And so I discovered that Cinnamon is also a very good option when it comes to « a better Windows 2000 ui ».
It’s also not incredible on HiDPI but at least Cinnamon is pretty good at not breaking everything when you increase font size by 150 or 200%. On XFCE if you do this everything becomes ugly.
Go to Settings, Appearance, Advanced, set the font DPI to something like 144 or what works for your screen.
The only thing that does not obey this is Firefox; the way to adjust it is to set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to something like 1.5 in about:config.
First because usually it is only text that I want to be larger so I can read it. Increases the size of "everything" just decreases UI density with no benefit (while things that conform to the text like button still increase in size to contain the text).
Second because scaling "everything" often leads to ugly results. E.g. I use a program to browse local media files that generates thumbnails for those files. The size of the thumbnail generated matches the size of the widget it displays for that file. If the widget is scaled 1.5x due to UI scaling, it will show a blurry upscaled thumbnail.
Been using WSL full time for over a year and have no plans to go back..
How so? We support setting GTK's UI scaling to 2x, and (as of 4.18) I believe all the bugs around blurry icon rendering have been fixed.
What exactly becomes ugly for you?
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
LXQt if you want something with less features, Plasma if you want more features. They're both performant.
As for Wayland, I use it on a Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspbian xwayland). It works well enough, but there is some kind of bug that causes xwayland to fill the swap space at almost 100%. When this happens, I find it necessary to close applications to reduce the swap usage.
Not sure what you mean. We have CSDs available for people who like it, but they can be turned on and off.
If you're talking about random GTK apps that run on Xfce, there's not much we can do about that; we don't set app policy.
That's one of the nicer things about Wayland, though: there's a way for the compositor to tell applications "I'll draw the decorations". On X11 there's no protocol for that, only a way for an app to tell the window manager it wants to draw its own, without a way for the WM to say "no, don't do it".
Yes, guess you're correct. Qt apps in Plasma was a better mix for me. I have consistency and no funky titlebars.
But I don't get the HiDPI point? Certainly 4.16 had issues with HiDPI, but in 4.18 you can set the UI scaling factor, and I believe shortly before and/or after initial release, we fixed up all the issues of blurry image rendering. I have a HiDPI screen and it's worked very well for me, and looks nice.