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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

> Nobody makes money on desktop linux and it's in a terrible state.

What's terrible about it? Fonts rendering? Or Wayland still not having "won" over XFree86/Xorg? I'm using Linux as my main computer since more than two decades and, if anything, desktop Linux is much better now than it used to be. Browsers and JetBrains' Java written IDE did a lot for that but even though I don't game I know people are playing games on Linux too. I mean: if you're a dev spending your life in browsers and IntelliJ IDEA (heck, or Emacs), Linux is sweet.

Desktop Linux is the distant third player after Windows and OS X but what's terrible about it besides its small market share (on the desktop, servers and appliances being another story)?

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From what I've heard, hi res displays, and other features that work perfectly on macs such as suspend/hibernate on closing the laptop, can still be problematic just like 10 years ago when I last had a linux laptop. Is that fair?

There is an argument that those things work that well because Apple can sort the software for a reduced set of hardware configurations. Which means that System76 could achieve the same with their own set of configurations.

On the other hand, Windows seems to be getting it right on many more configurations, not on all of them, but on many more than MacOS and Linux. Not sure how reliable this data is, but here you go .

https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/operating-systems-market-sh...

This is the single problem I have with running Ubuntu 20.04 on my laptop. It takes about 1.5 minutes to wake up. But it does wake up, and then it’s far better than any alternatives

I'm running NixOS and they take care of my boot stages automatically. I have 2 disks with one boot partition each (unencrypted boot), raid1 for swap and data and neither suspend or hibernate is a problem, though I've previously had issues with not finding my bootloader at all, seems to be solved by calling sync on my boot partitions once I update grub (which nixos does every time I "rebuild" my setup, which is several times a day).

This is on a System76 Lemur Pro (lemp10).

The fancurve in the firmware is suboptimal, but there's a merged PR for solving that too.

I hope they make a fanless ultrabook (don't care if ARM or x86 tbh, as long as KVM works and AES is accelerated), then I could buy one for home as well.

I should note that it naturally takes awhile to wake from hibernation if I had a lot of applications running (40GB RAM, which is a weird configuration)

Fond though I am of grub (for 'crusty sysadmin' values of fond, admittedly, but nonetheless), if it has all the features you need the nixos systemd-boot support seems to be much simpler to drive and debug.

Absolutely, sadly it doesn't support copying itself to two locations natively like grub, might be an easy fix but I haven't looked into it.

You can't raid your boot partition so if you have 2 disks and want to be able to boot from both of them you need this operation. Maybe it could be solved with something as simple as an rsync between /boot and /boot-fallback, no clue.

I suspect that wouldn't be tricky but I've been focusing on helping out with Hydra development recently - once I get confidence with core-fu I expect to rewrite the grub stuff to be sensible modern perl first - but I mentioned systemd-boot for people who aren't me (and apparently aren't you either ;).

Definitely enjoying nixos so far though :D

I think that's fair. I will say, I select for laptops that are known to have good linux support (ex: Thinkpad X1), and my last few have worked pretty well. Sometimes there are weird quirks, but honestly no more than my macbook has.

It is. Every time my laptop screen blanks or go s to sleep, I have to fix my displays. Not everything is perfect but minor nits are solvable..

Wayland has won over xorg already. I have been using it for several months on two laptops and a gaming desktop.

Then again, Linux won over Windows in 1996 for me so perhaps I'm a bit of an outlier.

Waylandis now default on all big distros.

The war is over people. Even the xorg people are happy about this.

Only on GNOME on Mesa though.

I think a large number (or I'm just projecting and should speak for myself!) of hold-outs are just cautious about the actual switch itself, or 'why fix what isn't broken', but that'd be a little strong for me - I am keen to switch, I find X frustrating to configure and use, it's just that since it is working, I'm nervous of breaking rather than switching and improving it! Hoping for Framework to start shipping here (UK) soon and I'll try it out from day one rather than (before) switching my desktop.

Screen recording does not work well in Wayland. Black screen with the mouse cursor. Keeps breaking in Chrome and not even working in FF for me with Google Meet. Haven't used Zoom in a while, but prob still broken.

On Gnome Wayland, if you play Sonic Mania, you can feel the latency from when you push a button and Sonic jumps. From what I hear on Linux Unplugged, the latency also exists in other games. KDE Wayland is too broken to try.

Nice definition of won for 1% of desktop market.

Why should I care about its market share? How does that affect me?

Because that is the whole point of the thread being discussed and System76 endeavours that started this whole thread.

In this context Linux has won nothing, nada, niente.

Given all he claimed was (a) "Wayland has won over xorg" (b) "Linux won over Windows in 1996 for me" (note the last two words) your response struck me as something of a non-sequitur.

I mean, sure, Linux hasn't won out in the world, but I don't really see how that makes a difference to a comment about Wayland versus xorg within the population of people who are running Linux.

HiDPI screens are still an issue.

I finally got them to work well in wayland (literally last night with sway) which supports different resolutions/scaling per monitor unlike xorg. Try out wayland on your desktop, that may be the last part you need. wdisplays to size things.

This also seems to be an issue with (albeit likely main use) of running your monitor at double DPI, like you would with a laptop and side monitor. With a 43" 4k monitor and some old 2560x1440 27" monitors the default worked great.

Now I just gotta figure out how to get my 2nd nvidia card working on my desktop to get that 5th monitor turned on.

Yeah this is several hours of fiddling. I had this working years ago but things got broken, they seem to be on the way to getting fixed.

And as other articles have said, I've spent as much or more time unf**ing python on windows, installing WSL2, etc.

Really the only things holding me back from a full time windows box were pubg (not a reason now), fusion 360 (can use a VM), and 5+ monitors. If I get those monitors running it's go time. Luckily I have the same computer config at home and at work so it may happen.

you can use the other 20 displays wiht synergy.

Do you mean I should hook up N other computers and use synergy between them or just have separate X displays and synergize between them?

N others with a mix of different versions of linux, windows and macOS[0]. There are also clients for Kolibri[1] and Android[2]

Can configure some to hibernate until you move the mouse into the display.

[0] - https://symless.com/help-articles/operating-systems-supporte...

[1] - http://board.kolibrios.org/viewtopic.php?t=2544

[2] - https://github.com/symless/synergy-android-7

What's the issue? The only issue I have is not having a good way to get a consistent font/UI sizes across (switching between) different monitors/machines. But I have/had that problem with macOS too.

Not for me on Ubuntu 20.04. I use fractional scaling on my laptop and it works perfectly. Just prefer deb installers instead of flatpak and snap, because flatpak and snap aren’t ready yet. HiDPI works great.

Each user will have their own gripes. Personally, for me, unity 7 was peak desktop. Since both unity and X are abandoned, it is increasingly difficult to get fixes for bugs. So, we need to switch to wayland, which fixes some issues like screen tearing, but things like multi-monitor setup are still quite flaky. And finally, GNOME is just not to my liking. So I would have to wait for KDE or XFCE to sufficiently catch up with wayland. The packaging situation has also become worse. There isn't a single LTS distro doing a good job of packaging chromium.

Perhaps Nixos? It isn't LTS, but extremely reliable. https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=21.05&show=chromiu...

HDR for one thing. It took years before we got proper Optimus support, and it will probably take just as long to get HDR support. Having to use the command line is another problem. And poor support for HiDPI and multi-monitor. And the lack of a standardized stable platform for application development. LSB tried and failed, and now Flatpak and Steam looks like the best hope. Of course, that goes far beyond a DE, but I hope System76 will push for improvement.

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