Jesse is back but this time Félim is in his sick bed so it’s a 3 man show yet again. Some heated debates about Nextcloud’s actions, Ubuntu extended support and PowerPC distros, followed by a deep dive into the world of HiDPI 4k support in Linux.
News
Nextcloud going too far to ensure that people stay up to date?
Introducing Ubuntu 12.04 ESM (Extended Security Maintenance)
With the death of Ubuntu MATE for PowerPC, a fork appears
Admin
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We also spoke about a couple of upcoming events:
HiDPI
Ikey has been trying out some of the big desktop environments on his new 4k monitor.
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Some feedback on the EOL of PowerPC 32-bit support. That architecture has now been removed entirely from the 17.04 archive, trying to build off it’s remains is a bad idea. While I wish the community initiative the best of luck with their PowerPC remix, I think they’ll struggle. Let’s remember PowerPC 32-bit is still supported in 16.04 until 2019, so building on top of 16.04 would have better longevity. As for performance a G4 Macbook is significantly out formed by a Raspberry Pi 3. So if you’ve got an old PowerPC Macbook and are on a budget then upgrade to a Pi 3 and stick Ubuntu MATE on it and you’ll have a better computing experience. I’m not being facetious either, you really will.
That said, it is the owners of new computers based on PowerPC that I have most sympathy with. It is these users who you see regularly posting screenshots of Ubuntu MATE running on their AmigaONE X5000 and X1000 from the likes of A-EON – http://www.a-eon.com
The owners of these modern and capable PowerPC based computers have fewer options for Linux operating systems now that PowerPC 32-bit is no longer a release architecture in Debian and the architecture is dropped from Ubuntu going forward. But this group of users is very small in my experience, just 0.4% of Ubuntu MATE downloads are for PowerPC, i386 is ~5%, amd64 is ~45% and ~50% is for the Pi.
Now on to the topic of HiDPI support in MATE. It is labelled experimental and not advertised as a feature, because it’s terrible. When GDK scaling is set the individual applications scale very nicely. But Marco (the window manager) makes a bollocks of calculating screen dimensions and MATE Panel has little to no compensation in calculating strut offsets when pixel doubled. Now MATE is finally GTK3+ only (all GTK2+ code was dropped in MATE 1.18) it is a feature we want to improve and something we’ve discussed with Ikey and would love his involvement with. Being somewhat late to the HiDPI has some advantages in that we can learn from the challenges other desktop environments have encountered on their HiDPI journeys. As for Unity 8 you can enable pixel scaling even though there is no UI to manipulate it and it looks pretty great on my XPS 15. See my G+ post that explains how to ‘export GRID_UNIT_PX=16’ in ~/.profile – https://plus.google.com/+MartinWimpress/posts/b77FTcgEJdw
Finally monitors. I completely agree with Ikey on the point about not buying a UHD monitor. A bit over a year ago I got a 27″ 2560×1440 Samsung IPS monitor, this works with all Linux desktops, all tiling window managers and applications of any toolkit without having to fiddle with scaling options.
As Ikey said this is due to the physical size of the monitor versus it’s resolution, which in my case, translates to a “typical” 96dpi. When I found myself needing more screen resolution recently I simply got a second monitor of the same model, effectively giving me the equivalent of 8x720p resolution screens. I have one monitor plugged into my Skull Canyon NUC via HDMI and the other via display port. The NUC is more than capable of pushing the pixels around those two screens, even when playing 1440p YouTube videos it purrs along.
I’m on Jesse’s side. On a residential gateway, if you can’t bothered with a decent VPS setup on a public-facing port 80 server (yes, it is a server), then you deserve to get all the ISP notices in the world.
I agree that there are better ways for NextCloud to keep their users updated or aware of updates (and ISP’s shutting people down was unfortunate and probably not anticipated by NextCloud), but otherwise I feel similarly to Jesse in not being bothered about what was done. These were public facing servers and NextCloud just probed the landing page. It’s not like they did penetration testing.
There’s are still BSDs around to run on PowerPC ;P
From my experience with a 1.2 (or was it 1.4?) GHz G4 iBook a decade ago I they they were only a little behind the then popular Pentium M. The 64bit G5 then were around the Pentium D (64bit Pentium 4 glued together on one die) performancewise.
Dell workstations come with DisplayPort since 2010 I think and they rarely gave us any troubles. Same thing for Macbooks.
The only thing I can think of is the newest Dell diplays not powering on again when you wake up a connected, previously suspended thinkpad.
Hey just wanted to give you a quick heads up and let you know a few of the pictures aren’t loading properly. I’m not sure why but I think its a linking issue. I’ve tried it in two different web browsers and both show the same results.
I think it’s an https issue. I’ll investigate.
I wanted to second Ikey’s comment near the end of the podcast about just getting a good, standard resolution monitor. I have a consumer-level experience that is consistent with this. Years ago, when my CRT TV finally gave up, I got a bit crazy and bought a very nice Pioneer plasma 60 inch TV. Which is still running, so we’re still using it. A few months ago, I spent a week at a rental house that sported a 60 inch Vizio 4K TV, and had a Netflix account that provided some real (so they say) 4K content. I was almost afraid to watch, but it turned out to be very nice. I started to worry about what I would decide when I got back to my ancient plasma TV. Oh, did I mention that it isn’t even 1080p, its only 720p… Well, it is still extremely watchable, and it retains its place until something even more spectacular than 4K comes along. Yes, the truly picky could see the difference, but the contrast and so forth are really outstanding. So, I would like the “+1” the advice to get a good monitor.
On the other hand, Ikey also said that HDMI always seems to just work. For a good time, try getting the aforementioned Pioneer TV working with some of the distros currently available for the ODROID C2. More than half the time, I get no picture at all, and when I ssh in and check the logs, I find entries that say something like “HDMI no video”. The audio works fine, so I guess that’s a win. And yes, it boils down to EDID sucking mightily in Linux. Plus, once EDID has spoken, there does not seem to be a thing you can do about it. When I do find a distro that can produce a picture, without fail it overscans enough so that I lose the top and bottom 8 lines of image, and about 8 or 10 characters from the left side – no toolbars in grahpical boots, no prompts a command prompt. Great fun!
Long time listener to Linux Luddites, first time listener to LNL. I like the show, it’s really good! Only thing I dislike is the cursewords, which I believe was absent from Luddites.
Best,
Jarl
Hi Jarl,
We had a long discussion about this when planning the show and while we weren’t crippled by being SFW on LL we did want to be able to let rip now and then on LNL.
Plus with two Irish on the team SFW would have required too much editing!! 😛
Hope it isn’t too often to ruin your enjoyment of LNL.
Here’s to a full 4-man team for LNL7.
(-:
I have a 28″ monitor, and plasma 5 works great on it. Unfortunately getting it set up is non- intuitive. Ikey is quite right- the scaling slider doesn’t seem to do what it should. It was added very recently, and doesn’t seem to be working yet. Currently It works better to go into settings->fonts and use the “force DPI” option. Many things, like window title bars, will scale up around the fonts. Then there are also a bunch of things you need to change manually. The panel will be too small, but it can be dragged to any size, and everything will scale to fit. Fonts in the text editor and terminal are 9 point by default, and will need to be changed to 11 or 12. Icons in Dolphin are too small. In the side bar you can change this by right clicking, and the main pane has a slider. Also every window opens too small the first time you use it. Fortunately Plasma remembers window sizes, so once you resize them, they always open that way.
Is this ideal user experience? No. Is it it usable once you set it up? Yes. In fact it’s quite good as long as you stick to QT5 apps, and other apps that support hidpi. Firefox should get a mention here. It used to be necessary to dig around in about:config to get it to scale, but now it just works. On the other hand, get out your magnifying glass if you want to use Steam in desktop mode.
And, please everyone, don’t run Kubuntu 16.04, it’s too old. If you run anything before Plasma 5.8, you’re missing out on stability and features. Also, try the Wayland session- it’s coming along nicely.
Have you even looked at Qt’s HiDpi support? I’m sorry, but it really doesn’t sound like you did your research here, at all :-/
Did you listen? I spoke about Qt/KDE.