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.
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)