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