This week in KDE: bug squashing and more | Hacker News Reader

This week in KDE: bug squashing and more

pointieststick.com

17 pointsjrepinc19 comments

I really like KDE. The philosophy that an DE can have extra functionality rather than the standard "if it doesn't run on a 10 year old ThinkPad, it's trash."

Of course I'm being a bit unreasonable since the majority of desktop users likely are running vms and accessing it it over VNC/xRDP/Guacamole. And so require something snappy.

I'm running KDE Neon on a Lenovo T450 and an XPS 13. And the experience is great.

However high dpi is hell to configure, still not happy with it.

How did you configure high DPI for the xps 13? I couldn't figure it out and gave up.

> However high dpi is hell to configure, still not happy with it.

If it's about the HiDPI autodetection you should try Tumbleweed, Qt has many HiDPI related fixes there and sddm works OOTB.

> However high dpi is hell to configure, still not happy with it.

You should check out the Wayland session. They have fractional scaling working perfectly there

Yeah X11 is unusable with HiDPI. Works great on Wayland.

typing this from a 4k screen under X11, everything looks fine... https://imgur.com/tyXOG0X

Maybe because you got used to it. There's a bunch of awful scaling issues with that screenshot. The taskbar is unusable, a bunch of icons in your music player are wrongly scaled, and there's a bunch of text layout brokenness.

I also suspect you've had to configure things quite a bit to reach this layout. I see for example your zoom-level is non-default in Chrome. I had to do the same when I was using X11 with a 3.8k screen. And it still sucks.

Wayland makes the scaling seamless and perfect for all native apps.

> Maybe because you got used to it. There's a bunch of awful scaling issues with that screenshot. The taskbar is unusable, a bunch of icons in your music player are wrongly scaled, and there's a bunch of text layout brokenness.

could you detail ? the taskbar is exactly at the right size for me. The only thing I see that is blatantly bad is the text on the left sidebar of the media player.

> I also suspect you've had to configure things quite a bit to reach this layout

The only thing I do is setting Xft.dpi = 144 in my .Xresources.

> I see for example your zoom-level is non-default in Chrome.

that is because I keep playing with my middle button when I'm reading :) before taking the screenshot I had it at 250%

Hi - I've tried this on my machine with 4K display running Plasma Wayland but unfortunately my xwayland programs are still blurry. Was this really the only thing you've done?

EDIT: just realized that you're not using wayland ..

yes, and plasma neither - it has its own scaling method which does not use xft.dpi afaik

> They have fractional scaling working perfectly there

Hear, hear! So you are not using firefox? All the XWayland apps are blurry.

KDE/Plasma apps are crisp. But to be fair, Gnome had experimental fractional scaling on Wayland two years ago.

> extra functionality rather than the standard "if it doesn't run on a 10 year old ThinkPad, it's trash."

Actually, nowadays KDE is one of the most lightweight DEs out there. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-...

The view that KDE is bloated was accurate years ago, but nowadays it's outdated.

> if it doesn't run on a 10 year old ThinkPad, it's trash.

And Plasma probably runs quite well on a 10 year old ThinkPad anyway. I run one of the latest versions of Plasma on an old x86 tablet with 1 GB of ram, a slow SSD and an Intel Atom CPU. It's just a bit slow to boot, but this was improved on the last release (I could not test it on the tablet though).

It is quite lightweight, but you probably shouldn't install the kde-full package on an old computer.

I have KDE with HiDPI set up on a desktop, and that works fine. I wrote this a year ago, and included a screenshot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17420889

Multi-DPI may well still be an issue.

I use KDE on a 9 year old thinkpad and it runs reasonably well, at least much better than GNOME.

> However high dpi is hell to configure, still not happy with it.

Plasma 5.17 on Wayland gained fractional scaling support. Works good for KDE apps, blurry on XWayland apps such as Thunderbird and Firefox. However, when you start

GDK_BACKEND=wayland firefox

firefox isn't usable, but sharp. Still a long way to go as it seems.

Running it on an almost-10 y/o ThinkPad, careful mate.

My personal pet peeve with KDE and GNOME is how they both pretend there is no other DE. At work we try to give users the choice and install multiple DEs, but it requires painful workarounds for silly stuff.

> Dolphin now tells you what’s blocking unmounting a mounted volume (David Hallas, Dolphin 19.12.0)

Wow, that's pretty cool! I've often been wondering about which application is blocking the volume.

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