Comment by dandotway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dandotway | Hacker News Reader

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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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