mccContinuing into a second week of sporadic but gradually increasing use of my new Linux laptop and I am just continually shocked by how staggeringly bad the experience is at every level. The new indignity is that the version of Audacity I installed from the snap store cannot play audio. This is not as bad as it could be because oddly in this case I didn't install Audacity to play audio, I installed it to visually inspect audio waveforms, but this is still pretty bad.
It would be easy enough to explain this by a simple rule I broke, such as (many, many people have told me this) "don't use Ubuntu" or (this is a rule I mostly followed up until now) "only use LTS" or (I hope not) "don't use Linux on a laptop". But this does not explain why my desktop installation of Ubuntu 23.04, not LTS, works so well. (Or why Ubuntu 22.04 seemed basically okay on the same laptop until I boosted to 23.10.)
I am currently leaning to theories such as
- Ubuntu 23.10, specifically, somehow, is Cursed to a possibly unprecedented degree
- Linux (Ubuntu?) is currently in a state where it seems okay on a cursory inspection of a test install (just long enough to go "aha! Linux on the desktop is pretty good now!" before switching back to your real operating system) but falls apart utterly if you subject it to regular daily use
- Ubuntu 23.10, specifically, somehow, is Cursed to a possibly unprecedented degree
- Linux (Ubuntu?) is currently in a state where it seems okay on a cursory inspection of a test install (just long enough to go "aha! Linux on the desktop is pretty good now!" before switching back to your real operating system) but falls apart utterly if you subject it to regular daily use
One thing that's for certain is that I made things very hard for myself by using a hidpi monitor, but it's actually very difficult now to buy a laptop that isn't hidpi!
Some people have claimed the problem is not hidpi per se but the fact that 150% DPI, "fractional" DPI, is a big problem on Linux, but this too confuses me because 150% DPI has been bog standard on Lenovo laptops since 2015 (and, on Windows, entirely Not A Problem) and CW says Lenovos are good for Linux. So WTF.
Another interesting problem I created for myself: I decided to get a touchscreen. But it appears what touchscreen support exists in GUI Linux is engineered around the idea that a touchscreen means a tablet. A mode where you have a touchscreen but you also have a full attached keyboard was not contemplated. So like for example almost every touchscreen interaction results in bringing up a on screen keyboard, invariably covering whatever content I was trying to interact with.
Dunno. It still seems to be so hard to get a good touchpad on anything that isn't an Apple device. This laptop I would describe as "acceptable" but it is kinda funny to me it has three input methods, a touchscreen, a pencil eraser, and a touchpad, and they all work "mediocre at best". Perhaps this will be the gravity that inexorably leads me someday to Framework, where theoretically(?) I can pick my own touchpad.
Vlad Vukicevic@mcc A large part of the touchpad experience is software, unfortunately. So picking your own doesn't necessarily help.
@vvuk It has a bit of give because it has both tap and click-down, I don't like that, I feel like it somehow stresses my finger a little when it springs back at me. Idk
Ted Mielczarek@tedmielczarek @vvuk No. I don't click. I got trained out of that. I just do the tap gesture. Meaning the pad having affordances for better clicking is actually getting in the way
Dag Ågren ↙︎↙︎↙︎@mcc The fact of it is, Apple remains the only company that actually takes user experience seriously, rather than treating hardware as a list of features.
Zimmie@mcc I like Apple, but it’s deeply irritating that they seem to be the only company which cares about trackpads. They’re one of the only parts of a laptop you physically touch when using it, and *everybody else* phones it in. There’s zero justification for them being as bad as they are on kilobuck laptops.
T045T@mcc you could get an MNT Reform, which lets you put in a trackball 🙃
@T045T I don't like trackballs!! I just want a MacBook from the alternate universe where Apple aren't being assholes
Dan Cassidy 🦌@mcc I might be mistaken but I'm pretty sure it's just the drivers that suck. I'm pretty sure Apple products used synaptics touchpads at least for a while, and those are horrible on Windows and Linux.
@mcc the synaptics ones on my Dell laptops are reasonable IF you spend 20 minutes changing all the settings and you don't mind that the settings randomly reset themselves once a year or so.
Also if you turn the sensitivity up so that you can get all the way across the screen in one swipe (which you should! The trackpad has DPI to spare!), then it becomes nearly impossible to click without it being interpreted as a drag.
Both of those things could be easily fixed in software, I'm pretty sure the hardware itself is perfectly fine.
Also if you turn the sensitivity up so that you can get all the way across the screen in one swipe (which you should! The trackpad has DPI to spare!), then it becomes nearly impossible to click without it being interpreted as a drag.
Both of those things could be easily fixed in software, I'm pretty sure the hardware itself is perfectly fine.
@whimsy I'm curious if I can configure the Lenovo trackpad until it gets good.
@mcc tbh I went a bit off-piste there because the configuration I was discussing was the additional configuration options provided by the driver in Windows. I have no idea if similar options even exist in Linux.
The last time I tried Linux on a similar laptop was many years ago and it was absolutely hopeless.
Synaptics trackpads have a fallback behaviour where they expose themselves to the OS as an ordinary mouse so you can use them when you don't have the custom multitouch driver installed. But the mapping from trackpad to mouse is implemented in firmware and is awful, just barely usable.
In Linux at the time there either were no multitouch drivers or I didn't know how to install them, so the only option was the firmware trackpad-to-mouse mapping.
The last time I tried Linux on a similar laptop was many years ago and it was absolutely hopeless.
Synaptics trackpads have a fallback behaviour where they expose themselves to the OS as an ordinary mouse so you can use them when you don't have the custom multitouch driver installed. But the mapping from trackpad to mouse is implemented in firmware and is awful, just barely usable.
In Linux at the time there either were no multitouch drivers or I didn't know how to install them, so the only option was the firmware trackpad-to-mouse mapping.
Howard Chu @ Symas@mcc a similar problem happens on Android devices, even if e.g. you've got a h/w kbd paired over bluetooth or whatnot. It was obviously annoying enough that someone went to the trouble of writing a null keyboard app that you can install from the app store. You choose it as your default Android kbd and it just does nothing, so no annoying onscreen kbd obscuring your view.
VioletMy conclusion from installing Linux on a Surface tablet is that they *also* did not really consider the mode where you have a touchscreen and no keyboard plugged in, because it has the same problem. There was seemingly no way to get the onscreen keyboard to show up only when you interact with an input, and a lot of apps didn't seem to support scrolling via the touchscreen.
@amethyst windows has the button in the start bar, if that was the only way to bring the screen keyboard up I'd be happy
ailepet@mcc Last time I've read about fractional scaling, it looked liked this: https://blog.elementary.io/what-is-hidpi/ (but I guess @cassidy could give us an update?)
as for fractional scaling on Windows, I've seen it work but doesn't it look a bit... bad? Like with blurred stuff all over the place?
Jernej Simončič �@ailepet @mcc @cassidy Windows supported fractional DPI scaling from Windows 3.0 onwards, though most programs were only ever tested at 96 DPI (the default) and some at 120 DPI ("Large Fonts" mode). Windows Vista added a manifest setting and an API to declare a program as high DPI compatible, and made every program that didn't declare themselves as high DPI compatible render at 96 DPI, then bitmap stretch (Vista and 7 only did this if you set DPI above 120, from 8 onwards it happens even at 120 DPI). There was also a compatibility setting for older programs you could set to mark them as high DPI compatible.
Later when monitors with even higher pixel density appeared, some high-DPI-compatible programs started having problems again, as they weren't really tested above 150%, so Windows 10 1809 added two more DPI compatibility settings – one that makes the program always render at 96 DPI and bitmap-stretch, and another that does the same, but intercepts (most) font drawing calls, which makes text sharp (it can cause some rendering problems, so it's not the default).
But otherwise Windows always supported fractional scaling, and programs that did not make assumptions can always render sharply.
The only remaining problem is when you have displays with different DPI – this is fully supported by Windows, but programs need to specifically support it, otherwise moving a window between different DPI monitors will result in blurriness.
Raven Onthill@mcc Sympathies. Audio on Linux is always problematic. 🙁 The only way to get a reliable Linux laptop without a lot of tinkering is to buy one from a firm that supports it.🙁🙁🙁
@ravenonthill I looked into that but that seemed to mean paying 2x as much
AatubeI installed Endeavor on some random cheap Walmart laptop (Gateway) and have had NO problems at all with audio
catch@mcc @ravenonthill if it's any consolation I bought the German equivalent of a system76 (tuxedo) and have had problems with that, although I'm running stock Ubuntu instead of their patched kernel after they pushed a bad kernel update.
Oblomov@mcc Fractional scaling is a problem on Wayland because the protocol it's designed around integer factors, so that a new extension had to be devised specifically to support fractional scaling
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/143
and it's still … questionable.
On X the situation is (or was, depending on perspective) very inconsistent, and highly dependent on application and toolkit. Qt apps work best IME, GTK3 apps work worst, most of anything else is entirely app-specific.
wp-fractional-scale-v1: New protocol for fractional scaling (!143) · Merge requests · wayland / wayland-protocols · GitLab
Previously wp-surface-scale-v1. This protocols allows for communicating preferred fractional scales to surfaces, which in combination with wp_viewport can be used to render surfaces at fractional scales...
@mcc (I'm not getting into the nitpick about “150% DPI” making no sense as an expression, but as a general rule it'd be more appropriate to differentiate between physical DPI of the display, visual DPI in relation to distance-to-display, and UI scaling.)
What's the physical DPI of your monitor again?
What's the physical DPI of your monitor again?
@oblomov perhaps when I am eighty years old, on my deathbed, a version of Linux whose display technology has as coherent a technical underpinning as Mac OS 2003
@mcc ironically that was one of the intents of Wayland, but the people who designed it were only worried about how to push pixels to the screen faster, completely disregarding basically every other aspect of UI management.
@mcc I know this isn't what you're interested in hearing, but that's basically the reason why I stick to Debian, X11 and a barebone window manager (awesomewm). It avoids most of the issues related to the #CADT model
https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
that is sweeping Linux in an effort to “modernize” it (= make it more palatable to corporations without actually fixing the underlying issues, and creating more), at the cost of some friction which, for me, is WAY less effort than fighting the news mess.
https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
that is sweeping Linux in an effort to “modernize” it (= make it more palatable to corporations without actually fixing the underlying issues, and creating more), at the cost of some friction which, for me, is WAY less effort than fighting the news mess.
jondoda@mcc yeah, the fractional scaling situation is unfortunate, and as you say, you really can't buy a good laptop these days that doesn't need fractional scaling.
That said, the situation is improving, and I think over the next year it there's a good chance that the remaining issues will be basically solved.
@mcc at least for me, the only remaining issues are IntelliJ, which still runs under XWayland and therefore doesn't scale properly, and games (which also run under XWayland).
A native Wayland backend for IntelliJ is underway, so hopefully that problem will be solved soon, and games will be fixed either by a Proton port to Wayland (which may be a while off) or by using a hack like KDE has where the compositor doesn't even try to scale XWayland apps, and just leaves them to do what they want.
@mcc Electron apps used to be a big problem, but Electron has a native Wayland backend now and all of the Electron apps I use on the regular have finally updated to a new enough version to actually have it.
@jondoda generally, games are auto scaling. Eg they try to run "full screen" and display the same content at the same relative sizes regardless of platform or actual screen size. (Much to the frustration of people trying to read, sitting six feet away from a TV, text in games developed on a monitor one foot away from the developer's nose.)
@mcc yeah, the problem with games is that when you're using fractional scaling XWayland tells them the screen is smaller than it really is, so you can't run them at native res, and the UI is always blurry (well, I guess that's really just the same problem as with all XWayland applications)
@jondoda I hope D:
keithzg@mcc My experience with fractional scaling (which I've been using for years now, usually 125%) is KDE stuff handles it great, pure Qt is sometimes iffy but generally can be manually fixed (annoying, but doable), most other toolkits a mixed bag, and anything based on GTK is a fucking disaster.
I mean, GTK didn't even support fractional scaling at ALL until fairly recently! Every Gnome or GTK app would just be either at 1x or 2x and there was nothing to be done except put up with it or find alternatives. Embarrassing (and led to me purging a lot of GTK stuff from my normal usage).
I mean, GTK didn't even support fractional scaling at ALL until fairly recently! Every Gnome or GTK app would just be either at 1x or 2x and there was nothing to be done except put up with it or find alternatives. Embarrassing (and led to me purging a lot of GTK stuff from my normal usage).