zlacker

>>tonyst+(OP)
Yeah, no. Maybe with old laptops, but newer laptops still have their fair share of issues. When I bought my thinkpad A485 kernels wouldn't boot without additional parameters, the graphics would freeze at times and cause a hardlock, sleep and hibernation have been fixed and broken again intermittently over several kernel versions, the wifi card's AP mode started causing segfaults in kernel 5.2 due to the driver's rewrite but has since been fixed, the fnlock key LED didn't update properly, which I spent a while debugging and submitted a kernel patch for, and while over the years the fingerprint scanner has been implemented, it's a pain to install and support for fingerprint scanning in linux is still in a very sorry state. Oh and bluetooth still can't connect more than one device at a time, so I had to buy a dongle to connect two joycon controllers.

Granted, I've always had these kinds of issues with new laptops, especially when it came to proprietary nvidia or AMD graphics (before AMDGPU) and I agree it's improved a lot, but I still need to tell people that there's caveats with some (especially newer) laptops.

>>mid-ki+H5
With Wayland, Gnome and KDE have no way to adjust the scroll speed on a laptop trackpad. Not the pointer speed, the scroll speed.

In 2022.

That is the kind of basic thing that does not work.

In addition to that, if you have a high-DPI laptop display and you want to plug it into a low-DPI desktop monitor (or vice-versa), good luck getting the scaling to work in a usable way.

>>_skel+Eu
Wayland just generally is missing config files...

Like just give me a big text file with hundreds of tweakables and tunables like X had...

They hide behind 'you just need to get your client to make the right API calls'... but that just means most wayland compositors don't support most of the available options...

>>london+wv
If we are talking about desktop Linux, a lack of config files is not a problem. If you expect people to edit files to get their desktops to work properly, you have already lost.

The same config pane where I adjust my pointer speed should let me adjust my scroll speed.

>>twblal+Tv
Generally those config panels write to files for you (how else would their changes be persisted?)

>>bee_ri+nz
The storage mechanism is not the interaction mechanism, and Linux config files are not user friendly. All other desktop operating systems have a control pane for this stuff.

>>twblal+0C
Configuration files are a developer-friendly and user-friendly way of supporting customization. It allows more conventional Linux users to do their customization using their favorite text editor, in the familiar interface that they already like. And, if somebody decides they want to write a GUI for configuration (maybe to chase users who are more familiar with consumer OSes), all the GUI has to do is write to a file (an easy task in most languages).

>>bee_ri+JM
I'm a user and I don't find being made to directly edit config files user-friendly at all. Why on earth would I want to use a text editor to configure my printer? I don't use Powerpoint to edit photos either, even though in theory I probably could, but what a hassle. That sort of paradigm is fine for applications intended for professional use to be deployed to servers etc., but config management systems exist for those uses and the people managing these applications tend to be paid quite well, which is no coincidence. Targeting ordinary users? If there is no (decent) config UI, then it may be developer-friendly, but it's definitely not user-friendly. Yes, that can be a valid trade-off for resource-strapped hobby projects, and yes, it's fine if there is a config file in the back, but that shouldn't be the only way to configure an application. No other platform tolerates this sort of thing, and with good reason, given that most people find configuring software to be both intimidating and annoying even under the best of circumstances. I think devs actually believing that all users are just like themselves for decidedly non-dev applications plays a sizable part in why desktop Linux fails to break out of its tiny hardcore technical people and sometimes their parents niche year after year. Most people's favorite (i.e. only) text editor likely will be Microsoft Word, and I'm not sure how many of those people would say they like it.

>>divide+OR
It is user-friendly to typical Linux users.

It is a community-developed project, so it only really needs to appeal to developers. What motivation is there to attract non-technical users? Particularly ones who require lots of effort doing uninteresting polishing related tasks to keep them happy. Other platforms do this sort of thing because their entire reason for existing is to satisfy customers.

>>bee_ri+yZ
> What motivation is there to attract non-technical users? Particularly ones who require lots of effort doing uninteresting polishing related tasks to keep them happy.

First of all, adjusting scrolling speed is not an "uninteresting polishing related task," it is a basic standard of usability.

Secondly, if you don't think Linux on laptops should be broadly usable by the general population, you are in the wrong thread. The central point of the HN post we are all commenting on is the usability of the Linux desktop ecosystem on commodity laptops.

>>twblal+da1
Adjustable scrolling speed is useful (I mean, I haven't used it, but I can see why one might want it). Creating a GUI to adjust it is an uninteresting polishing task.

Swaywm has the ability to set this (you have to edit the config file). It seems weird that gnome or whatever you use lacks this option. Although, gnome has a lot of t's to cross and i's to dot, maybe they just haven't gotten around to it.