Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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