Ubuntu 18.04 LTS out!

heatlesssun said:
Windows 10 has actually gotten pretty good at it with a combination of OS and application improvements.
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Many desktops are good with scaling and some are great with scaling now. MATE has awesome scaling now as of 18.04. KDE 5.12 likewise scales very well. Unity was doing pretty good before it was shutdown. Gnome is slowly getting there. I find Windows 10 scales very well too. My problem with 10's scaling is that it tries too hard at times and auto scales to much. I wish is would just stay 100% by default and let the user scale it higher if needed. Really off putting to log in and find it at 150% on a 15 inch laptop.

The real problem is apps. Many apps, especially legacy apps, don't scale worth shit. At work we have some contracts that still use an aging version of BMC Remedy. You want to talk about an app that can't scale to save it's life...BMC Remedy is the one.

I have one lady that for some reason has a Latitude E7250 (12 inch screen) with a 1080p screen. She was complaining about Remedy being blurry and sent me a screenshot. Holy hell...it looked like my vision was back to pre-LASIK. Come to find out she's running that shit at 250% (which in itself is nuts) but when I said back it down to 100% and slowly increase it up to where it's still usable I was told "anything less than 250 is unreadable". Meaning this lady must wear coke bottles. So my next comment was...OK let's get you an external monitor (she works remote). "No room for that." OK...let's get you a new laptop with a bigger screen and not 1080p. "Oh I can't do that, it has to be a laptop this small as I don't want anything heavier." So I gave up and said fine you can keep the E7250 but I can't do a damn thing about the blurriness.
 
Vermillion said:
I find Windows 10 scales very well too. My problem with 10's scaling is that it tries too hard at times and auto scales to much. I wish is would just stay 100% by default and let the user scale it higher if needed.
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You can control scaling on a per app basis in Windows 10 now. As much as this has been a problem for a long time now it's close to being a non-issue with Windows 10. Absolutely it is largely an issue with individual apps as I've long said, I've mention Steam how many times before they fixed it? At least on Windows 10. SO MUCH BETTER. Especially on high-DPI screens.

The amount of weirdness I'm with an out of box experience with high-DPI on my Surface Pro 3 is crazy. Mouse cursors changing in size, micro text especially on WINE apps, and there's tons of those in the Ubuntu store.

I know that I'm not desktop Linux expert but maybe before blasting Microsoft on whatever that maybe some of those Linux geniuses can do better than Microsoft on being able to read text on screen?
 
heatlesssun said:
You can control scaling on a per app basis in Windows 10 now. As much as this has been a problem for a long time now it's close to being a non-issue with Windows 10. Absolutely it is largely an issue with individual apps as I've long said, I've mention Steam how many times before they fixed it? At least on Windows 10. SO MUCH BETTER. Especially on high-DPI screens.

The amount of weirdness I'm with an out of box experience with high-DPI on my Surface Pro 3 is crazy. Mouse cursors changing in size, micro text especially on WINE apps, and there's tons of those in the Ubuntu store.

I know that I'm not desktop Linux expert but maybe before blasting Microsoft on whatever that maybe some of those Linux geniuses can do better than Microsoft on being able to read text on screen?
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How do I control it per-app on Win10?

I actually don't know if I can do it per-app on KDE or MATE. I don't use those DE's. So they may be able to but I certainly don't know. I use Budgie and it isn't High-DPI aware yet. That comes with Budgie 11 when they move to QT sometime in the future.
 
Vermillion said:
How do I control it per-app on Win10?
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Right click on a Win32 app and select properties and you should see this dialog:

upload_2018-5-17_22-38-35.png
 
You can control it per app under Windows 10, but if the application isn't configured for HiDPI it still looks terrible.
 
heatlesssun said:
Windows 10 has actually gotten pretty good at it with a combination of OS and application improvements.
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Windows has definitely improved. I think MacOS does scaling better than anyone, but when you have a 100% iron fisted control over apps and os, you can do things like that.

Linux has been pretty much better at scaling than Windows, but not on a right out of the box install. Regardless of windows or linux if you install the OS on a 13" 4k display, you are going to have problems.

Hell, I run 2x28" 4k monitors, and I have to drop the resolution down to 2560x1600 because I can't read shit if I don't.
 
KarsusTG said:
Hell, I run 2x28" 4k monitors, and I have to drop the resolution down to 2560x1600 because I can't read shit if I don't.
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My eyesight's pretty crappy, I find the same thing unless everything's scaled to stupid proportions making my desktop look all huge.
 
KarsusTG said:
Regardless of windows or linux if you install the OS on a 13" 4k display, you are going to have problems.
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My Surface Book 2 15" is the highest DPI device I use daily now. Not 13" 4k but still pretty dense. Windows 10 defaults scaling at 200%. All the major browsers, Office, Steam, the Windows shell, Visual Studio, Steam, Acrobat, all the major stuff now scales perfectly. Even most open source stuff I use works well. There are things like CPUZ & GPUZ that don't scale well, not looking at those all day.

It all boils down to the apps of course but it shouldn't be a problem with the bulk of popular Win32 apps. And whatever UWPs one uses have always scaled perfectly.

As for Linux, I've been researching that a good bit the last week. Honestly I'm surprised at how little I'm seeing on the subject. There's info out that, few demos on YouTube, but just seems a bit light.
 
KarsusTG said:
Windows has definitely improved. I think MacOS does scaling better than anyone, but when you have a 100% iron fisted control over apps and os, you can do things like that.

Linux has been pretty much better at scaling than Windows, but not on a right out of the box install. Regardless of windows or linux if you install the OS on a 13" 4k display, you are going to have problems.

Hell, I run 2x28" 4k monitors, and I have to drop the resolution down to 2560x1600 because I can't read shit if I don't.
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Apple does not have iron fisted control over MacOS apps they do it only with iOS and there's a reason. Security. You can have multiple third party softwares for MacOS the most proliferous being different types of pro audio softwares.
 
I am digging 18.04 so far. I need to upgrade the antiquated GTX 670 in this 4770K build, but it is a gorgeous hunk of Emby server, HT box right now. Not horrible at a bit of gaming either
 
So I finally got some quality time with Ubuntu 18.04. I like it. 4K 60Hz was detected right off the bat on first boot, I had a lot of problems with this before. Even HDMI audio worked with the default open source drivers. Very nice.

One thing that was lost was the fractional scaling, but 200% is not that bad and I can get used to it. Overall it's nice and I haven't had too many problems yet.
 
cybereality said:
So I finally got some quality time with Ubuntu 18.04. I like it. 4K 60Hz was detected right off the bat on first boot, I had a lot of problems with this before. Even HDMI audio worked with the default open source drivers. Very nice.

One thing that was lost was the fractional scaling, but 200% is not that bad and I can get used to it. Overall it's nice and I haven't had too many problems yet.
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On Wayland you should still have the old scaling options.
 
cybereality said:
So I finally got some quality time with Ubuntu 18.04. I like it. 4K 60Hz was detected right off the bat on first boot, I had a lot of problems with this before. Even HDMI audio worked with the default open source drivers. Very nice.
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Agreed. On my RX 580 my new triple displayport setup is working great and I can easily switch between 120hz 1080p or 60hz 4k on my primary TV right from the display options GUI. It's actually less flaky than Windows, sometimes Windows screws up when switching to 4k.
 
I am 3 weeks into 18.04 on a laptop that I thought I would have to keep locked down to windows.

I always had issues installing Ubuntu to it. It has an M.2 SSD and for some reason, it would fail and I would get a generic "ubuntu has crashed" error while installing it. I tried about everything I could think of in terms of BIOS settings but couldn't get it to work. I ended up finding a mix of stuff that I could change that got me past the installer. The 2nd issue I have always had was that the laptop has a 4k display. I always had to change the resolution down to 1920x1080 since other distros had a hard time with scaling. Out of the box, HiDpi worked very well. I could keep the resolution native and 99% of the stuff I use scaled perfectly. Steam was the only program I continue to have problems with, but thats not a Linux problem, thats a problem Valve needs to work out. I got everything themed the way I like and took it with me on vacation last week as on my only laptop (for work and personal stuff). I had to build a Windows 10 VM inside it to take care of some work stuff, but thats the only interaction I had with Windows the entire week.

This is the most impressed I have been with any Linux distro, ever. Its extremely impressive. The only problem I have left is trying to get Wow installed. I've tried everything from youtube videos, to written tutorials (for 18.04 even), to the new flatpak installer, to lutris. No dice. I'll keep plugging away at it though.
 
The native distro upgrade in Ubunutu WSL worked perfectly to upgrade to 18.04. Been running it for a couple weeks now with zero issues. It's only the bash shell, so I can't comment on any GUI features.
 
AltTabbins said:
This is the most impressed I have been with any Linux distro, ever. Its extremely impressive.
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I'm about a month into running 18.04 on my Surface Pro 3. All the hardware at least functioned out of the box, got a number of things installed, LibreOffice, Audacity, Spotify, Steam, etc. Everything at least runs. Scaling though has been a big issue. It's extremely inconsistent. Most native stuff scales fine except Spotify and Steam and yes that's a Steam problem, they just got scaling fixed on the latest versions of Windows 10 only a couple of months ago. No WINE apps scale so far. But even things like the accelerometer, touchscreen and pen work out of the box. Some odd behaviors with touch though, clicking on the all apps button works fine, with doesn't respond with touch. Beyond that battery life isn't as good as Windows 10 though the battery on this device is getting old, I've have the device for 3.5 years now.

So not trying to debate anything. Been looking into the scaling stuff, haven't really tried anything yet. I know folks will say a Surface Pro 3 is "proprietary" though issues like scaling probably wouldn't have anything to do with that. I think though these kinds of issues stress the importance of getting Linux pre-installed on devices so that OEMs can work though these kinds of things and create solid OBO experiences if desktop Linux is ever to be mainstream. As a web browser or document editor with LibreOffice, this Surface Pro 3 is useable under 18.04 and I can still crank out tunes with Spotify, just a bit hard to read.
 
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Manjaro decided it didn't want to boot anymore on my desktop. I have spent the last few days troubleshooting it and the basic consensus is "just reinstall". Meanwhile, my laptop with Ubuntu 18.04 is running strong with no issues. I've actually just plopped it down on my desk and used it in the meantime anyways. I just put 18.04 on a flash drive and im going to be installing it on my desktop today. I would have done it sooner but I wanted to see how the 8.0 patch for wow played out since it came out Tuesday. I figured if it just wasn't working in Linux, I could at install W10 and then reinstall ubuntu alongside it for dual boot. From what I have seen and read, its running great so im just going to install Ubuntu and a W10 VM for stuff for work.
 
AltTabbins said:
Manjaro decided it didn't want to boot anymore on my desktop. I have spent the last few days troubleshooting it and the basic consensus is "just reinstall". Meanwhile, my laptop with Ubuntu 18.04 is running strong with no issues. I've actually just plopped it down on my desk and used it in the meantime anyways. I just put 18.04 on a flash drive and im going to be installing it on my desktop today. I would have done it sooner but I wanted to see how the 8.0 patch for wow played out since it came out Tuesday. I figured if it just wasn't working in Linux, I could at install W10 and then reinstall ubuntu alongside it for dual boot. From what I have seen and read, its running great so im just going to install Ubuntu and a W10 VM for stuff for work.
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My current limitation for Ubuntu 18.04 is the Unifi controller...

After fighting with 18.04 and then 17.10 LTS, the consensus was 'just install 16.04 LTS'. And it works.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
My current limitation for Ubuntu 18.04 is the Unifi controller...

After fighting with 18.04 and then 17.10 LTS, the consensus was 'just install 16.04 LTS'. And it works.
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Luckily I have mine on my server that’s still on windows. I’ll be going to 16.04 on my server when I get the drive to. I’m procrastinating it since I don’t want to reinstall everything.
 
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