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.)
.
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.
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.
It's actually working. The situation is messy, but workable. (As usal for Linux)
-- X.org people found out that automatic DPI detection is mostly useless because there too many monitors out there who report incorrect information. X supports a DPI override switch which would be a nice place to manually adjust this but...
-- The GNOME people decided to ignore what X reports and hard coded a 96 DPI definition.
-- On top of their hard coded DPI, GNOME has a "text scaling factor" property (default 1.0). Increasing it causes compliant applications to render fonts and other UI elements in larger formats. The main motivation for this was to improve accessibility for visually impaired people, but it also serves for people with high DPI screens. This value can be changed via the accessibility options or by installing the gnome-tweak-tool (or editing gconf).
Only GTK/Gnome applications will honor this and even then, compliance isn't perfect as some still use bitmaps for icons. But it's good.
So, for people with high DPI screens:
- Force the X DPI setting to a proper value. This will help with some applications (including most Qt/KDE ones, I think).
- Change the GNOME text-scaling-factor to something that matches the value above. Ie, if you set your X DPI to 200, then set your text-scaling-factor to 2.08 (200/96).
- For Firefox or Chromium, you'll need to manually adjust the zoom level.
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.