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Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

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Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#461

Post by mixmastamyk »

joombaga wrote: post #421
_skel wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Wayland, Gnome and KDE have no way to adjust the scroll speed on a laptop trackpad. Not the pointer speed, the scroll speed. In 2022. That is the kind of basic thing that does not work. In addition to that, if you have a high-DPI laptop display and you want to plug it into a low-DPI desktop monitor (or vice-versa), good luck getting the scaling to work in a usable way.

Agreed. It's a sad state of affairs. And unfortunately Wayland is the only way to get mixed-DPI with proper scaling.

Cinnamon does this fine on my framework. Is it imperfect in some way?

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#462

Post by drpixie »

aborsy wrote: post #15

I have been running Ubuntu on laptops for over a decade. No major issues, at least as of past 8 years. Great hardware compatibility.

Similar. The only thing I find problematic is fingerprint readers, which Linux doesn't yet support very well. Literally EVERYTHING else works fine: power-yes, sleep-yes, sound-yes, video-yes, network-yes, tablet keyboard-yes... (My preference is LinuxMint.)

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#463

Post by trelane »

pessimizer wrote: post #285
trelane wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, running Linux on Windows hardware is often a recipe for misery, or at least dealing with obscure kernel parameters. Which is why I've said and will say again: slapping Linux on Windows hardware is a mug's game. Buy it preinstalled, from a company that supports it. We actually have that option these days, and it's amazing . Some days, I swear the smartest thing Apple ever did was prevent users from slapping OSX o…

Or just look up your "windows hardware" before you buy and check compatibility. Companies that sell laptops with preinstalled Linux are far more often than not just selling rebranded "windows hardware." The benefit is that you get a support number, and that they have paid attention to the Linux compatibility of the models in their range.

> Companies that sell laptops with preinstalled Linux are far more often than not just selling rebranded "windows hardware."

What examples do you have of this?

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#464

Post by bravetraveler »

Gigachad wrote: post #452
_abox wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In addition to that, if you have a high-DPI laptop display and you want to plug it into a low-DPI desktop monitor (or vice-versa), good luck getting the scaling to work in a usable way. Sure? This is exactly the thing that Wayland was supposed to solve. Only X has one DPI for all screens. I still use X because I'm on FreeBSD and I even got multi-screen multi-dpi scaling to work there, with xrandr settings but indee…

Wayland supports it quite well but any app that uses the legacy XWayland compatibility layer does not work. Which is basically everything using Electron. It's not a fault of Wayland but it is reflective of the whole Linux laptop experience.

If it's using a recent build of Electron you can in fact use proper Wayland. Electron supports it, if something doesn't; they're on an old version.

Even sharing with the help of various 'portals', e.g. xdg-desktop-portal-gnome or xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

It 'simply' takes some arguments at runtime. Below are what I use -- taken from my Sway 'start on login' script [some is superfluous]:

    ElectronThingHere --silent --enable-gpu --use-gl=egl --enable-features='VaapiVideoDecoder,VaapiVideoEncoder,WebRTCPipeWireCapturer,UseOzonePlatform' --ozone-platform=wayland
You'll find they're basically identical to what you'd use to enable/force Wayland on Chrome. Also VAAPI {en,de}coding and pipewire based sharing

You can also replace --ozone-platform=wayland with --ozone-platform-hint=auto for less strong-handed encouragement

I use quite a few different Electron-driven things on Wayland. Discord is the only one seemingly refusing to update their Electron base... and getting free Wayland support

If not for them I'd remove XWayland support entirely from my Sway configuration

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#465

Post by tedd4u »

lozf wrote: post #361
Tozen wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the reality is that Linux consists of less than 5% of the market (desktops and laptops), where Windows OSes make up around 75% and macOS around 15%. So, that is going to dictate the priorities of companies supplying drivers.

What's the other >5%? Surely not *BSDs?

Some articles claim ChromeOS is at about 10% (Chromebooks)

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#466

Post by clhodapp »

Gigachad wrote: post #452
_abox wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In addition to that, if you have a high-DPI laptop display and you want to plug it into a low-DPI desktop monitor (or vice-versa), good luck getting the scaling to work in a usable way. Sure? This is exactly the thing that Wayland was supposed to solve. Only X has one DPI for all screens. I still use X because I'm on FreeBSD and I even got multi-screen multi-dpi scaling to work there, with xrandr settings but indee…

Wayland supports it quite well but any app that uses the legacy XWayland compatibility layer does not work. Which is basically everything using Electron. It's not a fault of Wayland but it is reflective of the whole Linux laptop experience.

It doesn't even require multi dpi. High dpi with XWayland is simply Broken in every compositor today: you have to choose between not scaling you Wayland windows and accepting super pixelated X windows (due to applying bitmap based scaling that almost no one would want with no option to disable it).

KDE's upcoming release in October should hopefully be addressing this by allowing you to disable the bitmap-based scaling.

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#467

Post by Legogris »

_skel wrote: post #364
mid-kid wrote: post #70

Yeah, no. Maybe with old laptops, but newer laptops still have their fair share of issues. When I bought my thinkpad A485 kernels wouldn't boot without additional parameters, the graphics would freeze at times and cause a hardlock, sleep and hibernation have been fixed and broken again intermittently over several kernel versions, the wifi card's AP mode started causing segfaults in kernel 5.2 due to the driver's rewr…

With Wayland, Gnome and KDE have no way to adjust the scroll speed on a laptop trackpad. Not the pointer speed, the scroll speed. In 2022. That is the kind of basic thing that does not work. In addition to that, if you have a high-DPI laptop display and you want to plug it into a low-DPI desktop monitor (or vice-versa), good luck getting the scaling to work in a usable way.

You certainly know what you're talking about because from a lot of experimentation, my take on the state of 2022:

If you want the "works so well it's boring", go with X11. The one exception, as you note, is multi-DPI, which has native support in Wayland.

For Wayland, there are (depending on DE/compositor) some specific issues or inconsistencies, like the scroll speed you are mentioning. Personally, I also have qt5 apps being all over the place with window placement under wlroots. There are times when you'll need to look up some environment variable to make an application or toolkit behave properly.

So if you're in the high-DPI+low-DPI scenario, yeah, it still takes some effort. For anyone else, I think OP holds.

My pick for a "boring stable desktop" stack:

* Dist: Your preference of Fedora/Debian/Arch. (Mint, Pop, and Endeavour acceptable derivatives)

* DE: Budgie/XFCE/MATE/Cinnamon

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#468

Post by spiffytech »

Gigachad wrote: post #455
stormbrew wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about new vs old but who makes the main parts and chipsets. Intel everything is always a really good bet, even when they're brand new, but there are other safe choices. It used to be quite hard to find new laptops with hardware combos that worked well with Linux but it's become a lot easier in recent years. Also my experience with windows has actually gotten quite a bit worse, actually, unless you use the st…

I think in general Linux users develop a tolerance for stuff not working so they say "This works perfect" when the reality is that a lot of the features are not working but they are still able to get day to day work done. Stuff like finger print readers and often web cams not working is borderline expected. On OLED monitors you can expect brightness adjustment and often sleep/wake to not work quite right if at all, e…

> I think in general Linux users develop a tolerance for stuff not working so they say "This works perfect" when the reality is that a lot of the features are not working but they are still able to get day to day work done.

For me, every OS has rough spots and it's about which ones I can tolerate the most. On Linux I get better window tiling than on Windows, and shortcuts for navigating directly to a virtual desktop, and no shenanigans with WSL2 having a separate memory pool from the rest of the OS. And I don't feel like the entire OS is antithetical to how I use a computer like with macOS.

But a bunch of more mundane things become a lot more fiddly or flaky. E.g., this week openSUSE Tumbleweed pushed out Gnome 43 before any of my extensions got marked as compatible and now they just won't work for a little while. That's easier for me to live with when the OS is well suited for me most of the time.

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#469

Post by Ayesh »

stoplying1 wrote: post #11

I can't believe I'm saying this, but after a decade of claiming I didn't have driver issues, I absolutely cannot figure out how to get decent audio on newer Lenovo laptops (usually IdeaPad line). Supposedly there's numerous speakers, some of which aren't active under Linux, and/or a similair issue with woofers. I've tried everything from half a dozen pages of results from Google and I'm running 5.19... From what I ca…

Could you get them to work properly in Windows? I have a Legion and an IdeaPad both of which have audio troubles because the speakers are just that bad, and no matter how much I messed with drivers, they didn't work. Audio is chopped off, although the 3.5mm audio/HDMI/USB outputs are fine.

Perhaps, it's a hardware issue?

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#470

Post by dividedbyzero »

bee_rider wrote: post #450
twblalock wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The storage mechanism is not the interaction mechanism, and Linux config files are not user friendly. All other desktop operating systems have a control pane for this stuff.

Configuration files are a developer-friendly and user-friendly way of supporting customization. It allows more conventional Linux users to do their customization using their favorite text editor, in the familiar interface that they already like. And, if somebody decides they want to write a GUI for configuration (maybe to chase users who are more familiar with consumer OSes), all the GUI has to do is write to a file…

I'm a user and I don't find being made to directly edit config files user-friendly at all. Why on earth would I want to use a text editor to configure my printer? I don't use Powerpoint to edit photos either, even though in theory I probably could, but what a hassle. That sort of paradigm is fine for applications intended for professional use to be deployed to servers etc., but config management systems exist for those uses and the people managing these applications tend to be paid quite well, which is no coincidence. Targeting ordinary users? If there is no (decent) config UI, then it may be developer-friendly, but it's definitely not user-friendly. Yes, that can be a valid trade-off for resource-strapped hobby projects, and yes, it's fine if there is a config file in the back, but that shouldn't be the only way to configure an application. No other platform tolerates this sort of thing, and with good reason, given that most people find configuring software to be both intimidating and annoying even under the best of circumstances. I think devs actually believing that all users are just like themselves for decidedly non-dev applications plays a sizable part in why desktop Linux fails to break out of its tiny hardcore technical people and sometimes their parents niche year after year. Most people's favorite (i.e. only) text editor likely will be Microsoft Word, and I'm not sure how many of those people would say they like it.
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