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Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

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Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#91

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…

What is the point of sharing your modern experience, then admitting that you haven't used the largest competing system "in a while"?

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got a 4K 27inch monitor and it worked great on windows 10 125% scaling, using hdmi. Then, I actually had to use the macbook for work, and it didn't get past your step 1. There is no way to alter the sizes of things, its either 1080p on 27in or full 4k. But, I decided to try one more thing, and got the usb-c to displayport cable. Behold, it allowed me to have 1440p HiDPI scaling, which HDMI didn't. And, I thoug…

I ran into a similar problem with an older 30" 1080 Viewsonic TV/monitor which featured both HDMI and DVI inputs. I wanted to hook my Intel Nuc to it which was running Linux mint 18-something. The Nuc has VGA and HDMI so I naturally hook it to the TV using an HDMI cable. For some reason, the desktop resolution of 1920x1080 was somehow being scaled larger than the screen cutting off the edges. No amount of playing wit…

That's common behaviour for a TV signal called "overscan". As you thought, it seems to be disabled if it knows a computer is connected. You can sometimes disable it in TV menus and most HTPC software has something to resize the UI to cope.

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#93
post #62

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…

What is lightweight? This is actually a complex question. Back in the day KDE has the largest in memory footprint when you first started up, but once you launched a realistic set of apps: suddenly KDE (using only KDE apps) has by far the smallest memory footprint.

My personal arbitrary definition is something that is usable without noticeable lag on a Raspberry Pi 1.

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fedora has had Wayland as the default since Fedora 25 (2016). In my experience, it has been stable since Fedora 26/27. I am not sure what the situation is now, but Wayland pretty much excluded NVIDIA. The proprietary drivers did not have support and Nouveau is buggy [1]. In my experience, it works great with both AMD (amdgpu) and Intel GPUs. [1] The developers are doing great work, but it is a uphill battle without s…

Fortunately, Nvidia has finally decided to get their act together. They contributed the wayland backend for KWin/KDE that got merged just last week. If I am not wrong gnome 3.32 also has the nvidia wayland backend

That's not "getting their act together". That would be supporting GBM instead of pushing their EGLStreams thing.

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#95

Whaoo I can't wait! Where does Xubuntu and Kubuntu stand, install-base-wise, compared to the default Ubuntu? And other distros, for that matter? I'm one of many people who left Ubuntu as soon as they started doing their big UI changes. I went to Xubuntu. But I have no bigger idea of which distro is hot anymore; once I settled on Xubuntu, I haven't really been shopping around for alternatives.

After Unity forced me to shop around, I jumped from Ubuntu all the way to devuan after trying debian, and elementaryos. Both debian and elementaryos had significant system stability issues because of systemd. For instance, logind would wig out.

I very nearly switched to a BSD, but the learning curve was a bit too high (I like apt).

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes your mileage may vary. haven't been in a situation where KDE or Gnome had something which I couldn't get done cheaper: just an idea of what happens if I were to install konqueror on a non-kde system: sudo apt-get install konqueror Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following additional packages will be installed: baloo-kf5 catdoc dolphin kactivities-bin ka…

This example is kind of unfair for two reasons: 1. Konqueror is basically the Swiss army knife of KDE. No wonder it pulls in everything and the kitchen sink. 2. You present an intimidatingly large package list to make your point, but that list is that long 'because KDE Frameworks (formerly known as kdelibs) is now deliberately packaged in a lot of tiny pieces to reduce the amount of libraries that an average applicat…

I always saw these tons of little packages as a bad idea as they make package management (from the user's perspective) harder, they do not really provide any space benefit (code is small), if anything they make loading slower (i wrote a benchmark some time ago and a binary linked against a single dynamic library with tons of exports was faster to load than a binary linked against several dynamic libraries with fewer exports - but overall the same number of imports) and AFAIK the OS wont keep the entire library in memory anyway if it isn't needed (if anything the extra housework needed to all the libraries are probably a net negative). And of course these intimidating lists.

And in practice applications do not use one or two of them, they use several of them and those libraries bring in several others, etc like spaghetti (so you have Konsole relying on Phonon as mentioned in another reply).

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#98
post #95

Whaoo I can't wait! Where does Xubuntu and Kubuntu stand, install-base-wise, compared to the default Ubuntu? And other distros, for that matter? I'm one of many people who left Ubuntu as soon as they started doing their big UI changes. I went to Xubuntu. But I have no bigger idea of which distro is hot anymore; once I settled on Xubuntu, I haven't really been shopping around for alternatives.

After Unity forced me to shop around, I jumped from Ubuntu all the way to devuan after trying debian, and elementaryos. Both debian and elementaryos had significant system stability issues because of systemd. For instance, logind would wig out. I very nearly switched to a BSD, but the learning curve was a bit too high (I like apt).

Package admin in OpenBSD is really simple, if you want to give it a try sometime:

pkg_info -Q # find a package

pkg_info # show package description

pkg_add # add a package

pkg_delete # delete a package

That's all the basics you need on a fresh install.

Re: Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update

#100

I'm not sure whether Xubuntu includes KDE's stuff or people here confused between Xubuntu and Kubuntu?

There are no KDE apps or libraries in Xubuntu. I'm pretty sure that I would have noticed in the 10 years of using Xubuntu and updating it with Synaptic.

Technically, that's not correct: Xubuntu is just an ubuntu package (https://packages.ubuntu.com/disco/xubuntu-desktop). You can install any other Ubuntu (Debian) packages.
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