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A note on HiDPI since a lack of fractional scaling is always brought up as a frustration point: with Xresources you can set 'Xft.dpi' to an appropriate value (like 144) and restart your X session and most programs/toolkits should scale fonts appropriately (Java is occasionally an exception but the same is true on Windows), it won't scale things like icons which can make the experience frustrating if your program has no other means to scale interfaces but this experience is about what you'd get on something like Windows 7 or 8. Additionally if you need multi-monitor support you can use display scaling (also known as upscaling) with RandR 1.3 (released around a decade ago) to upscale low DPI screens so that the fonts will be equal sizes on both monitors, e.g., 96 dpi -> 144 is 1.5x so a 1920x1080 monitor will become 2880x1620.

None of this is perfect or easy to set up and it's in no way a substitute for fractional scaling support in the toolkits of the programs you're using but it has worked for a very long time and produces appropriately sized crisp and sharp fonts on all monitors, and more importantly it should work reasonably well even on outdated programs or toolkits that have no support for fractional scaling. The Arch wiki link should explain this but it's not spelled out and there's a bit of a misconception that fractional scaling is the only way to get a blur free HiDPI experience on Linux when that just isn't the case at all.

I'm not sure what the note about fractional scaling is about. Pinebook Pro's screen is not hidpi - it's just a regular 1920x1080 13" screen.

On a Windows that would render at 125% or 150% scaling. 1080p on a 13" screen is actually quite small. Even on my 15" laptop with a 4K screen at 200%, which is equivalent to 1080p at 100% in terms of scale, I find everything feels tiny.

Fractional scaling does not have to be only for super high res screens.

> > Alt-tabbing between Firefox and a terminal takes one second, as does switching between Firefox tabs.

> This is not my experience at all. I do not notice undue delays switching between applications (do not use slack).

I do wonder how much of his experience might be slack + gnome or KDE, some desktop apps are just horribly bloated because they can get away with it. Also modern DEs are just massive, most people don't realise how much resources they take up because compared to 25 years ago we all have x86 super computers.

I find slack to be absurdly slow for what is fundamentally just a text based web app and yet I'm using a 1yr old XPS with an 8th gen intel CPU... i run i3wm and keep things very minimal, yet I still find myself waiting seconds for slack to do stuff.

That's a big part of the issue. Just running a desktop browser like Firefox on these ARM devices is an exercise in pain. While they technically run, they would be described as sluggish on a good day. Then trying to visit a 'heavy' desktop-oriented website will just bring everything to a grinding halt.

Exactly. IME HN or text.npr.org will fly, old reddit / readthedocs / other light js does fine, and SPAs like new reddit and Slack crawl.

I recently discovered that i.reddit.com or reddit.com/.compact is the "old mobile interface" and a lot lighter than even old Reddit.

Gnome is crashy, gobbles resources, incredibly laggy, and drops frames on my beast of a newish hex-core machine. I've switched to KDE in a VM on Win10 (some of the crashes were Linux graphics drivers, not entirely Gnome's fault, though some were Gnome—running in a VM makes them go away entirely, and also all my bluetooth stuff stays paired much better since Linux doesn't even know it's bluetooth) and it feels 4x as responsive on literally half the hardware, and under virtualization, as Gnome did.

I recently trialed a 2GB memory (!) dual-core Celeron minipc as a workstation, and if I could have solved all the 4k 2x scaling issues without spending hours (more) on it or resorting to a too-heavy-for-the-hardware DE, and gotten 60hz out of it rather than 30, I'd probably have upgraded the RAM to its max of 8GB and been totally happy on it. Void Linux with suckless tools made it feel blazing fast, as long as I avoided webshit (so, Sublime over VSCode, keep Slack the hell away from it, use a real email client rather than a webpage, that kind of thing). All browsers felt too slow to even launch except Surf and qute, and the latter was a tad slower and jankier than Surf so I settled on that, but it was fine as long as I avoided the kind of pages that eat a couple hundred MB and burn cycles for no clear reason (which is lots of them, sadly). I bet I could have made it work even better if I'd looked into adding a disable/enable JS toggle, defaulting to off, and maybe some kind of click-to-load-media thing, but it was surprisingly usable as it was. FF and Chromium were far too heavy to launch with no page loaded, of course. Man I miss pre-2.0 Firefox, when it was light and fast.

I recently set up a new HTPC/server/NAS for the living room. It runs FTP, SMB/NFS shares, a DLNA server and a few other assorted things, and a Btrfs RAID1 storage pool. For HTPC duties, I just use the standard KDE desktop in openSUSE and SMPlayer/mpv with some tweaks (I'm not a huge fan of how Kodi works).

As is, right now sitting at the KDE desktop with default settings, total memory usage is 613MB.

This myth that KDE is bloated and heavy really needs to die out. It may have been true in the early KDE4 versions, but that's a long time ago.

Wifi was a serious problem on my PBP, but Firefox and KDE have been impressively smooth. I could use it as a main development computer after I eschewed NetworkManager for dhcpd + wpasupplicant

Firefox is definitely slow on some of these smaller machines. Although a delay between app switches sounds like some virtual memory got paged out (either swap or executable pages got evicted to make room for FS cache.)

EDIT: apparently they’re shipping with plasma as the DE? Yeah that’s going to be slow.

Firefox is unbearably slow on everything including high-end Xeons if you don’t have a video accelerator (think headless VNC).

Perhaps the video driver or compositing is misconfigured?

Firefox is my default browser, and I’ve found Firefox to be fine on low end machines as long as it can use the video card properly.

Chrome tends to have better compatibility with chomebook-class hardware for obvious reasons.

The experience is a few years old now but I spent a year in college running Firefox on a celeron netbook with just the EFI framebuffer (anything else would crash on boot) and it was totally usable unless you opened google sheets. On my ryzen desktop that I built during the lockdown (after baking some bread heh) it’s very snappy. IME chrome (on GNU/Linux anyway) is usually much worse than Firefox unless you’re in the habit of opening hundreds (at least) of tabs.

>EDIT: apparently they’re shipping with plasma as the DE? Yeah that’s going to be slow.

KDE Plasma feels snappy even on a Core 2 Duo with Intel graphics, in my experience.

This myth of KDE as some kind of bloated lumbering beast really needs to die out. Install KDE Neon or openSUSE and give it a spin. You'll be surprised.

I think most people who say it’s slow are comparing it to xterm+cwm (or xterm+fvwm or whatever) which it will probably never beat. I installed dolphin the other day so my girlfriend can use my computers and that still does a lot of stuff which can be pretty slow depending on the hardware.

Anything's going to be slow in comparison to a minimalist X for people who really just want to have a bunch of terminals on screen at once and barely anything else.

KDE (and the other DEs) offer a whole lot more than that, obviously :-) Dolphin does do thumbnails and all of type of stuff, but it's not really a heavy application in itself, it just does a lot of disk-intensive tasks.

Obviously generating thumbnails for a whole folder of photos is going to take a little while on an eMMC drive, just like it takes a little while to get a list of all the shared folders on a network.

I hope the YouTube experience gets better after the hardware video decoder drivers land in kernel 5.8.

Playing around with Manjaro really makes me miss the ease of trying out kernels and patches on Gentoo, but I haven't had the time yet to put together a Gentoo cross compile environment.