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Ask Slashdot: Good Linux Desktop Environment For Hi-Def/Retina Displays?

Posted by Soulskill on from the time-to-start-thinking-about-this-again dept.

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."

10 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. KDE by Lobachevsky · · Score: 5, Informative

    Use KDE, and the retina display will look beautiful.

    1. Re:KDE by pecosdave · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Have to throw in my support here. Been using KDE since 1.x, I've tried other desktops but can't seem to use one of those without missing my KDE, and so much so that programs compiled to bring up GTK widgets (browsers) actively piss me off. The QT version of the file browser and so many other things are just more versatile and elegant.

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  2. Tiling WM by elusive_one · · Score: 5, Funny

    Use a tiling window manage and just get rid of all those annoying UI elements. Serious suggestion.

  3. Re:No one cares by pecosdave · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  4. Vmware Fusion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
     
    It's the same as Linux on any other bleeding-edge hardware (and from a very Linux-unfriendly company) .. so the entire thing has to be reverse-engineered from scratch.
     
    Want it done faster? .. buy rMBPs for the developers actually working on the drivers.
     
    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 .. 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.

  5. ...because of SVG. by gentryx · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  6. Change the DPI setting by erroneus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:No one cares by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, Linus Torvalds uses a Macbook Air...

  8. Re:Doesn't GNOME already support SVG? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. fluxbox with a dozen terminals by scourfish · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.