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Ubuntu 21.10

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Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#211

Post by bluepoint »

beebmam wrote: post #100
aborsy wrote: post #12

Over a decade of Ubuntu use, could not be happier! I remember in 2000s, I had to edit /etc/ text files to set up internet etc. Nowadays everything works out of box. All sorts of peripherals and hardware is recognized automatically. High quality free open source software is available for most stuff I need. The freedom to choose software and customize Linux, if required, is amazing! Am I missing anything ignoring close…

For my work PC, I use Ubuntu, period. Too many third party apps just don't work very well outside of the Ubuntu ecosystem, apps which I need in order to function in my workplace. I'd probably use something like Arch or rolling my own for work if these apps weren't necessary!

Could you elaborate? Which apps run in Ubuntu and not in Arch?

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#212

Post by md8z »

speedybird wrote: post #165
mdp2021 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You probably don't recall how bad Gnome 3 was initially I do, and I have never seen its face again since then and the huge upsetting of ruining what worked well, and to create something perverse. And unless it was fixed very recently, it still is, because I just tried `gnome-font-viewer` and there are fades in the interface that cannot seem to be disabled. Unjustifiable. Not just the desktop manager: the paradigm.…

> I am still wondering what caused that stroke of lunacy - at the time Power users have privilege and need to be hobbled; their complaints ignored. The needs of users with the least privilege, the computer illiterate, should be prioritized. Or something like that.

The general sentiment I see is that if a feature is only used effectively by a small handful of users then it's probably going to risk getting removed. That's just numbers, it doesn't make a difference whether it's "power users" or any other users. Either way maintainer time is limited and sometimes they have to make a decision to drop a feature that isn't pulling its weight.

But I've also never heard any description of the phrase "power user" that was clearly defined. Wikipedia says:

"A power user is a user of computers ... who uses advanced features"

"In enterprise software systems, 'Power User' may be a formal role given to an individual who is not a programmer, but who is a specialist in business software"

So which advanced features and which business software are we talking about here? That could be anything really.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#213

Post by md8z »

in_mice wrote: post #187
eecc wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well: * NetworkManager is a dumpster fire. * Wayland is 10 years in the making and it's still barely out of alpha and still missing crucial features such as fractional and consistent scaling. * Pipewire is a welcome attempt to mitigate another source of grief, Pulse Audio. * Gnome? Lets not get started... Please. RedHat has been a boon to the Linux community but it's lack of - how can I put it tactfully - design tast…

You're not wrong on wayland. I remember hearing people talking about how great wayland was gonna be a decade ago. Gnome and Network Manager are fine though. My XPS 15 wifi has been supported for the last three years without any issues.

Wayland is a lot better than X. The problem with any of these low level enhancements is that they take a long time to plumb through the entire system. I wish it wasn't so, but it is.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#214

Post by md8z »

eecc wrote: post #108
vladev wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll be surprised, but it's RedHat that made most of that happen. A lot of the important Linux projects are developed mostly by them - Gnome, Wayland, NetworkManager, Pipewire, flatpak, etc. Ubuntu, on the other hand, seem to like to do many things their way. Like aggressive patching. I recall fontconfig being heavily patched from upstream. Then we have Mir (now almost abandoned), Unity (abandoned), snap (flatpak,…

Well: * NetworkManager is a dumpster fire. * Wayland is 10 years in the making and it's still barely out of alpha and still missing crucial features such as fractional and consistent scaling. * Pipewire is a welcome attempt to mitigate another source of grief, Pulse Audio. * Gnome? Lets not get started... Please. RedHat has been a boon to the Linux community but it's lack of - how can I put it tactfully - design tast…

"still missing crucial features such as fractional and consistent scaling"

This has very little to do with Wayland and mostly has to do with the apps and the toolkits. I haven't really seen many Linux native apps that are able to function correctly at a non-integer scale. The rendering of these apps may have to be entirely changed and refactored to use floating point instead of integers. That a big thing to ask every app to do. The hard part is doing that, and then it's trivial to put a flag in Wayland (or XWayland) for an app to say that it supports it.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#215

Post by md8z »

Talanes wrote: post #194
rlpb wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand how people use their computers. I merely object to those people then blaming the distro for not writing software that can magically work around how they hacked it up.

Yeah, it's not the Distro's fault that they didn't design it for how people actually use their computers. How could they have guessed that would be an issue?

I don't understand how you can expect a distro developer to account for every single possible third party repository and package that is out there. That's multiple orders of magnitude more packages that they would have to support and test for, it's simply not feasible. It's reaching into combinatorial explosion. I would actually have serious concerns if a Linux vendor was somehow promising that they could support such an unrealistic thing.

The real solution was mentioned up thread though: they are designing it to be used that way, but you have to use snaps or flatpaks. Not third party apt repositories which can overwrite system components in an infinite number of ways.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#216

Post by md8z »

josephg wrote: post #115
rlpb wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You described third party repositories and mismatching Python versions. That is a hacked up system, by definition.

I don’t know much about python, but for nodejs dev work I have about half a dozen versions of nodejs installed. It’s super handy having all those versions installed so I can test that a certain native nodejs package I develop builds and works properly. And to rule out nodejs itself when reproducing bugs. I use nvm (or fvm) or something to manage all that because the system package managers updated too slowly. What ar…

If you replace the version of python that the upgrade process expects, then yeah, you'll probably run into problems. The upgrade process can't possibly support every single version of any given package, that would defeat the entire purpose of having a stable release cycle. If it's a core package like python which sits really close to the top of the dependency tree then the effects of swapping that out will cascade downward and that's why everything breaks so badly.

In my experience, this is the only safe way to have third party apt repositories:

- Don't install any third party packages which have reverse dependencies. This means no libraries, only applications. If you need newer libraries as a dependency then you have to statically compile the application.

- Don't install any third party packages which have the same name as an upstream package. If you want to install a newer third party version of an upstream package then you need to change the name of it and have it install all of its files in different locations. A prefix change is enough here, /opt is a popular choice.

- Delete all third party packages before doing an upgrade, in case a new upstream package happens to have the same name, or needs to put files in the same locations.

Do anything outside of that and you will risk getting your install into a broken state. Because even though you might think you are just installing some applications, what you are really doing is bolting things on to the upgrade process for the entire core system. Using nvm is perfectly safe though because that just installs the different versions to your home directory, it doesn't touch apt.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#217

Post by nextaccountic »

md8z wrote: post #214
eecc wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well: * NetworkManager is a dumpster fire. * Wayland is 10 years in the making and it's still barely out of alpha and still missing crucial features such as fractional and consistent scaling. * Pipewire is a welcome attempt to mitigate another source of grief, Pulse Audio. * Gnome? Lets not get started... Please. RedHat has been a boon to the Linux community but it's lack of - how can I put it tactfully - design tast…

"still missing crucial features such as fractional and consistent scaling" This has very little to do with Wayland and mostly has to do with the apps and the toolkits. I haven't really seen many Linux native apps that are able to function correctly at a non-integer scale. The rendering of these apps may have to be entirely changed and refactored to use floating point instead of integers. That a big thing to ask every…

Clipboard is consistently broken on Wayland. I don't use any XWayland application, it's all native Wayland. Sometimes when I copy things they don't paste, and I need to switch back to the original window for the copy to register. Or even copy again to be sure. This was never, ever a problem in more than 10 years using X11.

But, fractional scaling is working like a charm on Gnome + Wayland (after a gsettings command). Very crisp, despite people saying it doesn't work. On X11, even on KDE, I can't get fractional scaling this crisp. This is the only reason I'm using Wayland; all the rest sucks.

But, the problem is, GTK doesn't support fractional caling natively. Even GTK 4 supports only integer scaling. So for fractional scaling the compositor has to scale up, then down. This approach generally causes blurring (though I don't know why Gnome on Wayland here isn't blurred).

When I see screenshots of people with fractional scaling on Gnome, it appears very blurry. Comparing side by side, here it isn't. I don't know why and at this point I'm afraid of messing it with and ruining everything.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#218

Post by md8z »

nextaccountic wrote: post #217
md8z wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"still missing crucial features such as fractional and consistent scaling" This has very little to do with Wayland and mostly has to do with the apps and the toolkits. I haven't really seen many Linux native apps that are able to function correctly at a non-integer scale. The rendering of these apps may have to be entirely changed and refactored to use floating point instead of integers. That a big thing to ask every…

Clipboard is consistently broken on Wayland. I don't use any XWayland application, it's all native Wayland. Sometimes when I copy things they don't paste, and I need to switch back to the original window for the copy to register. Or even copy again to be sure. This was never, ever a problem in more than 10 years using X11. But, fractional scaling is working like a charm on Gnome + Wayland (after a gsettings command).…

"Sometimes when I copy things they don't paste, and I need to switch back to the original window for the copy to register."

I have honestly never had that problem in years of using GNOME Wayland, but I experienced it many times with misbehaved X11 apps. Maybe you want to come up with a reproducible test case and then report it?

"Even GTK 4 supports only integer scaling. So for fractional scaling the compositor has to scale up, then down. This approach generally causes blurring (though I don't know why Gnome on Wayland here isn't blurred)."

That's what I mean, it has to be done in the toolkits first. The first step would be to add support for that to GTK which is unlikely to happen until at least GTK5. Then after the apps can start to support it, I think you're looking at at least a few years before there is a realistic chance of having that. Sorry to disappoint, it's just not an easy thing to have. And I don't think there is much incentive to support this from a hardware perspective either since most people that I see asking for this are using it as a workaround for oddly sized 4K monitors.

"This is the only reason I'm using Wayland; all the rest sucks."

I feel your frustration but I actually would not suggest using Xorg in 2021 unless you really know what you're doing. It's not secure unless you take great pains to make it so. GNOME's Wayland session is the most secure Linux desktop there is outside of security-focused distros.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#219

Post by nextaccountic »

md8z wrote: post #218
nextaccountic wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clipboard is consistently broken on Wayland. I don't use any XWayland application, it's all native Wayland. Sometimes when I copy things they don't paste, and I need to switch back to the original window for the copy to register. Or even copy again to be sure. This was never, ever a problem in more than 10 years using X11. But, fractional scaling is working like a charm on Gnome + Wayland (after a gsettings command).…

"Sometimes when I copy things they don't paste, and I need to switch back to the original window for the copy to register." I have honestly never had that problem in years of using GNOME Wayland, but I experienced it many times with misbehaved X11 apps. Maybe you want to come up with a reproducible test case and then report it? "Even GTK 4 supports only integer scaling. So for fractional scaling the compositor has to…

I think the main (or only? not sure) culprit is Firefox (running natively on Wayland) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1726360 - it reports to be fixed in Firefox 93 but I'm on Firefox 92 still, I guess I should just update.

> And I don't think there is much incentive to support this from a hardware perspective either since most people that I see asking for this are using it as a workaround for oddly sized 4K monitors.

All 14" hidpi laptops (meaning, more than 1366x768) suffer from this problem. 1x is too small, 2x is too large.

Re: Ubuntu 21.10

#220

Post by md8z »

nextaccountic wrote: post #219
md8z wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sometimes when I copy things they don't paste, and I need to switch back to the original window for the copy to register." I have honestly never had that problem in years of using GNOME Wayland, but I experienced it many times with misbehaved X11 apps. Maybe you want to come up with a reproducible test case and then report it? "Even GTK 4 supports only integer scaling. So for fractional scaling the compositor has to…

I think the main (or only? not sure) culprit is Firefox (running natively on Wayland) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1726360 - it reports to be fixed in Firefox 93 but I'm on Firefox 92 still, I guess I should just update. > And I don't think there is much incentive to support this from a hardware perspective either since most people that I see asking for this are using it as a workaround for oddly size…

Those laptops I think would fall in that same category of displays, where the PPI is around 120-180. It's not enough of an enhancement to make the text crisp and not pixelated, and it makes everything look bad unless the apps native to 96 PPI start to implement a certain type of floating point scaling. The higher end laptops of the same size just give you a the same screen but with a higher PPI. Scaling up then scaling down doesn't cause noticeable blurring once you get past 250 PPI, so it's only that class of low end displays/laptops that would benefit from this. I wonder if those displays will even still be around in a few years time, I certainly would like to get a cheaper laptop around that size but with a higher PPI.
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