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Comment by Sangeppato | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunatey, in my experience Gnome is simply by far the most "modern" DE regarding this kind of features, basically the only one able to compete with Windows and macOS (For example, the touchpad behaves like I would expect in 2019). I haven't used KDE in a while so I have no idea about their Wayland situation (at this point, I simply refuse to mess with Xorg config files, so it's Wayland or nothing for me, at least on laptops). I really don't want to be a Gnome evangelist, but it's really the only option for some kind of features

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My experience is the same. I mostly use macOS on the desktop, so I am used to Lo/HiDPI screens to work together. On my Linux workstation, I tried several desktop environments, but GNOME on Wayland was the only environment to nail it 6-12 months ago (there may be improvements in other desktops now). HiDPI worked with Wayland and X11 applications and I could just use both screens with different DPIs, drag windows between them without oddities, etc.

It's a shame that they nailed this, but decided to remove menus, desktop icons, system tray icons, etc. GNOME could have been a great competitor to macOS and Windows, if they actually talked to real-world users. I wish that they had an UX steward like Sun Microsystems back in the days.

Yes, GNOME is horrible. So many hacks to get it usable. It's as if they designed it for a tablet or something.

It seems like they're just completely discarding the desktop metaphor like Windows 8 did. Everything in Gnome discourages you from using multiple windows, and there isn't even a desktop anymore without running hacky plugins.

I do like things like window snapping, and miss it in MacOS, but the actual desktop experience is so much better in MacOS than pretty much anything else.

Did you encounter any issues with Wayland? I've heard that it's not production-ready and that's why ubuntu decided to go with Xorg in 18.04.

Fedora has had Wayland as the default since Fedora 25 (2016). In my experience, it has been stable since Fedora 26/27. I am not sure what the situation is now, but Wayland pretty much excluded NVIDIA. The proprietary drivers did not have support and Nouveau is buggy [1]. In my experience, it works great with both AMD (amdgpu) and Intel GPUs.

[1] The developers are doing great work, but it is a uphill battle without support from NVIDIA.

Fortunately, Nvidia has finally decided to get their act together. They contributed the wayland backend for KWin/KDE that got merged just last week.

If I am not wrong gnome 3.32 also has the nvidia wayland backend

That's not "getting their act together". That would be supporting GBM instead of pushing their EGLStreams thing.

KDE and GNOME both have sort-of-working EGLStreams backends. XWayland remains completely broken on EGLStreams so it's not very useful considering how many applications still lack native Wayland support.

What is the point of sharing your modern experience, then admitting that you haven't used the largest competing system "in a while"?

> I simply refuse to mess with Xorg config files

Messing with Xorg config files is something you do not have to do since Xorg was forked from XFree86, especially when it comes to monitors. Personally the only time i had to do that was to force 1:1 mapping for mouse (ie. disable mouse acceleration), but that is not monitor stuff.

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