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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>The worst part is: how do I put my money where my mouth is? Am I going back to using Linux on the desktop (2022 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, remember)

people really need to retire this meme. On the desktop in particular as a dev environment Linux is completely fine at this point. I can understand people not wanting to run a custom phone OS because that really is a ton of work but for working software developers Fedora, Ubuntu whatever any mainstream distro is at this point largely hassle free.

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While I don't expect any Linux phone to become "mainstream" any time soon, it would be good if we had at least one "polished" alternative available.

PinePhone is still in beta and according to its own creators "aimed solely at early adopters"[1], while Librem 5 is experiencing supply chain issues with backorder shipping now scheduled to resume in October[2]

There is a version of the Librem 5 which is made in USA and it's in stock and shipping now, but unfortunately outside of my budget[3].

I was also considering getting something like Fairphone and installing an alternative OS but looking at compatibility charts there are some things that may not work with one OS or another.

So, right now I can't have a daily driver that is not iOS or Android, I will hold onto my very old smartphone and hope that things will change in the next year or so. I'm working from home for the foreseeable future so I can wait a bit.

[1] https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-beta-edition-linux-smar...

[2] https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

[3] https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5-usa/

Problem will always be the hardware. Until we get some 80's IBM style architecture on mobile, there is no viable Linux for smartphone.

I have 4 phones. None of them support lineage os.

I recently saw a review of the "Volla Phone" which is running Ubuntu Touch. Seemed much better than the Pinephone but still has issues:

https://youtu.be/neG2Z21epLI

> Seemed much better than the Pinephone

Just curious, how is it better than the Pinephone?

I am mostly going by what I saw in the review. I saw the review of pinephone on Linus’ channel where it seemed very slow. The review of volla phone seemed much better. Maybe I am wrong though as I haven’t owned either.

Pinephone is only slow if the software is not optimized. It's true for most OSes, but have a look at this: https://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/.

> Until we get some 80's IBM style architecture on mobile, there is no viable Linux for smartphone.

Not sure what you mean. Pinephone and Librem 5 both have very well documented hardware with first-class support of desktop (!) Linux.

There was one but people wouldn't "put their money where their mouth is".

The Jolla phone was made by ex-MeeGo/Maemo devs from Nokia, but nobody bought them.

Now they're focusing on just the OS and they don't make any full fledged devices: https://jolla.com/

Yes, I knew about them, they're not the only open source phone that died out unfortunately. Hopefully things will change now that privacy has become something even the "average Joe" worries about.

I hate ubuntu from the bottom of my heart, for breaking stuff and changing stuff that used to "just work" all the time, but 99.999% of the time, that means "background stuff", "normal users" never mess around with, and for normal users, a "usb key -> install -> next, next, next -> finish -> reboot" just works.

I used to use Ubuntu for many years, but it became a such bloatware. So many things what you don’t really need.

Packages were sometimes also different compared to vanilla Debian. This caused issues in stability (talking more about feature set). Some advanced software just did not work, which worked on equivalent vanilla Debian.

I might recommend Ubuntu for very beginner developer, but not to stick with it longer time. It will give you headache. There are also more privacy-friendly distributions.

Are Mac and Windows not also full of an enormous amount of crap that we don't need?

That does sound quite bad, doesn’t it? That some Linux distributions are getting closer to them? We have a freedom, let’s use it. I’m using it for something minimal, like Arch Linux.

I used to run Arch but I got sick of trying to fix my Grub/EFI settings etc. which it would occasionally break.

Freedom to me is being able to ignore the OS' existence, and frankly Ubuntu is better at that than Arch.

I’ve been using Ubuntu and now pop os on a Thinkpad for a couple years now, and I don’t miss Windows (which I used since…well, DOS 6) at all. Quite the opposite. As time goes on, seeing what’s happening with MacOS and Windows, I’m more and more happy that my computer is actually my computer.

Good luck if you have two screens with different DPIs.

Hello, user with two screens with two different DPIs (and two separate resolutions as well, and one of them a giant touch-screen drawing tablet). Nice to meet you, I use Arch btw.

X11's handling of different DPIs is annoying but workable; there's a couple of different possible methods of handling it that have their own pros/cons. Per-monitor scaling is supported, but I personally don't like the way it's handled, so instead I just pick a happy medium scaling that works OK for both monitors. My understanding is that Wayland makes this easier, but I haven't switched over yet because I'm waiting either for GPU prices to drop or for NVidia to figure out whether it's ever going to play nice with Wayland.

There are definitely pain points with Linux, but it's completely serviceable as a workstation computer, the meme is really dead at this point. If you're on a touchscreen device, Gnome's most recent release arguably has comparable if not better touch handling than Windows (admittedly not a high bar to clear, but remarkable considering how bad Linux's touchscreen support used to be). I use a Mac at work so I'll fit in with my coworkers, but outside of work I do not own a single computer with Windows installed on it.

I'm not going to tell everyone to switch to Linux, there are very valid reasons why someone might not want to, including an increased technical burden. That's real, it's just not the giant hurdle that a lot of people seem to think it is. The "year of the Linux desktop" is really out of touch in my experience, modern Linux as a desktop OS is fine; it's perfectly serviceable as a professional environment for a lot of people. I use Linux in part because it makes it easier for me to get an ergonomic setup for drawing tablets, device compatibility, etc...

And at some point I figured out that I don't really care what desktop Linux's market share is, because even <1% still seems to be big enough that the desktop stays usable for professional work and for more complicated device/media setups, which is all I need it to do.

So your answer about different DPIs is that you solve it by using a single DPI setting for both monitors?

And the “year of Linux on the desktop” meme isn’t about it not being a workable desktop or workstation OS. Of course it is and many people use it as such.

But it’s not a mainstream option that puts any kind of competitive pressure on the alternatives. You can’t go into Best Buy and walk out with a linux laptop/desktop that doesn’t have some proprietary layer (Chrome OS, Samsung, Google services) baked in.

So yes Linux works on the desktop, but “everyone should just use Linux” isn’t a realistic answer to issues like this one from Apple.

Per-display scaling works in X11. I happen to use a single DPI setting that's an in-between for both monitors, but that's not a requirement, you can scale per-monitor if you prefer that. Wayland will handle this a bit better, but even in X11 you have options.

I agree that "just use Linux" isn't an answer to privacy concerns in the mainstream, if for no other reason than that the current conversation about Apple is a conversation about phones, a platform where Linux is not currently usable. Purism/Pine phones are exciting, but they're not usable smartphone alternatives yet. Really if we want to talk about Apple's recent changes, I'm not sure any desktop OS is relevant to that conversation.

My frustration here is that a lot of the people who use "year of the Linux desktop" seem to have a really outdated view of what Linux is actually like as a daily driver. HDPI scaling was a huge problem on Linux for a long time. It's a lot better now.

The main barriers for Linux adoption at this point aren't technical. The barriers aren't trying to handle multiple displays, or projectors, or wifi cards, or even getting hardware -- there are multiple companies now that sell good preloaded Linux laptops. That doesn't mean the market share is magically there or that we're going to see a mass migration to Linux any time soon, but the market share is good enough that Linux gets decent support, and stable enough that Linux gives me generally fewer problems than Windows used to (that may have more to do with the quality of Windows degrading though). For a long time that wasn't the case; even until a couple of years ago I would have said that Linux was way behind the curve on touch/tablet support. That gap is pretty much gone now as far as I can see.

That part of the meme that's related to grishka's "sure Linux is a workable desktop, just don't hook any monitors up to it" comment -- that part is dead as far as I'm concerned.

I don't have any issues using multiple displays with different scaling settings on Linux.

Pop! OS, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint are among the distributions that flawlessly accommodate different scaling settings for multiple displays without any special adjustments.

On Wayland, both the GNOME and KDE desktop environments support multiple scaling factors.

For GNOME on Wayland, if you need fractional scaling, you'll need to turn on a setting if your Linux distro doesn't do it for you:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/06/enable-fractional-scalin...

They can retire the meme when any measurable fraction of mainstream users are using Linux without a proprietary software layer provided by a big tech company.

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