Comment by foxandmouse

I recently mentioned in another comment that Fedora 43 on my Ideapad is the first “just works” experience I’ve had with my multi monitor setup(s) on anything other than Windows 11 (including MacOS where I needed to pay for Better Display to reach the bar of “tolerable”).

Zero fiddling necessary other than picking my ideal scaling percentage on each display for perfect, crisp text with everything sanely sized across all my monitors/TVs.

I gave up on Linux Mint for that exact reason. I wasted so much time trying to fine tune fonts and stuff to emulate real fractional scaling. Whenever I thought I finally found a usable compromise some random app would look terrible on one of the monitors and I’d be back at square one.

Experimental Wayland on Linux Mint just wasn’t usable unfortunately and tbh wasn’t a big fan of Cinnamon in general (I just really hated dealing with snaps on Ubuntu). I did tweak Gnome to add minimize buttons/bottom dock again and with that it’s probably my favorite desktop across any version of Linux/MacOS/Windows I’ve ever used!

I kept reading endorsements of Fedora's level of polish/stability on HN but was kinda nervous having used Debian distros my entire life and I’m really happy I finally took the plunge. Wish I tried it years ago!

Steam has DPI scaling issues on Windows as well, especially on multimonitor setups.

Windows struggles even with native apps, as soon as you have monitors using different scaling settings.

I'm currently using a laptop (1920x1200, 125%) + external monitor (1920x1080, 100%) at work. The task manager has blurry text when putting in the external monitor. It is so bad.

When I still used windows (until windows 10) I always had to download some DPI fixer program to fix blurriness in many native windows programs.

Text rendering × DPI seems to be one of those difficult problems.

Funny you mention Fedora, since the installer itself is unusable in my 4K display, defaulting to the 4K resolution instead of a 2x. I never managed to install Fedora using the GUI.

I use two 4k displays with an M1 Pro MBP. They work without any flickering. They’re using HDMI rather than DisplayPort.

I’m also, to get the two external displays without them being mirrored, using a docking station and a display driver from Silicon Motion called macOS InstantView.

This is of course not ideal if you need DP and DSC.

I have been experiencing this on my 2k monitors as well (Also BENQ). I tried every "fix" under the sun, eventually it stops after enough voodoo (reboots, unplugs) and cursing.

One of the many random issues on the OS with the best UX in the world (lol). Like music sometimes stopping and sometimes switching to speakers when turning off Bluetooth headphones, mouse speed going bananas randomly requiring mouse off and on, terminal app (iterm2) reliably crashing when I dare to change any keybinding, and many other things that never happened in years of working on Linux.

If you're looking for high quality text at 4K, your options are more limited than if you're looking for gaming. This is a good roundup, and the leading Dell is superb:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37025568

One of my external screens is 4k and I haven't noticed any flickering. It's an Apple monitor though, so maybe that's the difference.

> or switch to Asahi

I would like to point out that, from my experience on M1, external displays do not work at all over DisplayPort on Asahi Linux at the moment.

I bought a MacStudio 2 months ago, on Sequoia you go to "display" and should see the various resolutions. If not, "advanced">"show resolutions as a list">"show all resolutions".

Curious what software; I've used "SwitchResX" in the past and it met all my needs...

it's not removed : you have to hold Option when choosing resolutions, and the panel changes to show myriad options.

i think that's what you're describing, anyway.

BetterDisplay has solved a ton of problems like this for me; when MacOS gets confused about non apple monitors, BetterDisplay knows how to fix things.

AFAIK the smallest 5K2K is 34", with a PPI of 163. I don't believe that is treated as "HiDPI" by macOS, is it?

Fedora 43 with KDE - have been using 140% scaling with my Dell Ultrasharp 32" 4k monitor - no issues whatsoever. I've noticed that the Dells do a pretty good job with Linux - I have used monitors of various sizes ranging from 27" to 43" and never had any issues on Linux.

I run plasma 6 on X11 and it also functions amazingly well on 200% scaling.

Same here. I stick to 100% scaling and side step the whole hi dpi issue. I even have a single USB type c cable that connects my laptop to the laptop stand and that laptop stand is what connects to the monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

I know people will say meh but coming from the world of hurt with drivers and windows based soft modems — I was on dial up even as late as 2005! — I think the idea that everything works plug and play is amazing.

Compare with my experience on Windows — maybe I did something wrong, I don't know but the external monitor didn't work over HDMI when I installed windows without s network connection and maybe it was a coincidence but it didn't work until I connected to the Internet.

I have similar issues without the high refresh rate. It's a MacOS bug related to sleep/wake corrupting internal display settings.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255860955?sortBy=upvote...

After 344 "me too"s and 180+ replies they silently locked the thread to save themselves from more embarassment.

hello fellow AW2725DF enjoyer

I finally got fed up with my two external monitors (one of which I rotate to portrait) getting mixed up by MacOS every time my MacBook would go to sleep or I unplugged it, so I bought a thunderbolt docking station which has basically solved all my issues. Worth every penny to be able to swap my personal laptop and work laptop with a single cable.

Macs don't support the USBC / displayport daisy chaining support that my monitors should be able to handle. Very frustrating that this stuff is still so nonstandard. If you have all Apple it all works perfectly, of course.

No, it has not. Scaling is better on Linux and Windows.

So apparently when Canonical was the gorilla in desktop Linux, they had a push to have apps make their menus accessible via API. KDE supports that protocol. There are KDE widgets that will draw a Mac-style menu bar from it.

That means you can take the standard KDE "panel" and split it in two halves: a dock for the bottom edge, and a menus/wifi settings/clock bar for the top edge.

There are some things I don't know how to work around - like Chrome defaulting to Windows-style close buttons and keybindings, but if the Start menu copy is the thing keeping you off Linux, you can mod it more than you think you can.

Gnome with a persistent app drawer is relatively Mac-like. With a couple settings tweaks and possibly extensions, it can get pretty close. Even out of the box it feels a lot more mac-like than windows-like to me, but of course everybody is a bit different.

what does this even mean?

Can you independently set desktop wallpapers on the two screens? I know this seems nitpicky but it's literally impossible with Ubuntu/Gnome as far as I know; I have one vertical and one horizontal and have to just go with a solid color background to make that work.

KDE is in better shape than GNOME, but there are still some nits. Nearly all the available third party themes for example are blurry or otherwise render incorrectly with fractional scaling on.

I've been using fractional scaling on Gnome for years (including on the laptop I'm typing this on) and haven't had any issues. I haven't tried it with two displays that are set differently though. Is that a common thing?

Tried 3 months ago with Gnome (PopOS) and a 4k screen at 125% scaling, apps were blurry, especially Brave, which was a big disappointment.

I give Linux a try each time I need to set up a new computer, and each time run into new issues. Last time (2 years ago) the hdmi connection with the screen would drop randomly twice a day. Same for the keyboard, and the wifi card didn't have drivers available. It became quite annoying, reducing my productivity as I had to reboot and pray. I then installed Windows, which solved all of the issues (unfortunately?)

Maybe I'm just unlucky.

Boy, does that fractional scaling should look like shit on any vector graphics.

That’s why Apple used 4k on 22”, 5k on 27 and 6k on 32 to make it crispy always on 200%

Blows my minded that a 4k 27" monitor that was $500 a dozen years ago is still near top tier now.

5k has been surprisingly stagnant.

You can adjust this in settings.

KWin/Xorg AFAIK has been on maintanence duty (i.e. fixes mostly come from XWayland) for >5 years now. KDE has expulsed the Xorg codebase of KWin into a seperate repo in preparation of a Wayland only future.

Even if KDE/Xorg is a stable experience is true now, it will not be true in the medium to short term. And a distro like Kubuntu might be 2 years out from merging a "perfect" KDE Plasma experience if it arrived right now.

iMessage, Apple Pay (w/Touch ID), native Apple Music client, iCloud (if you're invested in the iCloud ecosystem) along with its seamless integrations with photo apps like Photomator (among others), shared music and movie library across my Mac, iPhone, and Apple TV.

There's probably a lot more I'm not thinking of right now. Point is, if you're an iOS, macOS, and iCloud user you give up a lot of quality of life bits going to another platform. There are times I want to go back to Linux, but when I think about the stuff I'm going to loose I talk myself out of it. macOS isn't the greatest, but it's not the worst either and Apple's products and services just tie in very well with each other. I get annoyed by things like the shitty support for non-apple peripherals, needing 3rd party apps to make them work decent, crappy scaling except on the most expensive monitors and no decent font smoothing when running at native resolutions. But... I stick with it because I either like or love the tight integration and added quality of life that comes with it.

Most of my gripes are probably Gnome specific in this case - When you screenshot something it pins the image temporarily on the screen. If I drag into any open app it avoids saving it to disk. - Pressing CMD W or Q consistently closes any app (works on some gnome apps) - Mac keychain passkeys (I don’t own a usb stick) - Third party window management (through accessibility privileges only) - Apps respecting dark mode settings - The app menu (file, edit, window, etc) being in the same spot every time

Definitely not exhaustive since I only spent a few weeks with it. There were also plenty of things I liked about Gnome more but not enough to tip the scale for me

One solution to this problem is to buy from a vendor that installs Linux for you (e.g. System76). Much like with Apple, they can sell you a fully functional computer that way.

My understanding is that the asahi team have been doing incredible work exactly with doing the non-fun bits. They just chose to do it on the hardware of a company that's extremely hostile to this kind of effort.

I think this is true with an arm mac (and would be tricky to fix that, props to the Asahi folks for doing so much) but for a lot of other hardware (recent dell/asus/lenovo, framework, byo desktops) I find Linux complete. I'm sure there is hardware out there that with struggles but I've not had to deal with any issues for a few years now myself.

Bringing random hardware from vendors who never intended to support an OS is a weird criterion to judge an OS' "readiness" by— and one no one seems to apply to macOS or Windows.

It can be very device specific unfortunately. Thinkpad tend to work quote well. I had a Framework that my wife took from me and it's truly fantastic, works out of the box.

i agree on the software level, but then we have hardware. M cpus, touchpads, battery life. it's hard to justify using PC hardware.

Well I guess the iMac Pro isn't on the lucky list then. I know it's losing updates (and therefore support) this year.

Unfortunately, I looked into it, and my other options are an Asus CX54 Chromebook or a Lenovo X1. There simply aren't competitive alternatives to Mac hardware, at least not at modern Google.

It's a mountain of little things that add up rather than a few killer features.

It's the way drag and drop is a fundamental interaction in text boxes, the proxy icons in title bars, how dragging a file to an open/save panel changes that panel's current folder rather than actually move a file.

It's how applications are just special folders that are treated like files, how they can update themselves independently of each other or any system packages, how you conventionally put them in the /Applications folder so you can put that folder on the Dock to use directly as a launcher.

It's how all text fields consistently support emacs-style keyboard shortcuts, respond appropriately to the system-provided text editing features such as the built-in Edit menu, text substitutions, and writing features.

It's how you can automate most Mac-assed apps; how you can extend the operating system through app-provided and user-created services to every other application that handles text, files, images, PDFs, through the built-in APIs using AppleScript, Automator, and Shortcuts.

It's how the whole program rather than its last window is the fundamental unit of an application such that document-based applications can exist without a window without also polluting some system tray with an unnecessary icon, how that means workflows expect more than one window open.

It's how there's a universal menu that works for every app, not just conforming ones (i.e. KDE's global menu only shows KDE apps' menus; other apps need a plugin or just don't show at all), how the help menu has a search field to look for menu items, how keyboard shortcuts are bound to the menu items are bound arbitrarily within the program's settings window and can thus be assigned globally in System Settings, how this means all of an application's main features are therefore accessible via the menu bar, how that creates consistency in the menus.

Those are just some things off the top of my head but there are plenty of others, some a bit more user facing, some less. Just examples, a non-exhaustive list.

I'm sure those who don't care about these things will dismiss it but if you've been using a Mac since before macOS, before OS X, or even before Mac OS X, these are things you won't drop for Linux just because the design is a bit uglier.

Of course, if none of these things matter, then the swap is easier. It doesn't mean any DE is a drop-in replacement by any means. Many of the things that make some DEs "Mac-like" are skin deep.

The only people I meet who voluntarily use web apps in their day to day are Linux users who have convinced themselves that it is good enough because there aren't any good native apps on Linux.

And then you of course have corporate, who will not switch from Windows.

Nobody will voluntarily spend all day working within Gmail or Google docs.

You also conveniently cut out photo editing and design in your quote.

Edit: Also I wonder if all you server-admins, programmers and gamers would have switched to Linux if your only option was to do your work or gaming within a laggy and inadequate web-app? But you want other people to suffer that.