After more than an year trying to get my laptop (very high dpi) and my monitor (high dpi) to have decent fractional scaling on Linux so that I could use both screens while working comfortably.
I decided to try wsl and it is pretty much as fast (with my computer/use case), OS just delivers the problem above, so I am sticking with it...
I really have to agree on the scaling issue. I spent an entire afternoon getting my two displays - one 4k, one 1080p - to scale at different values without having stupid issues, but I just couldn't get them to work. This is on X because I had issues getting Wayland to work (might have been my laptop nVidia 1060's fault, tbh). I can't wait for my issues with Wayland to get fixed, because I've heard the fractional scaling support is much, much better.
I've been debating Linux vs WSL2 recently and this is exactly the type of issue that has me pausing on embracing Linux Desktop.
I've paid thousands to the Mac ecosystem over the years purely to avoid these problems. I just want the OS to work, and i've literally never had that experience on Linux. I'm sure it's much much better these days than it was the last time i tried, but - everything i hear tells me they still exist to some degree.
4k and 1080p is my exact setup btw haha. I was debating installing PopOS this weekend.
If this is an issue, try using Wayland instead of X11. I run PopOS on a similar setup and it works flawlessly under Wayland. Give PopOS a try, you won't be disappointed!
Edit: there was no configuration needed. I selected Wayland from the menu and it just worked right out of the box. No bells and whistles, just a great desktop experience.
What's the material advantage of Wayland? I've done a tiny bit of research on what it is, but not how it materially provides a better UX to the end users. Thoughts?
I'll give it a look. Admittedly it doesn't sound attractive, because it sounds like the exact bells and whistles of configuration that i _don't_ want haha.
The longer i'm a software engineer the less energy i have for dealing with my OS, i guess.
I never tried Pop OS, I might look into it as well since it's based off Ubuntu LTS, which I quite like. I'm too old for the rolling releases that change constantly. I've been using Ubuntu and Redhat for a long time now.
It is much better. Run it in a VM for a while and get a feel for it. Pick one of the stable versions like Redhat (Centos) or Ubuntu LTS so that you don't have to worry about constant updates as you would in Manjaro/Arch. And buy linux compatible hardware or system if you plan on using it professionally. A preinstalled machine/laptop is great for that. Dell and Lenovo have several.
Any recommendation for linux compatible hardware? I'll be building a new machine next year and i'd like to make it work with Linux, so a buying list would be nice.
I know the CPU/Ram/GPU i want, but i imagine most of the trouble is motherboard, since so many features are there.
I'm also curious how my current hardware rates on compatibility.
I've been building my own systems for a while. As long as you don't get the absolute newest motherboards you'll probably be okay. I have never had an issue with Linux and the Asus/MSI boards I've bought. Also like someone else said go with an AMD GPU. On a self build you can always send parts back. But if you get a laptop and it doesn't work with Linux make sure they have a return policy :) . They're much more cantankerous in my experience. That said if you stick with a mainstream Linux like Ubuntu you'll probably be fine with nvidia. I just prefer AMD gpu policies because they open source the driver code. I think both have had issues with Linux in the past, so sometimes you have to try a couple of different versions of the drivers. I tend to be conservative and not always go with bleeding edge. However sometimes that's what works.
Interesting, i've heard Nvidia is the way to go. Closed source, yes, but still great drivers. I saw some very concerning behavior from AMD GPUs, like not releasing decent drivers for ages after new cards were released, etc.
I also have an Nvidia right now, so.. hopefully it works great hah. Otherwise i'll be on Windows.
tl;dr: AMD - if a particular GPU is supported by your kernel and Mesa versions, it works flawlessly, NVIDIA - way more ifs and randomness.
AMD: check in which kernel version AMD added the support for your GPU, and which Mesa version has feature parity (most of the time it's already there because there weren't any big shifts since Vega, RDNA2 might be that one) and you're good to go on any distro.
NVIDIA: Wayland support isn't there for years and foreseeable future, random issues with driver updates. Supports only 3 distros (Red Hat family, SUSE and Ubuntu without derivatives, I even made a page for devs how to add Debian flavour of it on any deb distro since Mint users were constantly struggling), Debian makes it's own decoupling of blob which works flawlessly but new version might not be there for a month because maintainers aren't there. I still remember that full support for Pascal has landed 6 months after the release.
Not sure if you've already seen this, but I highly recommend AutoHotkey [1] for setting up hotkeys and hotstrings in Windows. It's powerful and flexible, though the language can be a little odd at times. You can even script mouse movements, or create application-specific hotkeys.
After more than an year trying to get my laptop (very high dpi) and my monitor (high dpi) to have decent fractional scaling on Linux so that I could use both screens while working comfortably. I decided to try wsl and it is pretty much as fast (with my computer/use case), OS just delivers the problem above, so I am sticking with it...
Main cons for me right now are:
* windows updates been too aggressively
* not able to easily create/edit hot keys