Weekly Edition
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Quotes of the week
And the next technology journalist that asks you whether you want
fonts that small, I'll just hunt down and give an atomic wedgie.
— Linus
Torvalds doesn't do blocking wedgies
And suddenly causing a complete cessation of vm scanning at a
particular magic threshold seems rather crude, compared to some
complex graduated thing which will also always do the wrong thing,
only more obscurely ;)
— Andrew Morton
You will get this message once a day until you've dealt with these
bugs!
— bugzilla@kernel.org failing to win
friends and influence developers(Log in to post comments)
Quotes of the week Posted Nov 1, 2012 4:56 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
Finally someone that understands about screen resolutions and how crappy current lot of laptops is in that regard.
Quotes of the week Posted Nov 1, 2012 8:49 UTC (Thu) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]
...loving my Asus Zenbook, although would have hoped it to ship with a Linux variant (one unused Win7 OEM serial code something for sale).
Quotes of the week Posted Nov 1, 2012 10:51 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
Hmm, 1920x1080, perhaps the best you can hope for these days. Personally, I avoid 16:9 screens; the slightly taller 16:10 (giving 1920x1200) is still a bit letterboxy in a screen that does not rotate.
I think Linus is asking for some real progress in displays, without having to pay Apple prices to get it. If a 10-inch tablet can do 2560x1600 it should not be too hard to get that same resolution (or better) in a laptop.
Quotes of the week Posted Nov 4, 2012 21:04 UTC (Sun) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]
I'd be happy with having at least 1000 pixels vertically at 13 or 14 inches.
This is already hard to find.
1920x1080 or better 1920x1200 at 13 inches and above would be absolutely ok, I don't really need 2560x1600 or something like that.
Alex
Quotes of the week Posted Nov 1, 2012 19:55 UTC (Thu) by khc (subscriber, #45209) [Link]
which one do you have? how well is linux working on it?
Quotes of the week Posted Nov 4, 2012 10:37 UTC (Sun) by tcourbon (subscriber, #60669) [Link]
I have the late 2011 Asus Zenbook (I think it's an UX31E, can't check right now, my girlfriend is watching a cooking show on it...) and I'm running ubuntu 12.10 (and previsouly 12.04 pre-release and release). It's running fine. Especially now the needed drivers and ACPI fixes are into mainline kernel.
I can get up to 6h of battery use (brigthness 50%, wifi off) using sublime text and listening to music with earbuds. I used to have poor wifi reecption but seems a thing of the past *knock wood*.
Quotes of the week Posted Nov 11, 2012 17:13 UTC (Sun) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]
laptops. Pshaw.
Android tablets. Facebook client. Nuff said... except, apparently, to Android developers who, in that famous observation, "seem to require adult supervision".
Quotes of the week Posted Nov 1, 2012 9:33 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
High resolution laptop screens are great as long as those with less than perfect eyesight can globally control all font sizes through a central DPI or "percentage enlargement" feature. Windows and Linux (X11's DPI) have this.
Unfortunately Mac OS X doesn't have this at all, so I'm reduced to application by application font size changes and custom plugins, on a Macbook Air 13" (1440x900). The result is that websites look terrible in Chrome for Mac on my laptop, due to Apple's insistence that resizing DPI globally is bad because it makes button images look worse. Oh the irony...
Quotes of the week Posted Nov 1, 2012 10:55 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
With the new Apple laptops they just apply a 2x scaling factor globally, which means that button images resize without getting ugly. On the 15-inch model the GPU then scales *down* by 0.75 to fit the display. A neat trick, but it wouldn't be necessary if the software were able to change the dpi setting properly.
Even if you have perfect eyesight, you don't want to view a 300ppi display with glyphs designed for 100ppi. My vision (after surgery) is better than average and my monitor is only 200ppi, but it still looks unreasonably tiny if you don't increase the font size.
Quotes of the week Posted Nov 1, 2012 20:56 UTC (Thu) by bjencks (subscriber, #80303) [Link]
The other problem that Windows and Linux have, but Apple doesn't, is that the DPI control is *global*. I have a nice 150ppi laptop screen, and things look great if I set the scaling appropriately on it. I also plug it into a nice big 96ppi monitor, and things look great on it if I set scaling back to "normal". But then things are tiny on the laptop display sitting right next to it.
Apple avoids this by only ever doing 2-to-1 scaling, and doing it on a per-display basis.
I've seen a few people argue against true resolution-independence on the basis that the current mechanism does something vaguely sensible on the monitor vs. TV use case where naive resolution-independence wouldn't. There seem to be two different variables that get conflated a lot: the actual density of the display, and the desired physical font size, which depends on the user's viewing distance, eyesight, personal preference, and even the PPI (I can read smaller fonts on higher density displays).
There's also the issue of how non-text UI elements should be scaled. For instance, widget borders would probably look pretty terrible at non-integer thicknesses. On the other hand, on a 300+ PPI display, single pixel borders start to be pretty hard to see.
Quotes of the week Posted Nov 1, 2012 10:18 UTC (Thu) by etienne (subscriber, #25256) [Link]
> whether you want fonts that small
I did use and like the "unreadable" font of Xterm, something like 6x4, so that you can keep a look of a syslog of a remote PC in a corner of your screen (if red letters appear there, increase font and read).
Small fonts Posted Nov 1, 2012 13:42 UTC (Thu) by kirr (subscriber, #14329) [Link]
Also, there is a very readable 11x6 font here:
Small fonts Posted Nov 1, 2012 16:43 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
>Also, there is a very readable 11x6 font here: http://font.gohu.org/
That brings us to another point: font thickness. Some people – me included – prefer fonts that use strokes at least 2px thick. The default font of many VGA ROMs matches this 2px property, the font you linked (both at 11px and 14px size) uses 1px thick strokes.
1px-thick fonts are prone to being hard to read, especially at [A] high resolution (pixels become small) or [B] your monitor has to do scaling and fitting for your text console and antialiases the stroke. And that's why the Debian font – the one that shows up in the installer – is completely awful IMHO.
Now, if you can upscale bitmaps fonts somehow, then it's all good — but I do not see HQ2X support in xterm yet, nor am I aware of a pcf2ttf tool.
Small fonts Posted Nov 9, 2012 5:31 UTC (Fri) by cyanit (guest, #86671) [Link]
Use a TrueType font, set weight as desired.
atomic wedgie Posted Nov 1, 2012 22:29 UTC (Thu) by lacos (subscriber, #70616) [Link]
The most important bit in this discussion has not yet been posted. "atomic wedgie" is not an ad-hoc word composition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedgie
"The Atomic Wedgie entails hoisting the waistband of the receiver's underwear up and over their head."
BTW a horizontal resolution of at least 2048 would be important because most websites do not shrink below 1024 pixels horizontally. (Definitely not down to 1920/2=960, let alone 1600/2=800!) That's when the ridiculous horizontal scrollbar appears.
Thus a 1920-pixel wide screen (not to mention an 1600px wide one) is unfit to display two browser windows side by side. Then one can choose from:
atomic wedgie Posted Nov 1, 2012 23:03 UTC (Thu) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]
>Might not be that bad, but what window manager supports that with quick (tiling) keyboard shortcuts? Resizing windows "free-hand" is lame.
Maybe this was a rhetorical question, but this is exactly where tiling window managers excel. I have been using wmii for a year or so now, and it's amazing how much screen space I have, and how useful it is.
(Of course, this is not a mainstream suggestion, since ordinary people would probably not appreciate learning to move their windows with Win+[vi keys]...)
atomic wedgie Posted Nov 2, 2012 5:32 UTC (Fri) by bros (subscriber, #75198) [Link]
Try i3-wm - I've switched to it from Awesome right after I tried it. The level of freedom it provides is awesomer (<- not a typo). :)
atomic wedgie Posted Nov 4, 2012 16:56 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
> BTW a horizontal resolution of at least 2048 would be important because most websites do not shrink below 1024 pixels horizontally. (Definitely not down to 1920/2=960, let alone 1600/2=800!) That's when the ridiculous horizontal scrollbar appears.
Hmm, I regularly use a browser window split in two on a 1920×1080 screen. I rarely have to move a browser window to a separate workspace to get a full view of the page, but it's not as often as this would make one think. On my 1440x900, yes, it happens a lot. I do have bindings to modify the split location, but they're probably among my least used bindings.
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