This article has a laundry list of things that annoyed the heck out of me. So I decided to try and dual boot to Ubuntu on my Surface Pro 7.
This may come across as a rant, but I do not mean it that way. I know the tears and sweat people have pored it into this. Anyway, here is the list of things that I found are broken:
- HDPI monitor support is BAD. Unity cannot do fractional scaling, resulting in perfect fonts on the menu, but such poor fonts in firefox that my eyes started to hurt.
- The SurfaceLinux sub-reddit seemed to suggest KDE/Plasma is better at this, which it is. I am trying this as my daily driver. The LTS version is still on X11, which means a common app like Obisdian.md actually caused the system to go to swap; I am still trying to figure out if this is the culprit.
- Trying Plasma on Wayland caused the system to hang. Fair enough, this is still under development.
- KDE minimal install, in its infinite wisdom, does not include the network manager applet. It is 2022, do you think users will not want to connect to wifi?
- Each time I switch from clamshell mode to multi-monitor, I need to reset the layout of the widgets on my desktop.
- Another easter egg in fractional scaling; the size of the cursor changes when you hover over certain windows or the task manager panel. I am not as familiar with the Linux ecosystem as I used to be, so I am not sure why this happens.
- Abandoning all hope of legible, anti-aliased fonts, I have tried to increase the font size across the system and in certain apps like Firefox and VS Code. You should see some of the hilariously bad KDE setting screens that cannot work with a font size of 16px (the default is 12px).
- SDDM seems to think I want an onscreen virtual keyboard even though I have a keyboard attached. It literally does not show me the login screen. I have to blindly tap in my password making sure focus is not lost on that box lest I never be able to login.
- Every time firefox starts the application renders like there is a rift in reality in the left bottom corner of screen. A forced maximize fixes this, but still.
I love my Wobbly Windows. I so want it to succeed. But architecturally, something just feels broken. The split between a display manager, a window manager and a compositor just means that instead of having to worry about one thing to make sure I have a working display, I need to worry about three things.
I still run Unity on a bunch of machines here, but it's old now and starting to bitrot. I haven't even tried on the 1 or 2 boxes that have hi-DPI displays: it's not worth it.
On non-*buntu distros, I use Xfce. It can't do fractional scaling.
Only a handful of desktops support it. From my research, I found 3:
• GNOME Shell. No thank you.
• KDE 5. Better, but still a no thank you from me.
• Cinnamon.
I looked at Cinnamon on Ubuntu and Debian, but the versions are quite out of date (Cinnamon 4.8.x). I wanted the latest 5.x series, and that means Linux Mint, the parent distro of Cinnamon.
So I now have a box with Mint 20.3 and a Liquorix kernel. It works well, it natively can mount my NTFS partition with the in-kernel driver and understand a Core i5 11th-gen GPU.
Cinnamon is a little clunky and a little hard to customise, but it does actually work in the way I broadly expect and can put up with, unlike either GNOME 3 or KDE 5.
Ubuntu Unity the desktop environment Ubuntu abandoned back in 18.04? On X11 with Gnome 3 with Ubuntu 20.04 it does actually support fractional scaling and if IIRC does it in a somewhat similar way to MacOS where it scales up the res*2 then downscales it. For whatever reason either GNOME didn't accept Ubuntu's changes or they didn't submit them upstream so it doesn't work in any other distro for GNOME 3. It actually works pretty well IME. It possible to mimic it with the right call to xrandr in other DEs.
This may come across as a rant, but I do not mean it that way. I know the tears and sweat people have pored it into this. Anyway, here is the list of things that I found are broken:
- HDPI monitor support is BAD. Unity cannot do fractional scaling, resulting in perfect fonts on the menu, but such poor fonts in firefox that my eyes started to hurt.
- The SurfaceLinux sub-reddit seemed to suggest KDE/Plasma is better at this, which it is. I am trying this as my daily driver. The LTS version is still on X11, which means a common app like Obisdian.md actually caused the system to go to swap; I am still trying to figure out if this is the culprit.
- Trying Plasma on Wayland caused the system to hang. Fair enough, this is still under development.
- KDE minimal install, in its infinite wisdom, does not include the network manager applet. It is 2022, do you think users will not want to connect to wifi?
- Each time I switch from clamshell mode to multi-monitor, I need to reset the layout of the widgets on my desktop.
- Another easter egg in fractional scaling; the size of the cursor changes when you hover over certain windows or the task manager panel. I am not as familiar with the Linux ecosystem as I used to be, so I am not sure why this happens.
- Abandoning all hope of legible, anti-aliased fonts, I have tried to increase the font size across the system and in certain apps like Firefox and VS Code. You should see some of the hilariously bad KDE setting screens that cannot work with a font size of 16px (the default is 12px).
- SDDM seems to think I want an onscreen virtual keyboard even though I have a keyboard attached. It literally does not show me the login screen. I have to blindly tap in my password making sure focus is not lost on that box lest I never be able to login.
- Every time firefox starts the application renders like there is a rift in reality in the left bottom corner of screen. A forced maximize fixes this, but still.
I love my Wobbly Windows. I so want it to succeed. But architecturally, something just feels broken. The split between a display manager, a window manager and a compositor just means that instead of having to worry about one thing to make sure I have a working display, I need to worry about three things.