More accurately, you have spotted not a Linux user in general, but a user of certain Linux distributions, which in my opinion have inadequate display configuration settings.
I am also using only Linux on all my desktops and laptops, and I have never used any display with a resolution less than 4k, for at least the last 12 or 13 years.
Despite of that, I have never encountered any problems with "scaling", because in Linux I have never used any kind of "scaling" (unlike in Windows, which has a font "scaling").
In the kind of Linux that I have been using, I only set an appropriate dots-per-inch value for the monitor, which means that there is no "scaling", which would reduce graphic quality, but all programs render the fonts and other graphic elements at an appropriate size and using in the right way the display resolution.
I configure dots-per-inch values that do not match the actual dpi values of the monitors, but values that ensure that the on-screen size is slightly larger than the on-paper size, because I stay at a greater distance from the monitor than I would keep a paper or a book in my hand (i.e. I set higher dpi values than the real ones, so that any rendering program will believe that the screen is smaller than in reality, so it will render e.g. a 12 point font at a slightly bigger size than 12 points and e.g. an A4 page will be bigger on screen than an A4 sheet of paper; for instance I use 216 dpi for a 27 inch 4k Dell UltraSharp monitor).
Emacs user. And the fonts I use have to work with anti-aliasing turned off.
Right now I'm using a Dell/Alienware AW3225DM and it's perfect for my needs (work + occasional gaming, and most of my gaming is retro). Best Buy was discounting these during the Xmas season.
I do not want anything higher than 2560x1440 because it makes my fonts look tiny, or I have to turn anti-aliasing on. Neither option is OK with me.
Any fonts look much better on a monitor with a higher resolution and the size of the fonts must not vary with the resolution of the monitor. A 4k monitor always provides more legible text than an 2560x1440 monitor.
The size of the fonts used by your documents is specified in typographic points, e.g. 12 points or 14 points. This corresponds to a fixed size on the screen, regardless of the screen resolution. The increased resolution only makes the letters more beautiful, not smaller.
If your fonts become smaller on a monitor with a higher resolution, then you are holding it in the wrong way, i.e. your operating system is badly configured and it does not know the correct dots-per-inch value for your monitor, so it uses a DPI value that corresponds to the obsolete VGA monitors.
A decent operating system should configure automatically the right DPI, because the monitor provides this value to the GPU when it is initialized.
Despite this, for some weird reason many operating systems do not use the DPI value read from the monitor to configure automatically the graphics interface, so it must still be configured manually by the user. Even worse is that the corresponding setting is frequently well hidden, so it is difficult to discover.
In any case, these endless discussions about fonts being to small on high-resolution monitors have been caused only by some incompetent morons who for inexplicable reasons have been in charge of the display settings of the popular operating systems. The user may have reasons to override the true DPI value of the monitor, but by default the OS should have always used the value provided by the monitor EDID, and then you would have never seen any change in font sizes when substituting monitors with different resolutions (except when even more incompetent Web designers specify some sizes in pixels instead of length units; allowing pixels besides length units for the sizes of graphic elements has been a huge mistake, but when this was done several decades ago, most computers did not have GPUs yet, so there were concerns about the rasterization speed in software).
I used to work in my mom and dad's print shop when I was a kid. 6 picas in an inch, 12 points in a pica, and by the time you go home your hands smell like hypo. That should give you an idea of how old I am.
For a kid I was passably good at setting up headlines for paste-up, but I never had to be the one who used an X-Acto Knife.
I'll die on the hill where 2K is better than 4K if your livelihood depends on having to stare at a screen at a distance of 60cm for upwards of 10 hours a day, longer sometimes.
I also think you missed my point about about the anti-aliasing. For various reasons I still use Windows and some of my favorite monospace fonts only exist in the the .FON format. I can emulate the X-Windows experience of using the misc-fixed-medium family and it works just fine for my needs.
I agree that on monitors with insufficient resolution ancient bitmap fonts can be sharper, because they are free of artifacts caused by mismatch between the shape of the letters and the pixel grid.
Your problem is precisely that you use monitors with a too low resolution. On monitors with a high enough resolution, you approach the quality of printed paper and you can use monospace fonts that are more beautiful than any bitmap fonts, without being able to perceive the pixels.
The only problem is that big monitors also need a bigger resolution and the combination of big size with big resolution can be expensive.
While for a size of 27" or 32" the 4k monitors can be quite cheap, I believe that at such sizes a 5k resolution is the minimum for good text rendering, and 5k monitors remain expensive.
In the limit, as pixel density increases, regular, unhinted floating-point-x text looks just like it would on a printed page. How can you get better than that? With enough resolution, you free yourself from all the hacks we've devised to make text on a computer halfway tolerable. Shouldn't doing so be the goal?
If you want that blocky-font retro look, you can use vector art to make squares.
plasma 6 for example has really good fractional scaling, i'd argue it works nicer than windows, where some old apps do not get rendered in higher resolution, some apps do not properly take advantage of it.
Encoding my 40TB library to AV1 with software encoding without losing quality would take more then a year of not multiple years, consume lots of power while doing this, to save a little bit of storage. Granted, after a year of non stop encoding I would save a few TB of space. But it think it is cheaper to buy a new 20TB hard drive than the electricity used for the encoding.
At least use 11 Enterprise (24H2) to mostly avoid the nonstop cacophony of ads. I don't want to hear about 365 or OneDrive or OneNote or Copilot every 3 μs.
Before AppVolumes got bought and became VMware App Volumes, there was Softricity (which became Microsoft App-V).. the app was actually a thin client to talk to a terminal server running the app in a container on a server. Office "installs" in 1 second because it's already "installed" on the app server. The next iteration was AppVolumes streams already installed apps like "Linux snaps" on-demand for Windows to do away with the separate terminal server.
She only uses that laptop for MS Office. She did actually use the browser version for a few months, but even that is a significant downgrade compared to native apps.
MS Office and most popular multiplayer games are the 2 biggest hurdles for Linux adoption at the moment.
I tried using Office on the web for a bit, for some reason there's absolutely no way to disable auto-capitalization on the web, luckily I almost never need to use it anyway, and have LibreOffice and Google Workspace instead.
What were the problems she encountered? I'd assume lag or inelegance, but that can be fixed by using a native Linux solution (i.e. Libreoffice), but I assume you've already tried/rejected that for other reasons. What were those in that case?
Lag was certainly a factor, but there were also weird behaviors like visual glitches and UI rendering issues. There were a number of intermittent problems that are hard to list specifically, as it’s been a few months since we tried it.
She is not a power user. Working inside a container running Windows just to display MS Word introduces complexity. separate file systems, etc. Sometimes the abstraction breaks, and you "fall out" of the app and end up staring at a Windows environment. It is very confusing for a layperson. On top of that, the RAM overhead was significant for her older laptop.
She is a kindergarten teacher. The last thing she can use is friction on her laptop.
We didn't try LibreOffice. I'm familiar with it, but the learning curve/transition is just too much friction. They also share a lot of documents with colleagues. I don't know the current state of compatibility between MS Office and LibreOffice, but I recall layouts breaking regularly. She also has a library of templates originally created in MS Office.
I'm not very proficient nor really need office apps in my day to day use but I've heard good things about OnlyOffice should LibreOffice not meet your needs.
> By accepting this
agreement and using the software you agree that Microsoft may collect, use, and disclose
the information as described in the Microsoft Privacy Statement [...]
There's a couple of terms in contract law, like fairness of obligations, unconscionability, disproportionate penalty, excessive advantage, etc. that the US seems to have forgotten. In the EU and other countries such... aberrations are struck down and unenforceable. People are still scared silly, but the ones that protest are usually left alone.
Those aspects of contract law mean that if MS included "you owe us your first born child" or "if you have not uninstalled this operating system within 2 weeks of installation, you owe Microsoft an additional one million dollars" then that clause wouldn't be valid.
They don't however mean that MS choosing to put adverts all over Windows is illegal, or a breach of the contract, just because users would prefer the OS be ad-free. The EU could legislate in various ways that would mean MS had to stop doing so, but they haven't yet and there's no aspect of general contracts law currently that prevents it.
One could argue that, and like I just wrote in my reply to your sibing comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087142) I would agree with you with regards to ethics, but it's not a valid argument from an actual legal perspective.
I'd love to be proven wrong about this, because I'm not blowing smoke up your ass I really do agree with you in that I wish MS could and would be sued over this, and lose, and have to stop making Windows shit like this. But I'm fairly confident that the only possibility would be for EU (or individual nations) to write new legislation addressing it.
If you bought and paid something (not a subscription) that was ad-free and then all of a sudden in a mandatory update you start to get ads, well, maybe someone already tried and failed to sue MS but personally seems pretty predatory.
From an ethical point of view I completely agree that it's predatory, I just don't believe any EU laws exist that mean anyone would have a chance of success trying to sue over that, I don't believe it to be illegal. And while I'm not all-knowing, nor am I someone who knows every single relevant law like the back of my hand, my opinion is somewhat backed up by the fact that I'm not aware of anyone with actual legal knowledge having ever suggested this behaviour of Microsoft's could be considered illegal the way you want it to be, it's only ever people who are users who think it should be considered breach of contract. (And considering how much money it would be worth if you could sue MS for this and win, if it were even a 50/50 question you'd get lawyers trying.)
Umm actually, you did. You also waived off the right to name your firstborn, and if you disagree, you’ve waived off your right to anything except arbitration. Sorry, I didn’t make the rules.
(Friendly reminder that legality, once again, ≠ morality. Victimless crimes can be illegal, and Enron fucking shit up and filing bankruptcy can be legal.)
In that case you are using a network protocol but one could argue you are still accessing the VM in the same local system the OS has been licensed for. It is a remote access from a software perspective but a local access from a user perspective.
Real question (because it took me, sadly, too long to learn it as an adult): Why don't they gatekeep? Do you think there is compassion for those who fled war in Ukraine, so people are more forgiving about linguistic and cultural differences?
I assumed this meant high school or earlier (18 and under). Most kids I grew up with (including myself) wouldn't be mature enough to do this without explicit instruction (and some policing!). That is why I want to understand more. Example: Did they have a big school meeting where they explained to local kids: "There are bunch of war refugees coming. Here are some things we can do to make them feel more welcome. First: Don't criticize their accent when they are speaking Flemish/Dutch." It is also interesting from the lens of Belgian linguistic culture, as the country is broadly divided north is Flemish, south is French and a tiny part is German.
So "not being a dick" really does need an explanatory framework in your world (and an elaborate one, with mostly irrelevant detail). That's.......a shame.
The problem here is just that upthread Muromec said “it’s that I want to gatekeep” when surely they meant “don’t,” and now there’s a whole chain of misunderstanding.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Kids learn foreign languages much faster than adults, plus get a lot more support and less judgement on mistakes from adults since school kids don't operate in a highly competitive environment.
But good luck reaching proficient fluency in a foreign language in your 30s where you'll face a lot more gatekeeping especially on the jobs market. Many western nations still gate-keep careers and opportunities based on regional accents alone, let alone not being a native speaker.
And before I get assaulted in the comments with the "umm acksually I could do it just fine it never was a problem for me exceptions, YES I know it's possible, it's just much much harder, especially when you've got a full time job and adult responsibilities, compared to doing it when you're 5-15 on the school playground, playing videogames with mates or watching cartoons.
You're conflating 2 issues here: judgement of adult attempts at a new language and the time required to learn it. The first is just a cultural thing, although it is sometimes valid for understanding a speaker (cases in Slavic languages, pronunciation in a homonym-heavy language like French, tones in Asian languages). Problem is that it's oftentimes more "cultural" than "valid" critique, which helps no one.
The second problem is more practical and it's not the only difference between child and adult speakers; the vocabulary required in most day-to-day settings for a child is considerably easier to master than the adult equivalent, regardless of language (describing symptoms to your doctor or getting through a bank or tax appointment will be much more difficult than describing the weather or what you want for lunch). Adults in general are just as good as children at learning new languages, it's just that life has different requirements from that age group.
Edit: that said, I actually am agreeing with your general sentiment
Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids.
Because statements like the original I was replying to of "no time for gatekeeping" are simply not true, but more like the poster doesn't notice it because he (or his kids) are not affected by that gatekeeping.
> Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids.
Adults in general are actually way faster at learning languages than kids if you control for time actually spent learning the language, but generally adults are required to fit language learning in around a full time job (and are also full of shame/embarrassment)
Can't concur. As a kid I learned foreign languages effortlessly, compared to now as an expat. And every other expat here my age shares the same experiences, where their 8 year old already speak the host country's language better than they do.
As another expat, I'd concur with him, with an asterisk. The thing is - your kids are surrounded by the language nonstop. Depending on your situation it may be spoken at school, certainly spoken by some of their friends, teachers, and so on endlessly. But "you" (speaking in generalities of expats and not necessarily literally you)? Unless you happen to have a local wife, then you probably speak it extremely rarely, there's a reasonable chance you can't even read it if it's non-latin, and there's no real need to move beyond that.
Living in one country for a rather long time, my fluency was basically non-existent beyond simple greetings, shopping/eating, and other basic necessities. By contrast somewhat recently I've taken a major interest in another language, one that's generally considered extremely difficult, and I've reached at least basic fluency in about 3 years. The difference? I immersed myself in the other language, my music playlist is overwhelmingly in that language, I've watched endless series and movies in that language, I've made efforts to read books in the other language, and any time I find another speaker I make sure to use the opportunity to talk with him in that language, and so on. If I was in a country where it was the native language, then I'd probably be near fluent by now.
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