Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Good Linux Desktop Environment For Hi-Def/Retina Displays?
Volanin writes "I have been using Linux for the last 15 years both at home and at work (mostly GNOME and now Unity). Recently, I gave in to temptation and bought myself a Macbook retina 15". As you can read around, Linux still has no good support for this hardware, so I am running it inside a virtual machine. Running in scaled 1440x900 makes the Linux fonts look absolutely terrible, and running in true 2880x1800 makes them beautiful, but every UI element becomes so tiny, it's unworkable. Is there a desktop environment that handles resolution independence better? Linux has had support for SVG for a long time, but GNOME/Unity seems adamant in defining small icon sizes and UI elements without the possibility to resize them."
Use KDE, and the retina display will look beautiful.
I've never tried it in really high resolutions, but everything I've found online says KDE supports resolution independence.
And it's just so much better and usable in so many ways than those other environments you've been using.
No one cares about Linux and Retina support because Retina is Apple and no one uses Linux that cares about Retina/Apple.
A hypothesis which is proven false by virtue of the question it is a response to.
Jackass.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Use a tiling window manage and just get rid of all those annoying UI elements. Serious suggestion.
I'm currently using xmonad as a desktop environment (almost exclusively), as it plays quite nicely on VHRDs (very high resolution displays). At most, you'll have to tweak the borderWidth elements.
Optionally, if you're looking for a bit more eye candy, try twm and its derivatives. Most the the UI elements scale dynamically. (too flashy for my tastes however)
/* MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
MADMEN ONLY */
Yes, because apple is the only company that does high-dpi displays.
(Actually, that's unfortunately pretty true right now, but I hope to start seeing better displays out of the hardware makers soon.)
.
Use a tiling window manager and do most of your stuff in console. i3 is my current personal favourite.
You can choose the magnification ratio in the initial configuration wizzard. This affects everything, not just the fonts. It's the real deal.
Hey troll, like Apple or not they're addressing a glaring problem by bringing out the retina display. Our screen resolution has stagnated and even regressed due to HDTV and the buzz word compliance of 1080i. I can only hope throwing down the gauntlet as they have will push other hardware makers to bring out their own 4K displays.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
HiDPI on Linux is a work-in-progress .. and even when it *does* work, battery life goes down the crapper. Also, thunderbolt hot-plug hasn't been figured out, but it will work as long as your Ethernet dongle is plugged in ahead of power-on. Wifi requires bw-fwcutter, etc.
.. so the entire thing has to be reverse-engineered from scratch.
.. buy rMBPs for the developers actually working on the drivers.
.. solves all the above issues and really isn't that big of a performance hit. Probably not the "purist" answer you were after but it's the easiest way to get it done in the meantime.
It's the same as Linux on any other bleeding-edge hardware (and from a very Linux-unfriendly company)
Want it done faster?
Like all things Linux, they'll get it figured out eventually. Until then, the best way about it is just run VMware Fusion and run Linux inside of that
KDE got a lot of flak for the early 4.x versions, because they felt terrible. But what they did (replacing many internals, reworking the architecture) did yield us now a very flexible UI. Plasma (KDE's UI) is fully based on SVG and looks good on pretty much any screen, be it a notebook, workstation, or even tablets. And its not such a CPU/memory hog as the people generally claim.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
The DPI setting will scale your fonts and other items to look good on your screen.
Usually, I am reducing the DPI on high-definition screens so I can get smaller fonts and icons, but the opposite should also work.
you mean 1080p. Computers haven't had interlaced displays since forever ago.
Car analogy, huh?
Bentley... Expensive, Heavy, Thirsty, Status symbol.
I think you're entirely correct.
Why do you think everything Linux has to be low-end shit? Some folks want higher res. and OP took one of a couple of routes to it. Sorry his choice of hardware struck such a nerve. At what price point do you say money isn't wasted or do you just not like high end hardware?
What glaring problem? The problem they're addressing is screen DPI, which is basically a non-problem, and not screen size, which is something I'd love to see get larger and is what you really mean when you say "resolution has stagnated."
Right now I'm stuck with a 1920x1200 monitor, and I'm glad to have that because no one makes them any more. If I were to "upgrade," I'd have to replace it with a 1920x1080 monitor. What I'd like to have is an even larger monitor, like the really nice but still way too expensive 2560x1600 monitors. (Still over $1000.)
What Apple did instead was up the pixel density, which is nice, I guess, but not really useful. Those high-DPI displays are great for a cell phone or other devices you hold in your hand, but not really great for a laptop.
Really, I'd rather see a higher push for the larger sized monitors so I get more useable room out of the display rather than see the DPI pushed up. All "retinal" gives you is the same UI, just with four times the pixels. It may look "shiny" but it sure isn't any more useful.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I think a much fairer statement would be "no one who develops Linux software gives a rats ass about Apple proprietary shit."
Fairer still would be to say "Apple Haters would self-mutilate if it put Apple in a bad light".
immediately run out and spend $3000 to validate my $3000 purchase.
You may not be aware, but Slashdot is just chock full of technical users who can use the web.
When they do so they would find the MacBook Pro Retina to be $1699, not your absurdly inflated figure.
They also, being technical users, would be asking themselves "could not a developer wanting to test resolution independence simply buy a high DPI desktop monitor and test that way also?"
Why yes. Yes they could. Too bad that you, a non-technical Apple Hater Troll, will be unable to even comprehend that question or think of similar cases before you post in the future and beclown yourself yet again.
You are kind of like the court jester who comes in and spills grape juice on your shirt on purpose. Every. Single. Day. Did you not notice the people stopped laughing long ago? And that the looks you get know are all ones of pity and horror?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, Linus Torvalds uses a Macbook Air...
--dpi dpi
This also sets the reported physical size values of the screen,
it uses the specified DPI value to compute an appropriate physi
cal size using whatever pixel size will be set.
Or maybe :
--scale xxy
Changes the dimensions of the output picture. Values superior to
1 will lead to a compressed screen (screen dimension bigger than
the dimension of the output mode), and values below 1 leads to a
zoom in on the output. This option is actually a shortcut ver
sion of the --transform option.
On consumer, desktop equipment, yes. Consumer mobile equipment is starting to see ludicrous DPI even in middle of the road devices, and commercial medical displays have offered very high DPI for some time.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
It's simply not true that 'no one makes them any more'.
Dell makes a few very nice 1920 x 1200 monitors. NewEgg lists more than 20 models.
They're not as common as 1080p screens, and they're not as cheap, but 'they still make them'.
And while 2560 x 1600 screens are still over a grand, you can get a 2560 x 1440 pretty cheap. $399 at Microcenter.
Didn't the GNOME desktop switch to scalable SVG rendering way back in 2004 or so (starting from Raph Levien's work on Gill back in 1999)? There were all kinds of articles back then about how awesome SVG was and how all GNU/Linux desktops would be using it soon. I thought Nautilus was designed with SVG support in mind? What happened to all that work and when did GNOME switch back to pre-historic bitmapped stuff? That's kind of sad.
"The ASUS Zenbook Prime is 1920 x 1080 with a 13.3" screen, which is close, if not better, than the Mac books."
It's really not. The 13" MBP display is 2560x1600 pixels.
Stop being an idiot, you're making yourself look bad here, not Apple.
0 1 - just my two bits
I just picked up a "WQHD" (Widescreen Quad-"HD" for values of HD meaning 1280x720, so a total of 2560x1440) 27" IPS LCD monitor online for $300 US. It's very bare-bones (DVI input only, no webcam or USB hub or anything, etc.) but considering a 1920x1080 monitor at 27" is hard to come by for $200, it's an excellent price for the much less common resolution.
They make them in Korea and ship them out under a handful of brand names. A search on "wqhd monitor" will find you several places you can buy them from. Make sure your video card has the correct output.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Lulz. "If your head gasket is warped, instead of whining to a mechanic, why don't you forge yourself a new engine block?" Yeah, you can, and I'm glad the option is there, but coding your own drivers is absurdly impractical for the great majority of users.
There were several major projects started about a month after Retina laptops came out. Retina for Firefox. Retina for OpenOffice (Libre Office had support day 1). Retina Ubuntu... So now you are just dead wrong. Everyone in the Linux community knows that Apple hardware is a pretty good guide to features they are going to need to support down the road for Linux. Moreover a huge percentage of Linux developers use Apple hardware.
As for the rest about "wasted money" and "shiny" I'll leave that to whomever wants to point out that the 15" retina was and still is a rather good deal compared to x86 laptops with similar features.
Consumer mobile equipment is starting to see ludicrous DPI even in middle of the road devices
Doesn't do anyone any good when you can't do real work on a phone. I'm still running a 2048x1536 CRT at home, and will be for the forseeable future.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
A high def screen with 12 instances of xterm, all visible at once without having to switch context is the pinnacle of the Linux graphical user experience.
SUSE and openSUSE went with KDE 3.x as the default until 4.x was well baked. The fact that many users and distros (and even SUSE users) failed to heed the warnings does not mean the KDE group failed.
It's not just about high dpi displays either. You can have a high resolution on a large screen while still wanting very large fonts and UI elements. It helps you see it better when your eyesight is not very good, if you have partial blindness, etc. So you can help both those with degenerative vision and those with amazing mutant vision at the same time.
Check that X11 has worked out the correct DPI of the display, not all displays pass this information through correctly and i'm not sure if virtual machines do...
You can see the current dpi by using xdpyinfo.
X11 itself is pretty good at resolution independence, but individual apps using bitmapped graphics all over the place are not.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Actually, the OS-X kernel - XNU is successor to NEXTSTEP's kernel. Mach 2.5 got replaced by Mach 3.0, the BSD parts of it were replaced by FreeBSD userland, and the driver kit by a C++ API called I/O kit (Wonder why they didn't use Objective C here too?)
But I agree w/ the GP, though not for the reasons he states. OS-X is a far better system and has nothing that Linux doesn't, unless one considers Quartz to be a disadvantage compared to running X11. So what the OP is doing - running Linux in a VM - is the right way to do it, if that's such an issue.