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Comment by anaisbetts | Hacker News Reader

Having set this up, this is going to be absolutely huge for ML. A lot of nonsense is getting cut down by this:

1. You don't have to install special CUDA-specific drivers that are behind the normal gaming drivers anymore. You'll soon be able to just use the Regular nVidia Drivers (and even now, all you need to do is install a Beta driver version). That's huge for someone just starting out, they don't have to have "the dedicated CUDA machine / OS"

2. At least in Arch, the Linux side of this is literally as simple as `yay -Sy python-tensorflow-cuda`, that's it. Can't get any easier.

3. VS Code's WSL integration means you can use a real editor, with real linting / auto-complete, but without the technical issues of Desktop Linux (aka the Wayland Nightmare and DPI issues everywhere)

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> (aka the Wayland Nightmare and DPI issues everywhere)

The picture is more mixed than you present.

I use Fedora at 2560x1440@14" and 2 by 3840x2160@27 and the dpi thing isn't an issue, set your font scaling to 1.5 and that's about all you need to do.

I dual boot windows and fedora (for gaming in the former and dev in the latter) and Windows 10 is by far more unpleasant to deal with, updates that tie your machine up for significant time, drivers are still "track down random binary from random vendor site and hope it works" vs "sudo dnf update" is (for me) no comparison at all.

Into the territory of personal preference, Cinnamon is a better desktop on than Windows - it's more responsive, more cohesive, closer to the classic WIMP interfaces I prefer.

As for wayland, I don't use it yet, I will when it's been stable for a year or two.

In my experience high DPI actually works somewhat decently and those fractional stuff can be fixed with don't scaling. At least if you only use one monitor. I personally have two I would use with 1.25x and no scaling which is just not possible with the x11 model.

Additionally having two monitors completely breaks vsync with very ugly tearing lines.

And Wayland on Nvidia has been very unsuccessful for me. Even when I got it to run the performance in e.g. firefox was absolutely terrible. Sadly Wayland is necessary if you want hardware video decoding.

In Firefox you can force hardware acceleration in about config which resolves tearing for me on scroll, it's off by default for conservative reasons.

Never had tearing issues on dual display Linux setup (currently using one, no tearing).

> without the technical issues of Desktop Linux (aka the Wayland Nightmare)

Nobody is forced to use Wayland. It’s still quite experimental, I think only Gnome enables it by default.

Xming on Windows isn't exactly a walk in the park either -- I'd still rather use the native, proprietary build of VSCode on a proprietary OS with the SSH extension if I'm on a high-DPI screen.

https://x410.dev/ is trivial to set up, and once done, it "just works".

But yeah, with VSCode WSL remoting, there's just no particular reason to do that anymore.

What's the performance like on this? Does it feel native or does it feel more like a VM?

I mean, it's just an X server for Win32 - I'm assuming it's a fork of Xming, just polished and neatly packaged for usability. It's fast enough to use interactive apps like text editors.

Just for fun, I tried loading a Word document in LibreOffice - I can see the redraw lagging behind scrolling, but it's still usable enough even when typing.

I bought x410 but gave up later since I needed OpenGL3 among other things. It is nicely done, worth the 10$.

Microsoft has also planned to provide a remoting tool based on RDP: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/the-windows-subsy....

VSCode works just fine with hidpi on Linux. It’s just an Electron app after all, and Chromium has had hidpi support since forever.

Many many many apps on Linux still have massive issues with DPI, especially with mixed-DPI environments (which are no longer an edge case, they're the Common Case with a laptop attached to a monitor).

Even accessing machines remotely via Xrdp has huge issues because once you create the session with a certain DPI, logging into the session from a different DPI machine means you're stuck reading either extremely tiny or extremely huge text

Using mixed-blurriness environment sounds like a nightmare to me, even if everything should work correctly.

Its really not, only Linux makes it that way. If its done right (as it is on mac, and to a _very_ slightly lesser extent, Windows) there isn't 'blurriness' at all. One monitor will just happen to be sharper than the other.

I work every day with a 4K monitor and a 1080p monitor side-by-side and it works well. Linux couldn't handle it in any configuration, especially with mixed Intel integrated+nvidia graphics, but Windows is a champ.

Wayland+Intel is working quite well in my mixed 4K+1080p setup. Qt apps are handling like a champion. Gtk seems okay too.

Obviously it's not so great with Xwayland, definite blurriness there. But to compare, the only workable X11 setup was one that ignored my 4K screen entirely and the whole thing was blurry.

They are totally an edge case. If you care about hidpi why do you still have a bad external screen? If you don't care about hidpi simply set a lower resolution on the one hidpi screen.

Because that is a standard office configuration during the last 15 years, laptops with docking stations and external monitors.

More than enough time to catch up.

Yes, standard configuration where the laptop and the external monitor have about the same ppi.

? there's an enormous effort to fix the blurry chromium on wayland (and by extension electron and vscode), codenamed ozone, and vscode make me painfully aware of it every day.

Afaik there's no official vscode build on ozone.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=578890

That’s an effort to have Chromium work natively on Wayland. It works just fine on X.org and even under Wayland with XWayland if you use something like ChromeOS’s Sommelier or just set window.zoomLevel/--force-dpi-something=2 (and not have XWayland windows scaled).

I've been using Gnome+Wayland for over a year and been quite happy with it

Installing CUDA specific drivers was always optional, in case you wanted to be sure of being on a tested configuration. The runtime parts of CUDA have always been included with the gaming drivers. The CUDA install was mainly for the development SDK, nvcc, etc.

> (aka the Wayland Nightmare and DPI issues everywhere)

It’s more of a pick-one. Wayland has pretty good per monitor scaling; your X11 apps will be blurry but that’s about all I’ve experienced.

The Windows DPI nightmare long surpassed it anyways. On a typical Wayland desktop the usual biggest problem is the DPI being set wrong for a monitor. Even on X11 the worst you get is applications that don’t scale correctly.

On Windows mixed DPI is damn near unusable. I don’t mean “sometime in the past.” I mean, now. I have a laptop with a HiDPI screen, that I sometimes connect to two monitors that are normal DPI. The process of connecting them causes Windows to throw a fit, jumping between multiple DPI levels before actually settling on the correct DPI. This often screws up apps that are slow to respond to DPI changes, like Explorer, which sometimes manages to resize my locked taskbar during this process, and it frequently leaves applications in a totally broken state. Here’s an explorer window that didn’t make the transition. https://m.imgur.com/VgrStHQ

Some builtin Windows apps don’t handle DPI switches correctly even then. You have to entirely sign out for Explorer to enforce minimum column widths correctly on a new DPI, and it just won’t on mixed DPI; it appears to adjust them on startup and never again. I filed a feedback item about this one.

As for third party apps, it’s a crapshoot. Qt supports scaling but on Windows mixed DPI setups its broken. IDA Pro launches with enormous window borders and some controls still scaling when loaded after a DPI change. You can of course use compatibility mode to force System scaling, and that makes it work at the cost of blur.

Why are third party apps such a crapshoot? Partly, history. Windows has undergone no less than 4 different iterations of DPI scaling. No, really:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/hidpi/dpi-awa...

There’s plenty of good information on this issue, but as someone who has tried to adhere to per monitor v2, I can say it is not terribly easy unless you limit yourself to dialogs. Builtin resources like fonts do not appear to update, so you need to create your own to support scaling a window with Win32 controls.

And that’s not all. I close my laptop lid when my laptop is docked. Windows helpfully sleeps the laptop even though external monitors, a mouse, and a keyboard are connected. There is no fix. Of course, I tried to make my own solution. https://github.com/jchv/SwitchOnDock

All in all, the Linux desktop sucks, but the Windows desktop gets a free pass because everyone has internalized the ways that it sucks. Meanwhile Linux with Wayland has progressed meaningfully and is still being regarded with unwarranted disdain nonetheless. It isn’t quite to the level of macOS with scaling, but it’s close. And that docking issue is also something that is not an issue on either Linux or macOS. So YMMV.

One thing I cannot do is allow someone to shame Linux for its DPI problems without acknowledging Windows DPI problems.

> And that’s not all. I close my laptop lid when my laptop is docked. Windows helpfully sleeps the laptop even though external monitors, a mouse, and a keyboard are connected. There is no fix.

Right click the battery icon in the system tray > Power Options > Choose what closing the lid does > Do nothing.

And yet, my Ubuntu does the right thing in both cases:

- When the lid is closed and there are no external monitors, the laptop goes to sleep. - When there is an external monitor, it switches to it entirely.

And when the external is disconnected after that (the laptop is still closed), it goes to sleep fine.

Of course, then lid close will never work as intended. What I want is for lid close to sleep IFF no external monitors are connected, regardless of whether the machine is on AC power or not. Thank you for the suggestion, and in my actual solution, I basically programmatically switch this setting on and off based on whether or not external monitors are connected.

I think there's an option in settings to select the primary display - if you set that to the external display, theoretically it should work. My laptop stops sleeping on lid close with this.

As it should not. Need to move the laptop into another room? Better not close the lid!

Just disable it and actively sleep when you do want to sleep. This is the most sensible way even if you never have any external monitors attached.

What the hell. It’s one thing to say you prefer nothing to happen on lid close. That’s cool. I don’t want that. This is like saying, “I would like a mocha” and having the barista say “Wrong, you want an iced coffee.” No, I do want my laptop to sleep on lid close, just not when it’s docked. This is clearly not much to ask for considering Linux and macOS do it just fine by default and I can still disable sleep on lid close if I want to.

Why is it better for Windows to do this wrong? It is clearly a side effect of the fact that the Power Policy system only differentiates between AC and DC and no other conditions.

What happens when I move rooms? Well, I only have one docking setup. But also, it is not a problem if my laptop spuriously goes to sleep. (My solution does not automatically sleep the laptop when it is undocked, either, so this is also still not an issue.)

It came out harsh, sorry. But it is more like asking for a 33cl beverage but getting 35cl.

There are tons of issues with a computer spuriously going to sleep. Network connectivity dies for one, as well as lots of minor quirks such as music stops etc. Having control of that is quite essential.

Being forced to manually sleep despite ones preferences is not a major issue. It is a sub-second operation that comes with lots of benefits. One of which being explicit with what you want to do.

On the flip side, a laptop failing to go to sleep can be a fire hazard or at least permanently damage your laptop, depending on where it’s stored. This killed one of my X1 carbons.

Exactly, I see that as yet another benefit of being explicit about it.

>the Windows desktop gets a free pass because everyone has internalized the ways that it sucks.

I don't use windows on my laptop, I also don't have external displays connected to it. Yet turning off auto-sleep is a no-brainer.

This is what Windows Custom Power Plans was built for. Have a plan called "Docked" that disables lid close, and leave it as sleep in other plans. Custom Power Plans have been buried in Windows 10 as confusing power user/OEM features, yet they still exist.

Exactly what GP was saying

>the Windows desktop gets a free pass because everyone has internalized the ways that it sucks.

> Meanwhile Linux with Wayland has progressed meaningfully and is still being regarded with unwarranted disdain nonetheless.

That's because things don't work.

I moved from i3 to Sway and back to i3 because Sway didn't deliver of being compatible with i3.

Then there is the xdg portal mess which makes screen sharing through a web browser weird.

And also the whole XForawarding mess, which makes all Apps using it blurry in HiDPI. I use my computer for work, and 99% of it happens in emacs. The remaining 1% is using Chromium, which also does not support Wayland yet, so for me 100% of my wayland experience on HiDPI amounts to "all text on Wayland is blurry". There is no "HiDPI per-App" setting to fix this, scaling to 1.5x is also bad, etc. And that's without entering on the "wl-roots will never support nvidia thing". I need to use both AMD and nvidia hardware for work. I don't care about whether Wayland's desktop war (e.g. Sway) against nvidia, who has 50% of the GFX market, and 99% of the compute market, is honorable or not. But I do care about not being able to work on Wayland while X works just fine.

Sway devs say that this is 100% nvidias fault. From my POV, all other desktops manage to work with nvidia's hardware just fine, Sway does not, so I see this as being 100% Sway's fault. Without an i3 replacement I can't use Wayland, so until this fanaticism finished, I'll probably won't be able to use it.

I scanned through the comments. There is no editor war anymore these days ;) For development I wouldn't have issues as I just use VIM and CLI. Neovim currently has linting and auto-complete and works so much better then before. Actually also using the language server protocol same like vscode. So no issues on DPI. The other tool used is chrome and that handles DPI quite nicely on linux.

But I switched to mac long time ago. Because I agree it handles text and HDPI displays much better. Maybe windows improved on this but reading text on it was such a downgrade to a mac. If windows would have as nice text rendering as mac I would switch instantly. Cheaper hardware for better price and all. No have best of both worlds windows and linux all in one.

The only time I see any HDPI issues on Win10 is when running ancient apps. It certainly works great in VSCode.

I'm not sure what you mean by "nice text rendering" - are you referring to ClearType vs macOS anti-aliasing? If so, that doesn't really come up for HDPI, because you can't see the artifacts either way.

> for someone just starting out

I'd hope that the barrier to entry for starting ML practitioners isn't easy environment setup, as Google cloud, AWS, even colab exist with easy to use environments.

Anyone recommend a good guide for quick setup and noodling on one of these platforms? I tried a Digital Ocean machine learning droplet awhile back with one of their guides and nothing on it worked.

I liked using colab to test certain things out, but it depends on whether or not you enjoy using tensorflow.

Edit: I should also add that if you enjoyed the colab experience but want to scale up, you can attach the same notebooks to a Google cloud compute VM and run them on that.

Thanks! I'll check it out.

In case you don’t know, Colab also supports other platforms, you can use PyTorch, Jax, Flux, and likely some others.

Oh cool! Honestly must have slipped my mind, but it makes sense since you can install some if not all packages via pip

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