At least everyone can stop hating on Gnome now. Secondly, Fedora 31 has had Gnome 3.34 for more than a month now. This article does seem like a disservice.
Performance isn't only reason for that. Mainly bizarre GNOME3 design decisions: lack of taskbar, tablet-like interface, atrocious file picker dialog, etc. Also maintainer attitude to themes and extensions, here's one rant from 2012: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...
My assumption is that they went out of their way to remove the menu option for creating text files, because apparently that's not something normal people want to do.
Running Linux on it had been a nightmare, I tried surface-linux and that just broke sleep.
To this day I cannot reliably get Wi-Fi to work out of sleep despite trying every fix in the book.
Sound breaks out of sleep.
Hi-DPI support is still a joke, which is a problem when most (all?) high end x86 tablets have hi resolution screens since they're meant to be used up close.
At one point I started to get logged out every 60 seconds if I tried to put the cover on it. Turns out hibernation was improperly configured, so instead of warning me, it'd log me out, try to hibernate, then try again 60 seconds later.
But also handling a mix of low and high DPI displays... and any solution that includes the command `xrandr` is wrong, either because of clarity issues, or tearing/performance issues, or graphical bugs in the DE, or a mix of all of the above
I don't get it, why can't we all just copy what OSX did. They got HiDPI so right with such a flexible solution, that I literally forgot that was still a thing until my latest endeavor with Linux
I feel like I'm going crazy because every time I mention the words Linux and HiDPI I have this same conversation, and it's been happening for years.
The my takeaway is always, Linux users have ridiculously low standards for what works when it comes to UI.
The conversation usually goes something like:
"I don't know Wayland works for me with X setup"
"What about the blurriness with fractional scaling"
"Oh I'm used to it/It only happens with some programs <usually all programs using some incredibly ubiquitous UI toolkit>"
Or:
"What about when you move a window from one screen to another"
"Oh I don't do that/Oh it gets a little blurry/Oh just use X11 and <insert Xrandr hack to mess with the frame buffer>"
Or:
"What about the tearing"
"I got used to it/What tearing, I'm not gaming?"
Or:
"What resolution are your screens"
"2k small screen and 4k big screen , I can just run the same scaling on both"
I remember one time I had this conversation in person, and we failed at the, "move that window to the other monitor" step when it blew up the window to 200% size on the smaller screen.
"Why do you expect the window to automatically resize itself and change the font"
"Because the application is unusable when every UI element is twice as big as it should be?"
"But I want my application to be unusable [paraphrase], you just think it should resize because that's what OSX does, stop bringing your OSX mentality to it and it's fine"
I think that's when I should have stopped ever hoping for anything better and stop saying Linux and HiDPI in one sentence... but here we are...
I haven't used fractional scaling, but it's supposed to be behind a flag. But I suppose it could be blurry.
I'm not experienced in this, but isn't fractional scaling inherently blurry?
OSX just has a set of "zoom" levels that let me make everything smaller or bigger in a very "fractional scaling-like" way (intermediate levels are between 100% and 200%) , and it works perfectly.
And it's not like just the font changes, it scales every type of UI element perfectly implemented with every type of UI toolkit
I know part of it is rendering to a frame buffer that's larger than the physical screen's resolution and scaling that, it might just be oversampling enough to not lose visual information when scaled back down.
But that's the beauty of HiDPI in OSX, I have literally never spent a single brain cycle trying to learn how it works, because for me as a user it's easy (just hit the size looks right), and for me as a developer it's seamless (just add 2x assets).
Sure, you can now fat-finger a launcher icon and the comically oversized hide/close buttons, but basically all graphical applications (even the tiny handful of redesigned Gnome apps) are still primarily designed to be used with a keyboard and mouse.
You need to throw that model out the window if you want a program to really work well on a touch screen. But if you do that, running the program on a desktop will be infuriating.
I'm not sure that you do. The main issue really is having big-enough controls, and supporting things like scrolling via touch. The nice thing about Gtk3 is that it heavily nudges designers to make their applications touch friendly.
Fedora is up there. In 2019 Fedora may potentially have a larger "desktop" user base than Ubuntu. Often times people will lump in Ubuntu based distros as Ubuntu, inflating Ubuntu's popularity, but in this day and age Mint probably has more desktop users than Ubuntu.
Ubuntu's popularity is being reduced to AWS these days, but lets be fair here: Who uses Ubuntu as their primary desktop of choice when there is better distros for every user need? Right now, Ubuntu is the goto desktop OS for those who want to run two gpus on a laptop and that's about it.
I find that claim very hard to believe. I'm an Ubuntu developer. I see both bug reports from users, and fixes being landed. It is rare to see a report from a Mint user, and even rarer to see any fix that is attributed to having come from the Mint community, whether that's landing in Ubuntu directly or via upstream.
Either the Mint community keeps fixes to themselves (I doubt it because it's very difficult to maintain a derivative distribution that way), or Mint users and developers aren't affected by or don't report/fix any bugs affecting them whose root cause is upstream (seems unlikely, given the firehose of reports and patches Ubuntu developers send upstream), or there are relatively far fewer Mint users than you think.
Disclosure: I'm also a Canonical employee. However this opinion is my own and I am not representing my employer in making this comment.
Unfortunately we don't have anything more accurate: https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
I've reported a bug on github over at https://github.com/linuxmint I've reported bugs elsewhere too, but I just write what Ubuntu version I'm using within Mint, because that's more relevant. shrugs
Trying to stay objective, it's certainly not in dispute that Ubuntu is also "advertised as the user / noob friendly option" and continues to take this stance.
From this perspective, the difference between Debian user feedback and Ubuntu user feedback is night and day (I'm also a Debian developer). I don't think the difference between Ubuntu and Mint is anything nearly like that.
Meh, I won't. Gnome 3.34 might be faster, but you can't reasonably expect that to last across the future releases. Gnome developers have a week established tradition of fucking up their users.
I'll keep my simple life on Xfce.