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System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

blog.system76.com

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Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#151

Post by hyakosm »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #77
valvar wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your logic there? I would have thought that if your eyesight is poor, resolution matters much less as you can't tell the difference. You'd want to scale things 2-4 times anyway.

2x scaling at 4k is comfortable and crisply rendered fonts are a MUST. My eyes are far more fatigued at the end of the day if font rendering isn't crystal clear. Other resolutions require non-integer scaling and my experience with that has been... not great.

2x scaling in 4K is the Hi-DPI equivalent of 1080p: on 13 or 14 inch screens, elements on screen are really tiny. On this screen size, we have mainly 1280x800 (Apple) or 1366x720 (PC) resolutions, where the Hi-DPI or Retina equivalent (2x scaling) is 2K.

With GNOME, screen elements (texts, windows and widgets) are big (way bigger than macOS or Windows). In this case 1080p-like at 2x scaling should be OK with this screen size.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#152

Post by CoastalCoder »

varispeed wrote: post #34

I wish they had a laptop with a latest and top AMD, 14" 4K IPS matte panel, programmers friendly keyboard (pg up/down home end on dedicated keys at least), expandable RAM and nvme drive, silent fans and metal chassis and a Linux support. Less important physical camera and wi-fi cut off switch. If there was an ARM chip with comparable performance to M1 I would consider it too if it was running Linux. After watching th…

I feel almost 100% the same. Only difference is I'd want a bigger screen than 14".

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#153

Post by zakki »

pram wrote: post #97
arnaudsm wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note the latest AMD 5850U chip is 40% faster [1] than the M1 for the same wattage! It really deserves more media exposure than the M1 which has the only merit of beating Intel. [1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+PRO+585...

The M1 is the entry level processor, and is still beating everything in single thread performance. What merits the media exposure?

Why do we call it an entry level processor? Is it marketing words?

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#154

Post by ekianjo »

867-5309 wrote: post #70
varispeed wrote: post #34

I wish they had a laptop with a latest and top AMD, 14" 4K IPS matte panel, programmers friendly keyboard (pg up/down home end on dedicated keys at least), expandable RAM and nvme drive, silent fans and metal chassis and a Linux support. Less important physical camera and wi-fi cut off switch. If there was an ARM chip with comparable performance to M1 I would consider it too if it was running Linux. After watching th…

4K on a 14".. what is the use case for that? unless you have some hybrid long-short sightedness (d)efficiency, use your laptop as a chesttop, or want quadruple the pixels for half the battery life I really can't see any benefit

> what is the use case for that?

Marketing specs?

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#155

Post by toolz »

arnaudsm wrote: post #118
pram wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M1 is the entry level processor, and is still beating everything in single thread performance. What merits the media exposure?

The M1 and 5850U are in the same laptop price range. But I agree on the single-thread, it's indeed 12% faster.

I recently bought a lenovo ideapad (ultrabook form factor) for under $900USD with a 5700u 16GB ram 512 nvme

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Apple-M1-8-Core-3200-MH...

I'd say AMD is really blowing the M1 laptops out of the water at half the price and more performance.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#156

Post by skrtskrt »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #77
valvar wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your logic there? I would have thought that if your eyesight is poor, resolution matters much less as you can't tell the difference. You'd want to scale things 2-4 times anyway.

2x scaling at 4k is comfortable and crisply rendered fonts are a MUST. My eyes are far more fatigued at the end of the day if font rendering isn't crystal clear. Other resolutions require non-integer scaling and my experience with that has been... not great.

I am in the exact same boat, 2x scaling at 4k. I am young but I wear contacts that are not an exact perfect prescription due to the limitations of contacts.

But people will swear up and down to me that there is no way I could possibly tell the difference between screens.

You can literally see individual pixels on a 1080p screen!

I am on Macbooks, but I want to switch to something with Linux so I am waiting for the gen 9 Thinkpad X1C with 4k screen to be available at some reasonable price.

Font rendering is also clearly worse on Linux than Mac, making the fuzzy pixels even more unworkable. I dual booted a 2015 Macbook Air into several Linux distros and I could barely read the text no matter which settings were applied.

More relevant to the overall thread: Pop OS is awesome.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#158

Post by postalrat »

varispeed wrote: post #81
867-5309 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4K on a 14".. what is the use case for that? unless you have some hybrid long-short sightedness (d)efficiency, use your laptop as a chesttop, or want quadruple the pixels for half the battery life I really can't see any benefit

I currently have XPS 15 with 4k screen and I can easily see pixels, so 14 should be a little better. There is also the feeling that it is 2021 and should I still be seeing pixels? I think crisp high resolution view is much better for the eyes and feels more natural. I am also almost always within reach of a mains socket, so I don't particularly care about battery life, just that I can move the machine from one place…

Do you use any sort of desktop scaling? I'd hope not if you can "easily" see pixels.

I'd imagine anyone who can "easily" see 4k pixels on a 15" screen would have text characters around 1mm tall.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#159

Post by skrtskrt »

fnl wrote: post #93

I've recently switched from my usual MBP upgrade to System 76 (Oryx Pro). While yes, Apple's walled garden does feel like a Rolls Royce compared to anything, the price tag difference this time was just way too step for me to keep buying a new Mac: It was basically 2x or more for roughly similar hardware, if not slightly worse on the MBP side. Overall, using Pop_OS! with its specialized GNOME3 setup has been a bliss,…

iTerm2 is a beauty, is there a closest equivalent on Linux?

There seem to be 25 popular choices especially now with the GPU-accelerated ones. Tried a few of the classics like Termite and they all seemed painfully outdated and crappy compared to iTerm.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#160

Post by kllrnohj »

arnaudsm wrote: post #90
varispeed wrote: post #34

I wish they had a laptop with a latest and top AMD, 14" 4K IPS matte panel, programmers friendly keyboard (pg up/down home end on dedicated keys at least), expandable RAM and nvme drive, silent fans and metal chassis and a Linux support. Less important physical camera and wi-fi cut off switch. If there was an ARM chip with comparable performance to M1 I would consider it too if it was running Linux. After watching th…

Note the latest AMD 5850U chip is 40% faster [1] than the M1 for the same wattage! It really deserves more media exposure than the M1 which has the only merit of beating Intel. [1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+PRO+585...

TDP rating != wattage consumed. In an ideal world it would, but it has long since stopped meaning that generally. This includes the M1, which will happily exceed 15W of power consumption, and the 5850U almost certainly does as well since AMD's previous generation CPU in that class happily exceeded 15W.

You'll have to wait for a proper review that does power measurements to get a sense for how they actually compare on that front.

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