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Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

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Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#81

Post by _hyn3 »

yagodragon wrote: post #48

What really sets me off with linux DE's is how poorly they handle dpi scaling on external monitors. I recently bought a 24" 2560 × 1440 monitor for my 15.6 laptop running Ubuntu Mate 18.04. This is what i went through just to make it work. 1. Plugged the hdmi, everything looks so small. 2. Mate desktop had HiDPI support but only by a scaling factor of 2. Now everything looks very large. 3. I have to manually change t…

I'm currently using XFCE on 3x4k monitors on a desktop. You can control almost everything with the DPI setting in Settings > Appearance > Fonts and use the Display menu to adjust your screen resolution. (The font sizes do reflect correctly into Firefox, though - no tweaks needed there at all. One thing that I've noticed is that you have to completely quit or close some apps before the new DPI settings are used.)

I also frequently connect my XFCE laptop (only 1920x1080 native) running a totally different distribution to a 4K TV.

This requires a visit to the Appearance menu (as above) every time I plug/unplug in order to adjust font sizes. (Or, I could just run the 4k at 1080p, but either way it needs an adjustment.) This doesn't actually bother me, since it's just one step and I could script it if I did it all the time.

As far as using your laptop screen as a second screen, I've never really cared for that as a way to work anyway because of the size disparity (my 4k monitors/tv's are all much, much bigger than my little 13" laptop), but you could play with the resolution on each -- but you're right; the DPI settings in XFCE are for the whole desktop (and all apps, including Firefox), not per screen.

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#82

Post by hollandheese »

neverminder wrote: post #78
Zardoz84 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Plasma/KDE

I did, but to me personally it wasn't nearly as polished as Unity and I also didn't like the absence of that unified UI look across all the base apps that Unity has. I also like the global menu and abundance of themes that exist for Unity/Gnome.

KDE has the global menu as an option, and you can get a pretty unified UI with it too.

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#83

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

yagodragon wrote: post #48

What really sets me off with linux DE's is how poorly they handle dpi scaling on external monitors. I recently bought a 24" 2560 × 1440 monitor for my 15.6 laptop running Ubuntu Mate 18.04. This is what i went through just to make it work. 1. Plugged the hdmi, everything looks so small. 2. Mate desktop had HiDPI support but only by a scaling factor of 2. Now everything looks very large. 3. I have to manually change t…

To be fair, I have the same problem with Windows 10 and the Surface Pro, MS's flagship product. The SP4 has a 13" screen and a 3200x1800 resolution, which is quite dense. Windows 10 helpfully suggests turning on the scaling to 200-300% when on the native screen to help things scale up a bit. Plug it into an external monitor, however, and that scaling is no longer tenable. I then have to adjust it back down to 100%. However, W10 then informs me that some of the applications won't re-scale themselves properly until I logout and log back in. So I'm more or less resigned to the fact that every time I disconnect my Surface from its dock, I'll have to restart the thing.

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#84

Post by opencl »

bluedino wrote: post #70
yagodragon wrote: post #48

What really sets me off with linux DE's is how poorly they handle dpi scaling on external monitors. I recently bought a 24" 2560 × 1440 monitor for my 15.6 laptop running Ubuntu Mate 18.04. This is what i went through just to make it work. 1. Plugged the hdmi, everything looks so small. 2. Mate desktop had HiDPI support but only by a scaling factor of 2. Now everything looks very large. 3. I have to manually change t…

Try Fedora. GNOME 3 has fractional scaling (you have to enable it in 29, it's out of the box in 30) The problem then becomes, if you don't have a 200dpi display, the scaling is noticeable.. Just like if you scale the display on a non-Retina monitor on a Mac. You shouldn't really need to scale 2560x1440 @ 25" unless you have bad eyesight. Go up to a 27 or 30" display.

The GNOME fractional scaling support is part of the 3.32 release so it should also have landed in Ubuntu 19.04. You can enable it in F29/Ubuntu 18.10 but the reason it's not enabled by default is that it doesn't quite work properly.

edit: I just installed Ubuntu 19.04 and it has GNOME 3.32 but there is no fractional scaling available in settings, in either Xorg or Wayland. The old experimental option can still be enabled but continues to make non-GTK3 apps blurry.

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#85

Post by Fnoord »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #37
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure if kde can be considered as having ever been lightweight. as far as I remember it was always one of the most heavy DE's around. edit: I'm rate-limted[x] from commenting for defending myself against people calling me a brown-nosed European and white supremacist so I can't really reply below to @Crinus: here reply inline: oh I didn't know about v1, I think the first version I used was kde2 and that was the hea…

You forgot Enlightenment. Back to later 90's/early 2000's was the most heavier thanks to the quantity of FXs(Without using GPUs or composition...) that it had.

E17 had a compositor and hardware rendering before Xorg/XFree86 had (making it smoother and using the GPU instead of CPU). Its just that it was in an eternal state of beta.

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#86

Post by Crinus »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #35
Crinus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that 600MB of used RAM? Why is it so much? I've seen KDE environments use less than 400MB and when i use Window Maker i get something around 250MB or so. (all of them are ridiculous sizes considering something like Windows NT 4 needs 16MB of RAM for the entire system and applications to run while providing a ton of functionality out of the box, but still even relatively your setup looks to use a lot of memory)

Well I had working KDE 1 on a machine with 16MiB, and you can setup a working X11 + FVWM with 4MiB of RAM. Obviously using older versions of Linux kernel and userland. More ridiculous could be a full GUI OS on a machine witch less RAM, like an Amiga 1000/500 or a early Macs.

I'm talking about the current versions, not old stuff, i also had KDE 1 working on a 32MB machine.

I do not expect current versions to be easy to run even in 32MB (although i've heard - but didn't verify - that Xorg can be configured and built from source to use as little as 600KB) but i'm curious where those hundreds of MBs go even for something like Xorg + Window Maker.

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#87

Post by Legogris »

yagodragon wrote: post #48

What really sets me off with linux DE's is how poorly they handle dpi scaling on external monitors. I recently bought a 24" 2560 × 1440 monitor for my 15.6 laptop running Ubuntu Mate 18.04. This is what i went through just to make it work. 1. Plugged the hdmi, everything looks so small. 2. Mate desktop had HiDPI support but only by a scaling factor of 2. Now everything looks very large. 3. I have to manually change t…

The thing I am yet to achieve is getting a configuration for my laptop that works fine both on the laptop screen and on one or several connected external displays.

No problem with KDE Plasma, but when running a tiling WM without a DE...

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#88

Post by rhinoceraptor »

bluedino wrote: post #71
microtonal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is the same. I mostly use macOS on the desktop, so I am used to Lo/HiDPI screens to work together. On my Linux workstation, I tried several desktop environments, but GNOME on Wayland was the only environment to nail it 6-12 months ago (there may be improvements in other desktops now). HiDPI worked with Wayland and X11 applications and I could just use both screens with different DPIs, drag windows betwe…

Yes, GNOME is horrible. So many hacks to get it usable. It's as if they designed it for a tablet or something.

It seems like they're just completely discarding the desktop metaphor like Windows 8 did. Everything in Gnome discourages you from using multiple windows, and there isn't even a desktop anymore without running hacky plugins.

I do like things like window snapping, and miss it in MacOS, but the actual desktop experience is so much better in MacOS than pretty much anything else.

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#89

Post by Crinus »

Sangeppato wrote: post #56
yagodragon wrote: post #48

What really sets me off with linux DE's is how poorly they handle dpi scaling on external monitors. I recently bought a 24" 2560 × 1440 monitor for my 15.6 laptop running Ubuntu Mate 18.04. This is what i went through just to make it work. 1. Plugged the hdmi, everything looks so small. 2. Mate desktop had HiDPI support but only by a scaling factor of 2. Now everything looks very large. 3. I have to manually change t…

Unfortunatey, in my experience Gnome is simply by far the most "modern" DE regarding this kind of features, basically the only one able to compete with Windows and macOS (For example, the touchpad behaves like I would expect in 2019). I haven't used KDE in a while so I have no idea about their Wayland situation (at this point, I simply refuse to mess with Xorg config files, so it's Wayland or nothing for me, at least…

> I simply refuse to mess with Xorg config files

Messing with Xorg config files is something you do not have to do since Xorg was forked from XFree86, especially when it comes to monitors. Personally the only time i had to do that was to force 1:1 mapping for mouse (ie. disable mouse acceleration), but that is not monitor stuff.

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#90

Post by Crinus »

JasonFruit wrote: post #59

I was struck by something reading this article: almost none of the applications have names that express their function. If you haven't used it, what does Thunar do? Parole? GIMP? Gigolo, Garcon, or Ristretto? I don't see what's wrong with a name that has something to say about what your program does.

Descriptive names are taken.
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