Is there a pleasant way to run a Linux laptop today with decent drawing/touchscreen support, HiDPI, and working dock/undock multi-monitor support?
I have used various distros on and off over the years, but today I can run Windows 10 on a Surface Book 2, and the non-development portions of my experience are spectacular, for the low, low price of selling my soul: lazy file syncing with OneDrive, pen support combined with OneNote is spectacular. Unfortunately, WSL only gets me so far when I want to use more than vim. For better or worse, I don't get to spend all of my time coding, so I'd like Linux with a real, modern notebook experience that can let me get my work done without praying to the gods that my external monitors come back on when I plug in.
I have a Dell XPS 15 running KDE (on Arch Linux, but that shouldn't matter). I use the Thunderbolt dock (1 cable to charge, connect USBs and Ethernet, and connect up to a few 4k displays). It works great, with one minor issue related to hidpi switching.
I don't have a touchscreen so can't comment on that, but pretty sure KDE has support for that stuff - their art/drawing/painting app Krita works with pens/tablets, and there do seem to be some touch gesture related options in the settings app.
Docking just works. Monitors automatically remember your config and switch when you dock/undock. Also it's very easy to make scripts to swap monitor layouts using xrandr (of course, you can do this with the settings GUI, but with scripts you have all the layouts you use just a few keystrokes away if you want to switch to a special layout).
I use 1.5x DPI scaling with my 4k external monitor. The laptop screen is 1080p, so no dpi scaling. It works well, with the one issue that you need to log out and log back in to switch the scale factor - this seems to be the same as on Windows, but not as good as macOS. One option I just started using a few days ago is font scaling. I set the font DPI to 144 (the settings GUI lets you do this), so all text appears at a normal size. Some icons are still tiny - mainly things like the checkmark in an OK button. But it's good enough that I don't notice any egregious issues and don't mind using it. The advantage of this is that you only need to restart a program for it to use a new font DPI. So instead of logging out/in, I just set the font DPI and restart any programs if I need to.
There are a few minor graphical glitches left if you use fractional (not 2x or 3x) DPI scaling, mainly related to 1 px lines sometimes appearing between lines of text in the KDE terminal and text editor. But they'll hopefully be fixed soon, and I haven't noticed any other issues.
KDE has had a bad reputation in the past, but these days it is a very polished, fast, and feature-rich environment that just works and lets you get your work done. They have KDE Neon, which is the 'official' (I think) Ubuntu-based KDE distro, if you want to try it out.
My strategy has for a long time been to run Windows 10 for all of my browsers and games and paint programs and then run a virtual machine of linux with VirtualBox. I just use terminal Vim, so I run the virtual machine headless and ssh into it with a cygwin terminal.
It's a bit janky but no more janky than actually running Linux on a laptop. No worries about my HDMI projector connection working, no fighting with wifi, games on Steam work, and I get a full Linux for development.
The magic comes from proxying my development servers (like Django's) through the guest machine into Windows. I've got it set up so that if I type `localhost:8000` into any Windows browser, it hits my virtual machine's localhost.
So yeah, complicated, but from what I can see it gives me the best setup I know of with the least amount of fighting with the operating system.
I love this. Thanks for sharing. I wonder if there is a way to make a true dual system on Windows, with full graphical support (even if it is the Linux console), where you can flip between Windows desktop, Linux Desktop (if desired), and Linux console with a "switch desktop" hotkey.
I think I will try this on one of my windows computers. I can't switch from Mac to Linux because I use too much non Linux software, but most of it is on Windows. Adobe suite, Ableton, Native Instruments, etc.
Does anyone know a way to virtualize Linux like the thought above please?
You can certainly install a windowing environment into the virtual machine. I've done this a few times when I actually needed a windowing environment inside of Linux for complicated servers or doing things across multiple ports. It works just fine, and VirtualBox even has a "seamless" mode where it sort of feels like you have windows from both environments.
I've looked into touchscreen support on Linux and it was very disappointing. You can fiddle most things to a workable level eventually, but no matter which implementation, there does seem to be a lack of integration for the virtual keyboard, i.e. it doesn't pop up when I touch an input field or won't go away when the input field loses focus. Overall it was pretty awful. Since I wanted to use the device in tablet mode (without hardware keyboard), I have to run Windows for now :(
Did you try the latest versions of GNOME? Touchscreen support seem to be improving quickly there, and I'm quite sure that the ongoing work on GNOME-Mobile will improve things even further down the road.
I just have a separate script to configure my monitors for each of the environments that I work in. So I plug in at work and run work.sh, and everything is set up. Sounds like extra work, but it’s muscle memory at this point, and it’s very reliable. Plus there’s a graphical display configuration tool called arandr that lets you save the current config into a script, so they are easy to make.
Got a Dell Latitude at work, installed Ubuntu onto it. Worked without any setup. Connect it up to the Dell Thunderbolt dock and I have a pair of monitors hooked up to it, providing three screens.
This. The JetBrains licensing model is great. Subscribe to get updates, with a perpetual fallback license for the last version when your subscription lapsed. Their old versions also continue to work across OS upgrades, etc. If you subscribe, the annual fee decreases substantially for the first few years. This is nothing like Adobe's Creative Cloud.
I thought their fallback perpetual license is actually for the version you had when you purchased it, not for the version that was available when your subscription lapsed?
Not sure if they changed this recently - I stopped following them when they switched to subscription with fairly onerous terms (which they rectified after backlash to ‘mediocre’, but never to ‘fair value’).
You're correct in that the current terms are a result of community backlash, or at least that's how I remember it. What would you consider "fair value" for such a tool? And does that include any period of updates and enhancements?
I would personally be okay with a perpetual license plus one year of updates, and keeping the last version at the end of the paid-for update period. Pretty much what they have, but you get to keep the updates you get, not just the initial version you purchased.
The reason this is more fair is that I am paying for the version and one year of updates. Jetbrains has no right to say at the end of the period that since I did not renew, they are taking back the updates they gave me, as if it was by their grace I had been given the updates. I paid for the updates, I get to keep them.
That said, they have every contractual right to enforce whatever they think is fair, and I have every right to recommend against their products and/or prevent the bulk purchase if I am in a decision-making position about it.
I don't know that this isn't to somehow collect up user data, but this could be to showcase PDFs with embedded video. All my experience with the company has suggested they're on the up-and-up, though.
Disclaimer: I've used the company's SDK fairly extensively in my own product (but I'm not otherwise affiliated with them).
I had the same reaction, though in comparison to other former presidents it could be considered accurate. I did find it interesting that he doesn't receive federal health benefits, having only 4 years of the required 5 years service. (He does receive them through Emory University.)
Does anyone hosting even their immediate family email have a plan for what happens when they're hit by a bus? I've documented how my wife or executor accesses DNS settings and how to access the vendor portals. I can't imagine them, bright as they may be, doing anything more complex than that.
