I find this surprising. I'd say anyone who does any serious amount of multitasking (whether a Linux dev or not) would easily want one. I think people do care but they are just waiting on better pricing/availability.
This is far from true. Gnome shell itself is mostly OK (if buggy), but only a minority of real apps work properly. The standard Gnome apps (Nautilus, Gnome Shell etc) are fine, but that's where the support pretty much stops.
I would have thought so too, but this isn't my experience. The smartest developers I know at my current job still develop with old laptops with awful 720p screens (I mean, awful beyond just the low res) and can't be bothered to attach an external Full HD monitor, let alone ask for a 4K one. And still they are brilliant, produce great software, and are key when planning profound software changes in the company. These are people who I deeply admire and from whom I always learn something valuable when they speak. Keep in mind they are also developers, not "whiteboard engineers".
My conclusion is that we nerds tend to overestimate ergonomics, because they are easier to see ("pff, I can only type with a mechanical keyboard!", "how can people code with fewer than three 4K monitors!"), but the actual bottlenecks and difficulties of building complex software lie elsewhere.
I still can't stand 720p screens though.
(writing this from a 23" 1366x768 desktop monitor)
And honestly a lot of things are so broken in hidpi anyway that i do not see a reason to bother.
However, this is all assuming that 2x scaling is fine for you, support for fractional scaling is not great yet.
From the simple (boot screen runs at 1x so text is unreadable) to the wierd (VirtualBox tangle of bugs), to the frustrating (dolphin file manager, which I use to avoid UI bugs in the gnome file manager).
I found workarounds for some issues, and maybe they are fixed in the next LTS, but there is no way I could recommend 18.04 with 4k to a non-professional.
I've had a 4k 27" monitor mixed with 1080p and 1440p monitors of varying sizes for years and have managed to get 90% of software working great, and whenever I dip into Wayland get to use the fractional scaling there it goes up to 99% of software.
At least XFCE just works
Sorry but I don't have time for this anymore. I would have on my SUSE box in 2003.
So thanks for the idea - it truly had never occurred to me (oddly).
GTK3 and Qt5 software works great, anything else is a pot shot.
Sure, I had to put in a bit of effort, but now that I have the results are excellent, there's no scale jumping or even the weird rendering MacOS does when moving windows around.
#!/bin/bash
xrandr --output HDMI-0 --mode 1920x1200 --pos 0x100 --scale 1.5x1.5 --output DP-4 --mode 3840x2160 --primary --scale 1x1 --pos 2880x-150
AFAICT this effectively renders the smaller screen as if it had a much larger resolution (2880x1800), then downscales, giving a good quality image, and then positions the 4k screen to the right of it. The key is the scale factor compensating for different DPI on the different screens.
I tried scaling the other way first, by giving a sub-1.0 scaling factor to the 4k screen, but that meant rendering a lower res and then upscaling, which looked terrible!
The only annoyance now that I have this set up is that occasionaly driver updates change which output is which and I have to update the script so it works again.
Now that I'm older, it's just a waste of time.
It's worth it to me and like I say - it works better than than windows or even OS X on the same screen setup.
If that's of no value to you, that's up to you I guess. I'm in my 40s so no spring chicken...
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/msi-ws60-running-linux/
It isn't simple? no. You have different env variables for QT, GTK and xrander can set its own DPI as well. It is kinda a mess, but I use i3 so I figure I'm in for whatever pain I put myself into.
I've been running Linux on HiDPI devices for a couple of years now and I've got things sorted to where it's no an issue on any new device. I need to give Wayland/Sway another shot at some point. I hope it has better native zoom support than X11.
Only a few apps have given me trouble in recent times.
And there's nobody else to blame for that -- we've known for ages that 4K and fractional scaling was going to be a thing, just like we've known for ages that touchscreens were going to be a thing.
But nope, let's just measure everything in pixels. It's like the majority of native developers on Linux all looked at responsive design on the web and thought, "I'm pretty sure that's just a fad." Everybody just dug in their heels almost on principle or something and refused to make it a priority, and now we're behind both Windows and Mac when it comes to high-resolution touch devices.
And I still run into people who argue that what we should just scale the physical size of a pixel for the entire desktop by a percentage, just so we can keep building fixed layouts that absolute position all of their elements. At a certain point, it feels more like a cultural problem than a technical one.
Everybody else is doing responsive design. QT already supports `em` units (well, sort of[0]). We could be using them on Linux.
[0]: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/stylesheet-reference.html#length
I also use 2 different resolutions without problems
KDE plasma gives you fractional scaling
I've heard Wayland supports different scalings on different monitors, but I'm on Xorg so I can't say if it works
Step 1: put 'xrandr --dpi <your actual DPI>' in .xinitrc
Step 2: Use QT applications (Plasma is a fantastic QT desktop)
Step 3: Enjoy your reasonably sized everything.
"Scaling" is a broken concept to work around applications assuming 96 DPI (which is considered scale=1). You don't need it if you use programs that actually respect your real DPI. Unfortunately X11 doesn't properly compute DPI settings, even though EDID information generally contains the screen size - I imagine, for fear of breaking stuff.
(You can correct GTK3/GDK applications by setting GDK_DPI_SCALE=<actual dpi / 96>, but in my view it's a sin that you need to do that)
Printing, wifi/vpn, keyring, graphics drivers... everything just works.
But the original post is very sobering.
I left OS X a few years back when the new laptop came out. Partly the whole USB-C thing I suppose, but I felt that there was pretty good hardware around and the new MBP didn't really shine (and was fiercely expensive). So I made the move to Ubuntu on some new Lenovo hardware (Carbon X1).
I really look forward to the twice-yearly Ubuntu releases. More of the same, rarely any huge new surprises and just generally more polish. I upgraded to Ubuntu 19.10 immediately once the 19.10beta came out and it seems speedier.
I'm sorry to see Mac users get so badly burnt but I'm very glad I made the decision to leave when I did.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Best-Notebook-Displays-As-...
For the touchpad I am undecided how much here is software and how much is hardware. E.g. install ubuntu on a macbook, is the touchpad still great or just average?
Yes.
> There are no unnecessary frills.
My macOs machine doesn't have them either.
> It just gets the job done.
Mine does as well.
Do you want to talk about frills?