I moved to a 4k monitor and could never get an experience I was happy with, had to move back to Windows. I could use it at 150% scaling and get blurry apps, or 200% scaling and get no screen space.
Now, most programs did work fine or I could tolerate them (I don't care if Spotify is a bit blurry). But gaming was just bad, GNOME told the games a fake resolution and then rescaled them, so they looked awful. The best solution I found was using a Python script to disable scaling before launching a game, but it was clunky at best.
Now, the new fractional scaling extensions did add the ability to have the app handle scaling by itself, so I'm really just waiting for an option to disable scaling for X11 programs or for Gamescope to add a "tell the compositor I will handle scaling but then don't do anything" option so I can actually get full resolution for my games.
I'm also waiting for variable refresh rate, but I can live without that as GNOME Wayland doesn't really get tearing ever.
I’m in the UK and open street map has mapped out my local area more accurately than google. It is marginal, but I stopped using google maps after a few issues: I was hiking and it directed me into a privately owned farm (claiming it is a permissive footpath).The farmer was very racist.
Another time I was directed through the middle of a primary school.
I don’t like workspaces. It may be due to my asymmetric vision, but I need to have two or more screens with the data I’m going back and forth with. With hobbyist embedded stuff like Arduino, I need the datasheet and IDE side by side to be effective and laptop screens are too small for tiling IMO, even my 17’s (1080p) don’t cut it. Maybe my next with a higher resolution will be better.
Makes sense! I agree laptops tend to be too small for tiling; I don’t really use the tiling part of i3 on my laptop very much - usually only to pop open a terminal window on the side that I close after a few minutes.
It's pretty decent for me with ten workspaces (and each one mapped in a sequence from Alt+1 through Alt+0). Text editor always in the first workspace, browser in the second, music in the third, etc. What's nice is that you can (almost) replicate the same workflow if someone forces you to use macOS or Windows at work
Virtual Desktops haven’t really been a thing that I’ve really needed in my work flow. Maybe one day I will give using one a shot. I actually prefer my current setup with dual 27" monitors.
More/better atomic distros, like Silverblue, Kinoite, VanillaOS, etc. Silverblue is already excellent, easy to use and extremely solid, but there are still some odd rough edges that I think would make it less appealing to new users. When we can offer newbies a personally unbreakable Linux system that does basically everything they want and more, then I think it'll be easy to recommend. At this point it's hard to imagine going back to a traditionally updated distro.
The next steps for PipeWire, which has improved and streamlined audio (and sometimes video) handling and production immensely. I can imagine a future where we can easily send, audio, video, midi, and all kinds of other data streams between arbitrary programs on Linux, easily routing things with GUI frontends, having connections establish automatically, etc. I don't know how much this stuff is in the works, but I think PipeWire has a ton of potential left to be explored.
I’m a happy user of Fedora workstation. What makes Silverblue better? I’ve never tried it. I’ve done lots of changes but my system has been rock solid since Fedora 36.
I was on Fedora workstation before switching to Silverblue and they're both quite solid, to be fair. The big feature that differentiates Silverblue is immutability--you can't easily make changes to the base system.
Now, to some people I think that's going to sound awful, but it has its pros and cons. The biggest benefit being that your base system is solid (and not just solid as in unlikely to break, but literally unchanging over time). Updating your system is effectively replacing it with a different system entirely (delta compressed, so it's not too inefficient, if I understand correctly), and you can rollback/revert/swap between systems on the fly, in the unlikely event that an update makes something worse, though I haven't needed to. You can even rebase your Silverblue (Gnome) system into a Kinoite (KDE Plasma) system, pin both "commits" and swap between them. I haven't tried that though, since I'm pretty happy with the Gnome workflow. Long story short, immutable distros like Silverblue are basically as solid as solid can be.
There are two drawbacks that I can think of, and then a couple of minor nitpicks. The biggest being that you need to restart your system after making changes or installing packages. You don't need to restart between each package install or anything, but any system-level changes that you make won't take effect until you restart. The second drawback is that layering packages is not always ideal and working inside docker/podman containers (often via toolbx/distrobox) is the best way to do some tasks. For example, if you're a programmer and need to install a lot of dependencies to build some program, I find it's best to create a "pet container" to work in. That doesn't both me much though, in fact I kind of like that workflow.
So basically, it's probably not for everyone, especially people who really love to tinker and customizes everything. But if you want a basically unbreakable Linux machine, it's worth looking into.
Thanks much for the detailed reply. It’s obviously not for me since I do a lot of tinkering and I’m used to the traditional system. But it definitely should be suitable for some scenarios. Scools and kiosks come to mind.
The base os is immutable, but you can still change configuration files, compile and install local software (but not in the immutable directories), install desktop environment extensions, add custom repositories, etc. You can also layer packages, but most graphical software is best installed as flatpaks (but not mandatory). So it depends on what tinkering means for you. If it means messing around with binaries in the default locations, like /usr/bin, then it’s not for you, but for many other things there is a way, it’s just a matter of getting used to the separation between the immutable base layer and the things that you build around and on top of it.
It feels great on my laptop with gestures. On desktop, not so much. Feels like it’s designed to have one full screen application up at a time. Removal of tray icons is just stupid, and they should just give up on their push against them. Which their quest against tray icons is actually worse then just unstandardized tray icons themselves. Still, it’s definitely the most polished DE out there, so that’s why I tend to stick with it and run dash-to-panel. The overview mode is actually better then I realize now that I got used to it. Even pressing the mouse against the top left corner starts to feel nice.
I love it. I have used it for very long time with and without extensions. I love the overview in particular, pressing meta and having everything presented to you is fantastic. I used it by mostly running maximized windows, then each time I wanted to switch to another program I pressed meta and clicked on the app I wanted. I used workspaces to keep separate groups of programs for each workflow separate too.
If I used extensions it was small things like Appindicators and small cosmetics like blur my shell.
Now, I don't think GNOME scales very well if you use tens of windows at once, you would need to use too many workspaces, which are slow to navigate, and/or have tiny windows in the overview, which are hard to click because their position is unpredictable unlike traditional taskbars, where the programs are always visible and never move on their own.
My workflow never involved too many windows, so I never had problems with it.
Something else I wish would change is that the top bar should go away or actually do something other than show the time. I would say either just take it away entirely and only show it in the overview. Or turn the clock into a notch. Or just make it a half-traditional taskbar, with the clock and options moved to the right and the left side showing as many programs as they fit in thin bars.
Fedora for me as it seems to work the best for my hardware, will be moving to Kinoite when I get the chance. i already am using distrobox and Flatpak in general. Tried NixOS (with Root on ZFS) but couldn’t get hp-wmi module to work on on it. I was having some problems with Opensuse Nvidia drivers (wakeup from suspend didn’t work sometimes). The one thing I miss on Fedora, that Opensuse has is Full-Disk Encryption.
Is it for navigation? Bike routes? Route planning? There are so many services/apps/websites that use OSM data that you can really get as specific as your use-case needs!
If you just need a basic navigation solution for your smartphone, Organic Maps (uses OSM data) or (OSMand+) on Android are good options.
My go-to website for route creation (bike, car, or otherwise) is brouter.de/brouter-web/ It’s got a lot of options, but it’s far more powerful than Gmaps.
Yesterday I’ve seen the other thread, curiosity got the best of me so I registered in openstreetmaps and in Organic Maps I’ve added a missing cafe and a restaurant in my area. Fascinating!
I use Dash to Panel to show taskbar icons for running applications, with the topbar moved to a sidebar to save valuable vertical real estate: https://imgur.com/tc0IbuM.png
I use the Workspaces Indicator extension to keep track of which one I'm in, but I use workspaces to focus on specific tasks using groups of applications... not an individual workspace for each application. I normally only have one or two workspaces in use.
I disable the Activities button and Overview completely, with the Super key opening the Applications View directly.
I previously used Arc Menu to replace the Applications View, but dropped that when they added folders to the Application View. It's still a bit clunky, but it's usable now that is supports some minimal organization.
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