLY OS that executes this flawlessly and smoothly every single time no matter what is running?

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#255

Post by veddox »

tapoxi wrote: post #21

What advantages does Elementary have over (its upstream) Ubuntu? It just looks like a different GTK/GNOME Shell theme to me.

Well, for some people that is a pretty big advantage. I'm on Ubuntu 16.04 now, running Unity. Despite all its bad press I love Unity - it perfectly fits my workflow and just gets out of your way. (Not like Gnome Shell, where a third of your screen real estate is gone just with various menubars, each of which you could park a truck on.)

Gnome Shell on 18.04 pretty much killed Ubuntu for me. Next time I set up my computer, I'm going back to Elementary. (I used it some years ago, but it was still very buggy. I'm hoping they've fixed some of those since.)

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#256

Post by michaelmrose »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #12

I've recommended Fedora to several "I'm scared of computers" people recently and the experience has been very good. The new GNOME does require 5 minutes of tutorial, but after that they've been completely happy exploring on their own. The new "Software" app is an excellent GUI for installing new apps and updating the system. Personally I use Macs but if I didn't, Fedora would probably be my next choice. It has by far…

This is quite frankly a sub optimal recommendation. Fedora adopts crap that quite frankly doesn't work at time of adoption and only offers support for 6 months.

It also used to be true that updates between version x and x+1 were a crap shoot. Regular users don't want to reinstall twice a year even if its easy to do so. They also want to use stuff after others have found the showstopper bugs not help find them.

I used fedora from version 1 -> 14. Its great that stuff like fedorasolved.org exist but they needed to because it was always freaking broken for the first month of its sixth month cycle.

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#257

Post by DCKing »

michaelmrose wrote: post #237
DCKing wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everybody has the same sensitivity to this 'jarring' component of the Linux desktop, I'm well aware. But I think it would really help the desktop forward if the group that is sensitive to it would be catered to more, like Elementary is trying to do.

What in this context does "help the desktop forward" mean?

It means making it more enjoyable to use for everyone, both for those that are more and less sensitive to the aesthetics. Everyone is sensitive to it to some degree.

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#258

Post by petepete »

jammygit wrote: post #200
quantummkv wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using the Kde desktop (Kubuntu) for about 6 months now after switching from Windows 10 for Ruby development. The UI is damn good. Way more polished and consistent than what passes for the three way mess that the Windows 10 UI is these days. Straight out of the box you get a polished, Windows 7 type layout, complete with a start menu better than Windows, consistent fonts and smooth animations. And unlike eve…

Imho, gnome is quite nice. I think I'm in the minority maybe but I would be pretty sad if gnome went away one day (or had another memory leak/slowdown issue)

The mostly-silent majority. KDE has some nice features but under the shiny screenshot it's still a disorganised and inconsistent jumble.

GNOME gets out of your way and lets you get on with your work. Customising every last detail isn't necessary to be productive, and if it is a DE isn't for you anyway.

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#259

Post by solarmist »

black-tea wrote: post #228
virtualritz wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost as bad 5 years later then. - icons on task bar too low - icons on task bar vertically not aligned - task icons different size than pinned icons on task bar - task text vertically aligned too high - icons stylistically not matched - system icons unreadable (badly designed, all look the same, don't convey purpose adequately) - task bar icons on right are vertically all over the place - task bar mini icons s…

I think it's more that you are trying to see these things while other people use computers to do work.

So everyone with an eye for design doesn't do work?

Anyways anyone that has trained their eyes (which allows extremely technical visual skills to be developed, not just "art") to actually see what their eye is transmitting to them and not just interpreting it will immediately notice these kinds of things. It's like saying to them stop looking at letters if you're trying to read.

If this sounds like gibberish try this exercise. https://www.allaboutdrawings.com/upside-down-drawing.html

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#260

Post by jacobush »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #30
weberc2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I briefly flirted with contributing to the project, but the code was a horrendous mess and the build system was worse (CMake mess; most of the dependencies were implicit; etc). Vala aims to be intuitive for C# developers, which is a nice goal but everything is built on the trashfire that is GObject and the Vala abstraction leaks like a seive. Hopefully much of that was fixed with time, but I doubt GObject is any bett…

Thanks I was staring at the code examples trying to figure out which language it was. Some of the examples looked like C# but then some I could have swore were C++. Took me a minute.

Vala is to me the Dutch of programming languages. A fine language. When I hear it I first "know" it's English, then I know it's Danish, then I "know" it's German.

Which is when I realise is has to be Dutch.

But should I learn Dutch? Even though it's a fine language? Maybe I'm better off learning English and German first. And French. Dutch, and Vala, are too niche.

I wish ElementaryOS, would, in probably this order, would have:

a) used ObjectiveC instead of Vala. Elementary is attractive to to Mac users or admirers. Why not leverage what they know?

b) Exposed their API through some language agnostic mechanism. Heck, spits .NET even?

c) Supported interpreted languages such as Ruby, Python, Perl even.

IIRC I brought this up on some mailing list or other a LONG time ago, but (of course) was met - "Get with the program. Vala is fine."

It is fine, but come on. Everything about Linux (desktop) is niche to begin with. Why jump into a super-niche of a niche?

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