The point of wayland, though, is that back then 13-year-old you would get an application that "works" but to support myriad things (like HiDPI) you'd have to DIY it. Whereas now, sure a 13 year old perhaps won't write directly to wayland's APIs, but you'll use a library and have a much more globally usable result. And honestly probably have a better time - less effort for the same result, and with a more maintainable project in the long run.
The only problem that has existed is that originally there was a single DPI value, not a different DPI value for each monitor.
This has never created any problem for the people using multiple monitors with the same resolution, but only for the people who have used multiple monitors having different resolutions and who might have not liked the changes in windows size when moving a window from a monitor to another monitor.
That was indeed a problem, but it really affected a rather niche use case and it was also trivial to solve without any change in the X11 design, by just making DPI a per monitor variable, which was done long ago.
So criticizing X11 about a supposed problem with HiDPI is incorrect. I have used only multiple 4k monitors with my PCs, with X11, for more than a dozen years and I never had any problem with HiDPI, with the exception of many Java programs written by morons, which ignore the system settings and which also do not allow the user to change the font used by them. I do not know which is the problem with the Java programmers, but I never encountered programs with such a behavior, except those written in Java. Moreover, the Java programs are also the only that had problems with monitors using 10-bit per color component.
While X11 itself never had problems with supporting HiDPI, at least not in the XFCE that I am using, I heard that other desktop environments have created problems with HiDPI that have nothing to do with X11, by not exposing the X11 DPI settings but providing instead some "window scaling" settings, which is something that I do not know how it is implemented, but there are good chances that it is implemented in a wrong way, judging from the complaints that I have seen. I cannot imagine how one could use correctly a "window scaling" factor, because the font rendering program must know the true DPI value when rendering for instance a 12-point font. If rendering is done at a wrong DPI and then the image is scaled, the result is garbage, so in that case it would not be surprising that people claimed that HiDPI works badly in X11, when in fact it was Gnome or whatever desktop environment was used who was guilty for bad support, not X11. I never had to fight with those desktop environments, but I assume that even those would have worked correctly with HiDPI, when using xrandr to configure X11, instead of using the settings of the desktop environment.
There is nothing "niche" about plugging in a modern (e.g. made within last 5 years) laptop into an external display.
These kind of posts just show how disconnected from reality some of y'all are from what most Linux desktop users nowadays actually need from the desktop platform.
I always plug my laptop into one or two external displays.
Even without configuring distinct DPIs per monitor that was not a problem for me, because on the small screen of the laptop I kept only some less important application, like the e-mail program, while working on the bigger external displays, so I had no reason to move windows between the small screen of the laptop and the bigger external displays.
But like I said, setting a different DPI value for each monitor has been added to X11 many years ago, I do not remember how many.
I do not see why one would want to move windows between the external displays and the laptop, when you have connected external displays, so I consider this a niche use case, i.e. moving windows between small screens and big screens. I agree with you that having simultaneously big screens and small screens is not niche, so I was not referring to this.
Without a per-screen DPI value you cannot control the ratio between the sizes of a window when is moved between the big screen and the small screen, but even when you control the ratio, moving windows between screens of different sizes does not work well because you must choose some compromise, e.g. if you keep the same physical size some windows from the big screen will not fit on the small screen and if you make the windows occupy the same fraction of the screen size they will change their sizes during moving and they will be more difficult to use on the small screen.
But like I have said, this no longer matters as the problem has been solved even for this niche use case. I do not even remember if this problem still existed by the time when Wayland became usable.
Asymmetric laptop+monitor setups are very popular, people buy stands to prop their laptop up next to their monitor and just use both as normal displays. When i only had one monitor at my desk, i did this a lot, but i see people at work propping up their MBP next to two other monitors and using all 3. The idea that people wouldn't regularly go back and forth between both screens is sadly completely wrong.
Does anyone know of a precedent for this? I've never heard of a social (or other) network claiming to own account identifiers, then again I don't read their ToS with a magnifying glass either.
The combination of 'it just works' and 'SSO integration' is a killer.
To be honest, in 20+ years of working in IT, I never understood the point of the latter until recently, on a gig salvaging systems for a client with ~650 users after their sole IT guy unexpectedly resigned after 20 years and left for the mountains.
IRL, SSO is gold. Many hackers, like me, underestimate it.
And not just SSO, but OIDC. You don't even have to be an admin on your domain to set it up. If you have a Gmail or Office 365 e-mail address @mycorp.com, you can set up SSO for it on your tailnet in seconds. Your team members authenticating for the same domain will join your tailnet automatically.
And that's for the free and cheap tier. If you want the fancy stuff (like SAML and automatic user provisioning / filtering), they've apparently got that, too, but it's in the more expensive tiers.
SSO is basically tablestakes for compliance: customers would ask about your access control (or just if you have _that_ audit report, which has a lot of questions about it).
And trying to do access control without SSO is crazy: you need to keep track of application and users and their interactions. I wouldn't run any team with more than 10 people without it.
> Or do people actually want their keybindings to change when they change their layouts?
It depends. As a counterpoint to the folks replying "yes", I have for years had Meta-[1..9] bound to "switch to desktop X". I also regularly use US English and Czech/Slovak keyboards.
In the X11 days, I never had to think about this, since for whatever reason (I believe technically a bug and/or X11-specific WM behaviour, but I've lost the reference...) Openbox would use the US English layout for its keybindings exclusively.
Since I switched to KDE Plasma on Wayland, I constantly get annoyed, every day, as I may have my keyboard set to SK, press what muscle memory says is Meta-[1] and instead I get a funky zoom, since that keystroke translates to Meta-[+] in the SK layout :-(
> Anyway, interesting idea. As another comment pointed out, I wish there was an easy way to mount NFS and 9p shares as a user.
Add e.g. foo.bar.com:/path /net/foo.bar.com nfs to /etc/fstab with options=user ?
> Regarding the article content, I find 9p to be even simpler and probably more ubiquitous than NFS, though I don't know if MacOS and Windows natively support it.
Windows certainly does not. MacOS I don't know, but if you mean "natively" as "stock install without third-party software", then probably not.
Actually, scratch that, comments below suggest that WSL2 uses 9P for file sharing with the host, so it's possible that a version of Windows with the WSL2 bits installed will support 9P.
This is awesome. NFS is very much undervalued as a cross-platform interface for talking to a (not necessarily remote) filesystem.
~20 years ago I was using SFS (Self-certifying file system), which was a SSH-like Internet-usable TOFU filesystem, using NFS as the "backend" for talking to the host OS. The site has since disappeared, but is archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20080330201843/http://www.fs.net....
As I commented on TFA, and will gladly repeat here:
Wow. Well put. The scariest thing is, this translates even to domain-specific apps such as Navionics Boating. I use it every time I go out, because, somehow, they've not yet managed to touch the charts and rendering and it just works, better than any of the competitors. But, the rest of the interface is like a Fisher Price toy. You want to add a waypoint based on a specific lat/long you got out of a pilot book? There is no such thing as "Add waypoint" in the UI, nooo, you enter the lat/long in "Search" and then tap on something or other to add it as a waypoint.
This attitude manifests itself throughout the application's UI, as if, indeed, the application is optimized for "Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero.".
So, I guess it would require a lot more research to make a real argument about this, but to me, this just sounds like an application that isn't very good, but I don't think is the same phenomenon described by the article. I definitely don't think charging money is any kind of guarantee of quality. Software is hard to make and lots of software sucks just because it sucks.
But the difference I see is that I think Navionics Boating has an incentive to make that app better. That if they make improvements for users like you, that will likely impact their bottom line positively, because they'll attract and retain more users like you.
But free mass-market consumer apps have the opposite incentive. They are incentivized to dumb things down to the lowest common denominator, because there will always be > 1 user that they attract with that approach for every 1 user like you that they alienate.
Basically: I think free business models can ignore retention, whereas for-pay subscription models can't, and that's why I prefer them.
> Basically: I think free business models can ignore retention, whereas for-pay subscription models can't, and that's why I prefer them.
I think that only holds if you have enough competition that it starts making a real dent in your profit margin.
I don't have any proper data, but pretty much everyone I've met in the sailing community just uses Navionics. Fair enough; the company has been in the ECDIS business for many many years before smartphones even existed, and their electronic charts are good.
Their competitors, based on my subjective use of some of them, more or less fall into two groups:
(1) Similarly big players. Basically just C-MAP (parent is Navico, also in ECDIS for many years).
(2) Startups: savvy navvy and Orca.
I've only really used (1) enough to form a proper opinion. I originally picked it because it was way cheaper (50 EUR/year for global charts), but gave up since Navionics, despite being Fisher Price, at the end of the day just works, is fast, offline, and does not crash. OTOH C-MAP feels like a neglected side-line of the parent company designed to steer you into buying their expensive chart plotter brands (B&G mainly).
To be fair, I also tried a FOSS alternative (OpenCPN), but the app suffers from such a lack of UI design of any kind that I don't even want to go there, so I don't count it as a real competitor. And there's also Imray Navigator which is surprisingly good, but a different product category (raster charts).
TL;DR: Boating is making good money for Navionics, there's not really an alternative, so they don't care.
My most recent Linux laptop upgrade as of 10/2022 was:
FROM a refurbished Panasonic Let's Note CF-SX3, Intel Core i5-4300U, ~2013 vintage, 8GB RAM, aftermarket Intel 400GB DC S3610 Series SSD, purchase price EUR ~1500 ex VAT plus random hassles with customs importing used tech from JP to EU
TO a refurbished Dell Latitude 7390, Intel Core i7-8650U, ~2018 vintage, 16GB RAM, 512GB SK Hynix NVMe SSD, purchase price EUR ~600 ex VAT
The new one unexpectedly came with 16GB RAM instead of the advertised 8GB, lucky me. My main reason for upgrading was "want Thunderbolt / DP capable of driving 4K display", which turned out to be a mixed blessing.
This person's compromise was going from 64GB of RAM to 32GB, and from 2TB of storage to 1TB.
You young whippersnappers are so spoilt.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
PS. Now that you know the exact CPU I run, I'll invite you out to dinner at a Michelin restaurant of your choice in exchange for my private key of your choice.
7390s have been sub $200 on ebay for the last year or more. They are circa 2019.
Great machine, I'm looking for a replacement currently but the new latitudes have moved the power button onto the keyboard and removed the touchpad buttons.
Yup, they even get firmware updates via LVFS/fwupd!
The relative high-DPI-ness of the internal display in combination with worsening eyesight forced me to migrate from X11/openbox to Wayland/Plasma. That has mostly turned out OK, with the caveat of getting used to/working around a non-zero set of desktop bugs in my daily workflow.
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