Hacker News Reader

At work they are already treating Linux on Desktop as a "solved problem" due to WSL2 (especially due to the Microsoft marketing around it!)

Microsoft is basically telling us "Here you go, your developers can do their weird dev thingies now, so you don't have to bother with that Linux desktop stuff anymore. We've killed their last excuses."

I think this is a really bad thing to happen to Linux. Microsoft Loves Linux?? More like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. They're trying again to displace the Linux desktop marketshare, small as it already is, by pushing it into the software dev niche.

Personally I use Linux because I don't want to use Windows, with their choices made on my behalf and telemetry that can't be turned off etc. It's because I like choosing my own desktop environment, because I like full control of my machine, because I like to choose whether I want to use a TPM or not. It's not because I wanted to use some dev toolchain or something. I want to use Linux because I love Linux. Not because Windows wasn't good enough for my purposes.

Main reason I gave up on desktop Linux after 20 years is that Gnome is being forced on us and software is no longer playing as nice on traditional X11 window managers. I use HiDPI 4K screens and if you use a traditional window manager like FVWM which doesn't do all the modern desktop bus systemd stuff then you are outta luck.

  echo 'Xft.dpi: 192' | xrdb -merge

Is the first step to getting hidpi to work. But some 'modern' apps ignore this, but might respond to

  export GDK_SCALE=2

But then there are apps which respond to both of these settings and give you 400% scaling, or give you 400% scaling for some UI elements, 200% for other UI elements.... I just installed Windows, set my desktop to 200% scaling and I was all done and could finally start doing work again that actually makes money, and I even have more spare time for HN now that I don't have to constantly study the Arch Wiki to fix the next broken Linux thing.

Windows is actually better for online privacy because a Windows browser is so much more mainstream. If you are broadcasting your "Linux" OS in your browser User-Agent string to every website you visit you are not terribly anonymous online because you are broadcasting you are among the elite 1% of computer users. Yes, you can install a browser extension to say your User-Agent is Windows, but have you?

> GNOME

Just use KDE or anything else. GNOME is not the only option.

> DPI scaling

Wayland.

> User agent

You don't need a browser extension for this. Enable Resist Fingerprinting for Firefox and it'll hide your user agent as a Windows user, similar to what the Tor Browser already does.

I actually tried KDE Plasma on 20.04 LTS just a few days ago, and it has HiDPI bugs. When moving the mouse pointer over the desktop the pointer is drawn too small rather than 200% scale. I actually like the KDE taskbar better than Gnome's default. (I ended up installing the Gnome dash-to-dock extension to get a KDE-like taskbar.) I've tried Gnome, KDE, Xfce, and old-school window managers (mostly FVWM2) and Gnome has the fewest overall issues (particularly for HiDPI) but it still has a large number of bugs, especially when installing user themes, which I learned to just avoid for the sake of my sanity. (I actually tried KDE because I wanted to avoid installing dash-to-dock on Gnome, because of how often I've seen extension bugs on Gnome.)

Wayland still isn't 100% there for nVidia yet. "Well don't use nVidia then!" Well, for many machine learning workflows and other use cases non-nVidia isn't 100% there yet. But yeah, Linux users should avoid nVidia to the maximum extent possible.

Your Firefox tip sounds good, thank you.

I use KDE on 4K at 200% too. On FreeBSD with X even, at the moment :) Though for work I use Linux with Wayland.

It's true that the mouse doesn't auto scale but you can manually make it bigger in settings. Same with the "taskbar" height. HiDPI is still a bit in development and I heard the next release 5.23 will bring a lot of goodies in October. But overall I think it's fine.. Where it falls down is mixed DPI (e.g. one screen at 200% and another at 100%). But even Windows is still very flakey with that. Only macOS covers that scenario perfectly.

One thing I love about KDE is the wealth of options. Gnome is heading the way of Apple: opinionated software and minimalism. Windows is heading the same way though not as strongly. That doesn't suit me. KDE is really my thing.

While WSL2 makes it no longer necessary to switch to Linux, I've seen a ton of people making the switch due to Windows 11. Most things just work, better than on Windows.

I just switched a few months ago (after having tried it n times over 20 years), and this is the first time I'm sticking with it. Gaming works (I haven't found any games in my steam library that don't run OOB with proton), all developer productivity tools work, office productivity is solved with the rise of O365/GDocs, as hated as electron is every (or almost every) electron app out there is cross platform.

The only things that I haven't found suitable replacements for is graphics editing (I use the affinity suite on a VM), and probably CAD products and the like. But for 95% of users, desktop linux works better than Windows atm, everything works perfectly after installation.

Regarding the printer, in Windows I have to go to brother's site and download a driver, I've never had windows auto detect and properly configure a printer + scanner (just the printer, if your lucky). On Linux I just click add printer, it auto detects it and installs it, including the scanner.

I've been using Dell developer laptops with 4k+ screens and Linux for over five years. Haven't had any scaling issues either, since my external monitor is 4k as well.

I've been eyeing a Dell XPS Developer Edition for a long time but other HNers told me it suffers noticeable coil whine. Have you noticed any coil whine on the XPS?

There was also a story 5 days ago that putting an XPS in a bag voids its warranty unless it is completely powered off. Dell says you can't just close the lid to put the laptop in a sleep state before throwing it in your backpack:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952

(Of course, this could just be a CYA cover-your-ass clause that Dell's lawyers said to throw in to reduce lawsuit losses from lithium battery fires that affect all laptop makers including Apple. If the sales losses from this CYA clause's bad publicity are less than the reduction in lawsuit losses then I guess it's a win for Dell's balance sheet. I haven't seen any evidence that Dells are more prone to fires than any other brand.)

EDIT: I was just reading the linked XPS thread and it sounds like the overheating issue is due to a change in how sleep states were traditionally handled (S1/S3 etc.). This affects all Windows laptops, not just the XPS. A Linux XPS can actually avoid the issue if Linux sleep states are configured correctly, according to posters in the discussion.

Never knew what coil whine was, but it does make a “dit dit” sound when I move the mouse onscreen. I don’t notice however unless in an absolutely quiet room with my ear tilted to keyboard. Never had issues with sleep.

Windows is just so much worse in every way, the idea that someone would prefer to use it over Linux as a desktop confounds me.

Linux: fast, private, under your control, user empowering. Windows: slow, spyware, under microsofts control and works to wrench power from the user.

Just blows my mind.

I think you're right in that the way you describe windows in terms of speed, privacy and etc is correct (more or less), but I would not say disparity in market share is confounding.

>under microsofts control and works to wrench power from the user

I think that you and I are alike in that we care how we use a computer, what that computer is, what kind of software runs on it and so on. The key bit of empathy we need to understand the reason why most people use something that "works to wrench power from the user" as you put it, is that in fact most users want that powered wrenched from them because with power comes responsibility and for most people that juice is not worth the squeeze.

You can now create documents, communicate with people and consume entertainment (that is to say, most of what most people use a computer for) by doing little more than poking at a limited selection of large rectangles on a screen. Most people are happy with this and it's pretty hard to convince someone that they should spend time from their life on the effort of learning a new UI or an alternative operating system, or even think at all about what their operating system is. Honestly I get their position, and if I didn't care about computers I probably would not either.

Windows isn't really slow though...

That being said I hate windows 11 and the choices made. While I love windows 10, as it mainly just works and was a big set up from 7.

I use Linux nearly 90% of the time in server space. With Windows VM's mostly for the AD Domain Controller and Print Server, as Windows AD in a Azure AD Hybrid setup works great for user control. Integrates into my Linux server for a synced user control. The Linux alt is a janky option. Keeping user accounts locked down is pretty important for production systems.

The Linux desktop scene however is a great deal better than it used to be. Back in the Day I used to rock opensuse on a IBM T61, everything worked out the box with that install. Something Ubuntu at the time did not do. But the lack of software was always an issue and wine was not what it is today. Office 2000 and other old windows apps ended up working fine.

Honestly I will get hate for this, but I don't see much of a short-mid term future for linux on the desktop. I know valve will keep pushing gaming forward on linux, but it really takes a back seat and more as a secondary option that is easy to support.

Linux on the Server is by far the reality, and windows on the server is mostly for use as a domain controller or print server.