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0 pointsaforwardslash2y ago0 comments

My experience with 1440p monitors on linux is terrible, and I'm being generous.

Starting with the obvious, dpi detection is mostly non-existing and it seems the default text subhinting configurations aren't actually good for high dpi monitors - so you either get shitty fonts and graphics with good screen real estate or FHD experience with acceptable quality. And then you have to choose - do you want color management or different dpi settings per monitor? Because you can't have both - Wayland doesn't seem to have proper color management yet, and X/Xorg doesn't have different scaling settings per monitor.

Did I mention Wayland supports different dpi settings per monitor? Well sometimes it gets confused, and doesn't work well. Getting my kubuntu (I know, running kde doesn't help) to work with both my FHD and QHD monitor in an acceptable dpi setting took several hours, and forced me to switch from XOrg to wayland. Now instead of a robust desktop, I have a machine that needs to be rebooted every week because it starts forgetting to update screen regions - imagine a youtube video playing, but you only see the first frame.

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midoridensha2y ago

I definitely do not recommend mixing monitor resolutions; I tried that on my work PC and it was a disaster. So for both work and home, I have dual 27" monitors with the same resolution (4k at work, QHD at home). The one at home works fine, but the one at work needed manual setting of the DPI, so there do seem to be problems with DPI detection as you say.

kaliszad2y ago

Seems to work ok for me with a 16:10 Lenovo T14 Gen3, which is 1920x1200 connected using a Thunderbolt Docking station to a LG 43" 4K screen and a portrait 1200x1920 Dell 24" display. All of that with Debian 12 and Gnome. Yes, there is no scaling in this configuration. With my previous T470 I used a 27" 4K screen for some time in otherwise the same configuration with 1.5x scaling. I had to turn some Gnome setting on to make it available but it worked. I am on Wayland since at least 4-5 years back. The setup was a bit funky those 4-5 years back, sometimes it wouldn't come back up after suspend/ resume with the same configuration or when hot-plugging the docking station. But that is mostly a thing of the past and the setup overall is quite stable.

I still think the best experience was during the Dell Latitude E6420/E6430 days when used with the proprietary docking station. That worked every single time even when I, at that time experimented with XMonad. Yes, I haven't used fractional scaling then and the laptops were much bulkier (however also completely quiet when idling, which isn't the case with the Lenovos). Good times.

Overall, I am very happy with the setup and Debian is giving me no unwanted surprises even when I used Debian Testing over the almost 10 years now. My tasks and interests don't seem to require using Windows or macOS in a way I couldn't work around. That definitely helps but I also really feel that the operating system does not bother me and I can get my work done. I also don't suffer from all the things I remember when using Windows or still to this day seeing other people use it. Even a clean installation of Windows on proper hardware like the Thinkpad T470 with just Intel components is "an experience". The touchpad does not work nearly as well as on Linux out of the box. When you install the official drivers for that there is a Window with some inexplicable error with no useful information popping up. And having an uptime of more than 30 days on Windows personal computers seems to be pushing the envelope nowadays. I am not an uptime masochist but rebooting really isn't something that bothers me on Linux, I do it occasionally for a newer kernel when it suits me.