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?
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.
Some of the broad strokes are there, but the details are what matters. Gnome extensions also come with the problem of breaking every other update which quickly becomes irritating.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I do think there's an important distinction between technical debt and backwards compatibility. Yes The former can be caused by the latter, but I've worked in enough projects that didn't have to worry about backwards compatibility but were still riddled with technical debt to know that backwards compatibility is only one source of many.
I agree, if you have a specific dev flow that is compatible with the immutable OS approach, then these can be wonderful dev machines, but personally I don't want to change my workflow to fit the OS, I prefer the OS to fit my workflow.
At some point I I'm pretty confident that I will switch to an immutable version of Fedora and relearn my workflow in a distro box like world as I do see some real benefits to doing so, but I'm not in a hurry
I expected it to be an issue but I’ve had surprisingly few problems so far. If you’re working in docker-land or can use devcontainers, it just works. If you’re not but your stack is well supported by homebrew, also not a problem. Anything else you can handle via a distrobox container, where you can install from package managers to your heart’s content, and they have good integration with the base OS, but I’ve had to reach for distrobox a lot less than I expected.
Interesting, thanks! Out of curoisity would you (or anyone else) mind sharing some details about which stacks you work on? And have you done any GTK or linux native apps?
I do a decent amount of GTK and occasionaly Qt, and wonder if there's any extra friction for that
I think this is both the blessing and the curse of the incredible work that wine and steam has done. Unless and until we get the Linux packaging stuff figured out in a way that developers can target Linux instead of having to target each individual distro, I think the clear incentive for the vast majority of gaming companies will be to target windows even if they ultimately care more about Linux, because wine and proton are so good and so much easier to support than each individual distro natively.
Don't get me wrong, I rejoice when I get a native Linux game. I buy nearly every native Linux game I can find that is reasonably priced and sounds remotely interesting. I have a couple dozen games in my GOG backlog that I haven't even tried to run yet, but I bought on a sale or something because they were relatively cheap and supported Linux natively. So I would love a world where it was Linux first and Windows second.
I wanted to setup a family gaming PC in the living room for Christmas and went with CachyOS. It gave me a one click gaming installation option that just worked. I’m not interested in the FPS games with constant anti cheat mechanisms right now. It has worked with every game I’ve tried so far. Examples include: Crazy Machines 3, Cygni, Gradius, and Bejeweled (all on Steam.)
I have a PC with Windows 10 and so does my dad that I’ll be converting to some kind of Linux soon. Windows 11 isn’t even an option due to the TPM chip requirement. The computers are still quite good and it makes no sense to abandon them. With Linux their performance will probably improve.
If you get someone to help you with the installation, or buy a pre-installed Linux, then yes I believe this to be true. I only have anecdotal evidence, but I have my dad who is very non-tech savvy who after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95. There has been one time in 5 years that he had to reach out for technical assistance. It turned out that he had been misled by a prompt to buy Ubuntu pro and had gotten into a weird state. I blame that one solely on canonical, not on Linux in general. After that I switched him to Fedora, and he's been running that now for a few years and didn't even realize I had changed his underlying OS. He is able to install anything he wants from the graphical storefront, and same with updates. In the early days we did have some trouble getting his printer to work, though once we switched him to Fedora everything on that printer worked out of the box. When my sister came over to his house with her MacBook, she had to mess with the Mac to get the printer working for over an hour, and it was still pretty hit or miss. It would lose half the jobs she tried to send to it. It truly is remarkable how usable Linux is for the average person now. For people that have to run software that only runs on Windows or Linux, excluding games of course since steam and other game managers handle those wonderfully now, there is definitely still a bit of pain. But for people who can get by with cloud-based or Linux friendly software, it's really quite good.
Printers. It always haunts us. I have exclusively bought Brother for home and work for close to two decades at this point because they follow CUPS standards requiring no fidgeting, and their modern offerings all have AirPrint, which eliminates the need for drivers. It's 2026, and the normies still think you cannot print from your phone because printers suck so much.
Even then - I have a reasonably nice Brother Printer/Scanner/etc device, and I could never get AirPrint to reliably work until I switched over to using Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi. Something to do with it going to sleep and not broadcasting the necessary mDNS stuff, IIRC. I couldn't find any combination of settings in the printer to make it happy, and since it's now right next to a switch, it's not really worth the effort of digging any further.
> but I have my dad who is very non-tech savvy who after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95.
more anecdotes, but I had the same experience with getting my mother in law on Linux. she is 75, and hadn't used a computer since her old job, and she used Windows XP, i believe she said, there. a couple of years ago, she wanted a bigger screen device to use for her internetting since her eyesight isn't what it used to be (her primary computing device was always her Android phone otherwise). my wife and I got her a thinkpad t440p, set her up with Debian GNOME, showed her how to use the Software Centre and install her stuff and update the machine, and off she went. haven't had a call to fix anything at all. she says she likes the experience better than the computers she remembers using at work running Windows.
My sister was the same, she brought her machine over, I booted a Ubuntu disk and did the disk config in the install and then she set the rest of the stuff up and I haven’t heard from her about it for 5 years, other than that I check if she’s still using it now and again.
> after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95.
You have to choose that?
I'm a long-time Linux user, and I don't like GNOME better as a desktop environment. I'll take a Windows 95-like desktop UI over GNOME any day of the week...
Yes exactly. When I had a Mac for work, I had to tinker with that thing just as much if not more so than I do Linux. To windows credit, it was the best of the three when it came to not having to tinker to get what I want, but the lack of ability to configure it in a way that was comfortable and preferable was more limited and difficult, so there were annoyances I had to just live with. The point at which they started injecting ads into my desktop experience was a dark day and the day I said goodbye
Oh god, I had a Mac for work recently and had to spend 3 weeks becoming an expert in Mac External Displays And Thunderbolt just to get my HP Thunderbolt 4 dock (officially compatible with Macs!) to use a dual monitor setup with it. Finally I got it working, but every configuration I tried Just Worked(tm) on Linux. Jeez...
This sounds more like problem of HP’s dock than a Mac. Just because they said it is officially compatible with Mac doesn’t mean it is. Also, compatible with which Mac- Intel or M series? I use three different docks on two Mac Mini (M4 Pro) and they all worked out of the box. I did my research before buying them by watching YouTube reviews.
So Mac doesn't support DisplayPort MST like everyone else does (Windows and Linux have supported this STANDARD for years), because they are assholes and don't care about their users, and the fact that multi monitor support is different between Intel Macs, certain M1s (cannot use more than one external monitor at all!), and the rest of the Apple Silicon lineup (other M1s, M2+) is insane.
I eventually got it working on this Intel Mac by using one HDMI and one specific DisplayPort output on the dock so it wouldn't try to multistream it internally in the dock or whatever (can't remember what exactly it was doing). It might have involved an HDMI to DP converter. I honestly tried to purge my memory of it once I got it working.
Note that all setups worked fine with Linux without modifications. Would have likely worked fine on Windows, too, since it supports MST. Only one specific setup worked with Mac.
So no, it's not a problem of the dock, it's a problem with Apple refusing to support a standard so they can make people buy the expensive $400 docks they hawk in Apple stores. Or because they are lazy and think because they don't care, their users shouldn't either.
You will find many people complaining about Mac's multi monitor support (or lack thereof) online. They are choosing to ignore user feedback.
I hope freediver will shed some light on the open source plans, because that's a deal breaker for me too. I'm a long time paying customer and huge proponent (even evangelist) of Kagi, but a closed source browser is just too many steps backwards for me no matter who makes it.
I get (though wouldn't necessarily agree with) keeping it closed while it's still in the works, but would like to know if the plan is to open source in the future or not.
Thank you! I'm obviously just one person, but I deeply appreciate your willingness to engage on HN, and your transparency and honesty about things (not just today, but also in the past). Makes me feel even better about being a paid Kagi subscriber.
Indeed, and also people buying second-hand are pretty unlikely to buy brand new if they aren't able to find the second-hand item (or use it). It's similar to piracy in that respect, that some people who pirate might have actually bought it, but the majority likely would not have anyway so can't just say "1,000 people pirated our thing, therefore we lost 1,000 sales". The cynic in me thinks they know that and just use it as a convenient way to over-inflate the damage piracy is doing to them, but that's a separate topic
On the other hand, lots of people buying audio gear new DO take the second-hand market into account, and will spend more on the initial purchase if they think the product will retain its value.
Don't let perfect be the the enemy of good. I fully agree with you on what the bare minimum should be, but the reality is that our definition of bare minimum is currently a fantasy. Any steps taken toward our vision is good and should be applauded IMHO. Especially when it's a major player like Bose that hopefully sets a positive precedent and gets other manufacturers to realize this is not only possible but leads to applause and hopefully more sales.
Evolution v. Revolution. I'd prefer the latter, but realistically the former is the more likely to succeed short of people like us getting control of regulatory bodies and forcing it.
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