Comment by necovek

3 months ago

I appreciate them working out-of-the-box on Linux even more. And they mostly do, with Linux being the best PnP (Plug'n'Play — remember that with Windows 95? :) OS today.

But multiple modes of operation really made it harder for to configure devices like those 4G/LTE USB dongles: they will either present as USB storage, or one type of serial device or a CDC-ACM modem device (or something of the sort), requiring a combination of the tools + vendor-specific AT commands to switch it into the right mode. Ugh, just get me back those simple devices that do the right thing OOB.

13 comments

necovek

Reply
ChocolateGod  3 months ago

> with Linux being the best PnP

as long as it isn't wireless or bluetooth

  • formerly_proven  3 months ago

    Linux has out of the box support for the SBC-XQ hack, which is pretty much the highest quality, most widely supported (even by Apple hardware) low-latency-ish way to drive BT audio. Works exceptionally well. And switching profiles works better than under Windows.

    fwiw the last time I had wireless issues was with an exceedingly cheap 2013 laptop built from tablet hardware. That required an out of tree driver for a few years.

  • mystified5016  3 months ago

    Linux Bluetooth got upgraded to best in class when Microsoft replaced the windows 7 Bluetooth stack with the present heap of flaming garbage.

    Bluetooth works better under modern Linux than modern windows. I can go on for literal hours about this. Windows Bluetooth stack is the most broken and disgraceful pile of code I've ever had to work with.

  • ruszki  3 months ago

    or large high DPI monitor

    • adrian_b  3 months ago

      For more than a decade I have used only 4k displays (in most cases with 10 bit color components) on all my desktops and laptops, all of which run Linux.

      I have never encountered any problem whatsoever. Only in Windows I have encountered sometimes scaling problems.

      The only programs with which I had sometimes problems in Linux with high-DPI monitors have been commercial applications written in Java, some of which were very expensive. However those problems were not Linux-specific, but Java-specific, because those Java programs behaved equally bad on Windows.

      For some reason, there seems to exist a high percentage of Java programmers who are incompetent at writing GUIs and the programs written by them neither follow the platform DPI settings nor allow the user to select a suitable display font, making their programs unusable without a magnifying glass when using high-DPI monitors. Moreover, I have encountered several expensive Java applications that crash and die immediately when used with monitors configured for 10-bit color instead of 8-bit color, both on Linux and on Windows.

      So in more than a decade of using only high-DPI displays, I have never had problems with native Linux GUI applications, I have seldom encountered problems with native Windows applications and I have very frequently encountered problems with Java applications, regardless of the operating system on which they were run.

      1 reply →

    • necovek  3 months ago

      What's the issue you have with high DPI monitors? I've used 3200x1800 14" screens way back (on Fujitsu U904 when that came out: I found a review from 2014 online), 4k 24" Dell when it still required two DP cables for 60Hz, and more recently 4k 14" screens on X1 Carbon: while you need to configure scaling (I prefer 125% or 150% for UI elements, and fonts further increased by a factor of 1.4x), most programs work well with that (including non-native UI peograms like Firefox, LibreOffice or even Emacs).

      For a long while there was an issue with multiple monitors which you want to configure with different settings: you couldn't.

      I believe that is also fixed today with Wayland but I mostly stick to a single monitor anyway.

      2 replies →