Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

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Which distribution can you suggest?

I used KDE (24.04) for a while now. Also used Linux 2000-2008-ish. Have read APUE.

When I win-left/right a window and then resize it, then close it, now win-left/right always resizes it as previous one. There’s no way to reset it to 50:50 (unless logout).

Notification center is obnoxious. Regular “Program stopped working” with zero details. Why do I need this information. Copying a folder in dolphin pops up a progress notification that doesn’t go away when finished. You did something, expect a notification to pop up. You did nothing, still expect it.

Windows either steal focus or fail to steal it when needed, depending on your settings and astrology. Software update nags you to click update, then you click it, then it downloads something for a few minutes (you go doing your things), then a sudo password popup fails to get focus, and it all crashes after a timeout. Or things will pop up right in your face. VNC connection closed? Yes, bring that white empty window to front asap and tell “Connection closed” with an OK button.

Start menu was designed by an idiot, a wrong mousemove and you are in a wrong section. Sections reside exactly on the 80% of bezier paths from start menu to the section content and have zero activation timeout. So you have to maze your mouse around to avoid surprises. Logout, restart, shutdown, sleep buttons in the start menu all show the same fullscreen “dialog” that requires you to choose an action again. What’s the point of separate buttons even.

I could go on about non-working automatic vpn connections, mangled fonts/dpi/geometry if you vnc into a turned off physical display, console that loves printing ~[[A half of the times when you press an arrow. And so on and so forth, the list is so big I just can’t remember it.

Idk how Linux users are using Linux so that they do not meet any issues.

> When I win-left/right a window and then resize it, then close it, now win-left/right always resizes it as previous one. There’s no way to reset it to 50:50 (unless logout).

When you've win-left-ed a window, you've put it into a "zone", so what you're resizing is that zone not just the window. This is helpful when you've both win-left-ed and win-right-ed something so resizing via the split between them resizes both windows. (There's actually four of these zones with an up/down split too). You can reset it to 50:50 by resizing a zone-ed window again and your ratio with stay that way.

This is right, the “zone” is helpful for asymmetric side-by-sides. Windows does a similar thing.

The problem is that KDE “zone” doesn’t reset even when you close all windows associated with it, which should remove all traces of zoning cause there’s no window class/name affinity anymore. But when you win-left a new unrelated window, it becomes that-sized again. There’s no “reset” except for trying to manually 50%-width it back. My workflow includes taking screenshots (automation) so this is not an option, not to mention triggering perfectionism on “is this 50 or 49.7?”. I can re-size it to be around 50, but not reset (logout helps). I’d just bind a key “like everyone else does” ©, but there’s no way to control it programmatically.

I think I’ve seen a different thread last time, but here’s a similar one: https://discuss.kde.org/t/kwin-the-state-of-tiles/18316/3

Notably, it’s not how it always worked, it just broke with an update last summer (also affecting virtual screens etc) and no one seems to bother that much, as if it was some fringe “feature”.

gnome fedora has been revelation, I love how the task switcher is a combination of Spotlight and Mission Control (to put it in macOS terms) and dragging windows to the edge works well out of the box. When I mouse over the volume slide and scroll, it works. I have it installed on an Intel Mac mini and an m1 MacBook Pro, suspend works.

I’ve given up on Debian a dozen times but feel I might actually have a future with Fedora.

> Idk how Linux users are using Linux so that they do not meet any issues.

We open systemsettings and change things. We also use a launcher, not the start menu.

Since I have to deal with it (work related activity), I'd like to know how much of the above "things" I can change in the system settings. My experience is this:

win-left/right: an unresolved issue in KDE tracker that seems to remain so.

notifications: enter every program in a long list and change settings (most realistic to change).

focus issues: tried all levels (named "low" to "extreme" without any explanation, none work as intended.

start menu vs launchers: I don't find creating a launcher for every app I have reasonable. Fix the menu then call it "a daily driver".

vpn autoconnect: is on, doesn't work.

mangled fonts/dpi/geometry: I'm all ears how to fix that.

~[[A: would love to know.

You can just globally disable notifications.

You can use xmodmap to remap any key to anything you want.

> I don't find creating a launcher for every app I have reasonable

?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Just press alt+space and type like everyone else.

> mangled fonts/dpi/geometry: I'm all ears how to fix that.

Use a better font. For some reason they all use the android noto crap by default, so that must be changed if you want to see letters.

I want to click an icon, not type "like everyone else". All this customizability goes out of the window when it becomes emotionally inconvenient, eh? I also don't want to remap win-left to:

  #!/bin/bash
  taskbar_h=40
  w=$(xdisplay_info | awk '/width/ {print $2}')
  h=$(xdisplay_info | awk '/height/ {print $2}')
  xdotool getactivewindow windowmove 0 0 windowsize $((w / 2)) $((h - taskbar_h))

And a similar abomination for win-right, which I would have to maintain somewhere. And in wayland, what are even the options?

Use a better font

I think you misunderstood this. While the physical display is "on", it all looks correct. When you turn it off and vnc into the main X display, it's all mangled, regardless of the font. The order of turn off / vnc into doesn't matter either.

Also, I don't want to globally disable notifications. Maybe I just have to globally disable graphics? That would indeed solve many issues with linux desktops.

I don't think you want to click an icon, your main goal here is to reject any solution and keep complaining :)

Feel free :)

Yeah I surely will.

Cause Linux Desktop is very far from being ready to use, complete or bug/stupidity-free. Cause you didn’t address even a half of the issues here and was only picking on trivial functions that you understand and found coping workarounds for. “Reject any solution”, lol, I have yet to see any solution apart from “turn it off completely” or “don’t use”. I did all my due diligence, my complaints are not even remotely lazy.

And I want other people to know that, before they buy into fanboy advices from people who seem to either barely use anything in the OS beyond a browser, or are just lying to themselves. Answers like these speak even better than any of my complaints here could. Feel free to advise next time, I’ll be there as well.

Every discussion like this works the same. You mention a set of real use case issues and ask what to do, and all the advisors suddenly appear too busy to answer, with a rare exception of the most defensive deniers.

1 tiny minor thing doesn't work as I like = OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG!!1!!!!!1!!! HOW TERRIBLE1!!!1!!!!!1!!!!

As if there is any bug free platform :) But as we've established, you're not interested in rationality or solutions :D

> Cause Linux Desktop is very far from being ready to use

According to your criteria NO desktop is ready to use.

mx linux i like

Xfce (gtk really) has issues with fractional scaling, afaik. I can’t use neither 1x nor 2x on my 27”/1440p display.

Solution I use (works with _most_ apps -- GTK/Qt/WxWidgets/Electron, custom opengl/sdl apps are the main problem)

Go to window scaling and set it to 2x, this will cause the compositor to zoom in to each window 2x. Now everything will look obnoxiously big.

Then, go to the display settings, and set the display scaling to 1.5x or 1.7 or whatever it is that works for your DPI. (confusingly, this means zoom out)

So the zoom in/zoom out "cancel out" and you get a good balance.

Of course, it is rendering to a larger zoomed out canvas uselessly, but in modern CPU/GPU this doesn't cause too much of an extra hit on battery life.

This solution also has the benefit that if you use multiple different displays, you can as needed set different display "zoom out" levels for each one, and have it look good on both.

Where this falls over: - OpenGL/custom SDL apps like I said before that don't respect your scale factor. - Non Hi-DPI GTK themes (there are many hidpi ones available though)

You set the QT_SCALE_FACTOR env var for QT apps to also follow this, btw.

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