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