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
> 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.

Sure? This is exactly the thing that Wayland was supposed to solve. Only X has one DPI for all screens.

I still use X because I'm on FreeBSD and I even got multi-screen multi-dpi scaling to work there, with xrandr settings but indeed it was not fun. In Wayland it should be click & play though.

>>_abox+tK
Wayland supports it quite well but any app that uses the legacy XWayland compatibility layer does not work. Which is basically everything using Electron.

It's not a fault of Wayland but it is reflective of the whole Linux laptop experience.

>>Gigach+fN
Well, it took a long time for all Windows programs to work somewhat decently, and even now the OS still does not have great multi-DPI support.

For example when I move my mouse from my 192 DPI screen to my 96 DPI screen, the mouse position translates in physical pixel, not in physical location. So at the bottom it matches but near the middle of the 192 DPI screen it stops going to the left (it already ends up on the top of the 96 DPI screen going from the middle of the 192 DPI screen) and becomes an 'invisible wall'. Even in Windows 11 they didn't bother to fix this :(

The only OS that had a good transition to multi-DPI capabilities was macOS and that's really because Apple doesn't care about legacy and forces app devs to update their stuff. But it's not just Linux that's having a hard time with this.

But I didn't know this was a specific problem. I'm not using Wayland yet and won't for the foreseeable future. I'm on FreeBSD and KDE on Wayland has been broken a long time. When I hear this it sounds like a good decision anyway :)

>>GekkeP+3O
Windows' HiDPI does have some glitches (like the mouse positioning thing), but most apps work seamlessly (including browsers, Electron, and IDEs) or reasonably well (Microsoft Office). Also, Windows supports any scaling level, whereas macOS only supports 100% and 200%, which makes it easier to mask any sort of issues or bugs (pixel-doubling looks less blurry than scaling things up by 125%). Many (most?) 13-15 inch Windows laptops ship with a 1080p screen, which works best with a 150%-125% scale.

>>Kwpols+im1
MacOS supports intermediary DPIs, it has multiple "looks like resolutions". You may have to press ALT while clicking "scaled". But you can't (easily?) set any arbitrary scaling, like 123%. You can on Windows, but it recommends against it. And I've noticed that most apps work fine at 150%, but many feel weird at 125% (which is also "standard").

The Windows mouse thing has been somewhat fixed in Win11 22H2, where you can now even move your mouse to the side "above" the other screen and it will still move there.

As for apps working seamlessly, I'm really not convinced. Not even the taskbar works well. If you change the DPI while it's running, the taskbar icons become blurry. The initial start menu (on first click) adapts fine, but then if you start typing to search something, the results are a blurry mess. Edge has weird artefacts in the tab animation after a DPI change, where half of the icon moves at a different speed. IntelliJ has funny fonts, with some of them huge, others tiny.

To me, the killer feature of MacOS when it comes to multi-DPI setups is that it remembers the per-screen-per-setup DPI. In my case, my PC has a 14" 1920x1080 screen. When I use it alone, it's much closer than with an external screen. I like it in 100% mode. When I plug in the screen, a 32" 4k, they're both much further away. They have roughly the same DPI (by design - I mostly use Linux) so there's no "matching" to do, but I'd like both of them to be at say 125%. Tough luck. If I change the laptop's screen to 125% while the external screen is plugged in, it will stay at 125% when on its own, too. MacOS would remember that with this screen it's 125%, alone it's 100.