Comment by ikurei | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ikurei | Hacker News Reader

> Users with AMD graphics may experience significant graphical issues

Then, in the bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video...):

> This only happens when the secondary external display is operating at a different pixel width to the internal.

Isn't this a fairly common usecase? My whole company works on high-density laptop displays connected to cheaper 1080p displays. It surprised me to see this kind of bug in a final Xubuntu release, although the bug report says the issue is in the AMD driver.

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I love Xubuntu, I´ve always appreciated its stability, simplicity and flexibility. It has gotten a bit behind in features, when I use it now I miss a good Exposé-like feature, but it´s not that big of a deal.

The thing that keeps me on Mac or Windows most of the time is solid support for high density displays. I can´t get Linux to look quite as good as Windows, and nowhere as good as MacOS, on a 4k display or retina display, without having to go very deep into experimental features and patches... and I don´t want to do that.

Have you noticed that experience improving lately?

On a single display, I think I prefer HiDPI X to Windows. But the moment there's two displays with significantly different dpi, Windows runs rings around anything on Linux. Windows is surely buggy - I have serious problems with its multi-monitor support - but it seems that its multi hi dpi only occasionally crashes Firefox and it's otherwise reasonable.

With Xorg, there's no effective support for different dpi. So if you can tolerate the variation in pixel size then it's tolerable, but if they're too much it all breaks. Moreover, many apps completely ignore the dpi. For instance, Spotify which is is almost unreadably low contrast doubles down and it's unreadably small too.

With Wayland, it's unusable since any seriously productive app will be shown at at least quadruple size the moment you require pixel doubling, X apps will be pixel doubled twice and Wayland native apps all seem to be toys. This seems to have been a bug that was first report years ago so I suppose they're waiting until someone rights a Wayland version of Firefox and Jetbrains and so forth.

Fortunately, this motivated me to by a 4k screen which I'm happy with. It's only tolerably different than my hidpi laptop screen so I don't need to worry about X's mono-dpi-ism. But it's still incredibly frustrating.

Yes it's a super common use case, and it's my single biggest complaint about desktop Linux. Pop!_OS with Wayland handles it well, probably better than any other setup I've tried, but I have to switch back to X for games to work well (Proton tends to crash under Wayland). This was with a 4k vertical and 2560x1080 (21:9) horizontal monitor, which I also use with Windows and macOS. I'd say it works about as well as Windows.

I used the 20.04 Xub test DE on an AMG Picasso desktop machine for over a week without this problem - although it had failed to detect the usual display setting I use, which I'd had to fix with xrandr. (I'd had to xrandr Mint 19 too, but it stayed fixed.)

However, on the day I tried switching to the XFCE DE, then switched back to the Xub DE, I was greeted by the block staircase display. Later I found that by replacing the 'home' folder with the installed original, it was gone. But only one (the wrong) display setting worked.

Glad to see this is getting attention. For that first week, 20.04 was a rock.

Text rendering used to be a mess on Linux in general, even on the same browser and website. It's gotten better lately and focal looks pretty good out of the box.

Gripes: Even on Ubuntu 20.04 I find that display resolutions jump around after initial setting which is very bizarre. I started testing in a VMware workstation vm and it never respects the resolution I set - always reverts back to 800x600 after a restart.

Also on a bare metal 20.04 install with two gtx1080 and two screens it was a real mess getting even the welcome screen to display on the right monitor. Admittedly there's a lot of display connectors on that system but windows gets it right off the bat even with inbox drivers.

Setting up remote desktop access using built-in screen sharing feature is not possible using the default install without having access to the ui... This makes it hard/impossible to do a remote install and get desktop without kvm/ipmi.

Last gripe is if you want to use X/gdm instead of whatever Ubuntu has for x window compatability reasons, its a pretty big rabbit hole and stuff doesn't work well (login to a blank screen, hacking configs, UI breaks), understanding this is an unsupported setup, it's still an issues I ran into when trying to use window capture feature on ffmpeg for example.

I don't think mac has any hidpi support at all. They just decrease the resolution.

Last time I used it, KDE had _proper_ fractional scaling and rendered fonts at full resolution compared to mac, which by default runs at lower than native resolution of my retina MacBook pro.

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