This is why I won't use open source for a desktop anymore. It's so convoluted and changes so often that I have to constantly keep track of multiple kernel and userland systems in order to know what tweaks I don't need to make.

"Don't use the faffle-fille.123456 tweak, that's for the 2016 driver; the 2019 driver inherits the booble-babble hack from the nzudzu core. Also, the 611-double-decker-dev release added FOO_MANCHU support so you just need the abcdefghijk=999 argument to set up all the things you would expect to work by default."

I just want to pay someone to make my computer work the way it's designed to.

If you are hinting to proprietary systems in your last sentence, you can go ahead and pay someone to lock you into their ecosystem. This is how Free Software works and I wouldn't have it any other way. People work on their own and bring it together into one whole system, and that can cause incompatibilities. However lock-step design is also one of the key ways to destroy innovation. If you lack the desire to learn how to configure your system, then you will probably not want to use a Free system. That's just how it is.

I hope this doesn't sound rude, but that is exactly why desktop Linux and friends are a piss-poor experience compared to their proprietary counterparts.

There is a negative feedback look here. With enough of that kind of "customization freaks only, casuals need not apply, enjoy your non-innovative proprietary shitware" talk, user bases stay small and niche, people get alienated, and don't contribute to or use free OSes.

It's perfectly reasonable to want to trade customizability for usability. Chasing people who think that away from free software helps nobody.

There's plenty of free polished out-of-the-box experiences, from Ubuntu/Mint/elementary/whatever to hardware from Purism and system76.

There's definitely some "customization freaks only" assholes on the internet too, but…

very very often, it seems like some people perceive that when a non-out-of-the-box OS just exists and people like using it just personally for themselves.

There is definitely progress here since the early '00s. However, there's a very long way to go until even the most polished home-user Linux distros approach the level of usability (and supportability, even more critical) of proprietary OSes for non-power-users.

And I wasn't trying to paint everyone who wants to tinker with the same "gatekeeping" brush, sorry if I came off that way. GP equated proprietary software with "pay[ing] someone to lock you into their ecosystem" and "destroy[ing] innovation", and ended with

> If you lack the desire to learn how to configure your system, then you will probably not want to use a Free system. That's just how it is.

That's the sentiment I had trouble with. Not the existence of knobs (which should continue existing! Just with better tuning experience for casual users, and saner defaults).

I just want software that works well. In some ways, Free Software is that, and in some ways, it isn't.

I reject the idea that this is how it has to be. There is no reason Free Software has to be user-unfriendly.

You can use Ubuntu/Mint/elementary/etc. and it's very user-friendly. You can pay Purism or system76 to deliver you a literal physical out-of-the-box experience.

But, like, let tinkerers tinker. Nobody said that this should be the way to go for everyone or that user-friendly unix does not exist. You brought the assumption that all Free Software is like that into a thread about a specific less-popular explicitly-not-desktop-oriented OS ;)

But you are replying to a comment that says you don't need the tweaks.

I think the situation is a little bit made worse by the fact that historically, FreeBSD had some poor or out of date defaults, so it is prone to putting something in a config file and forgetting about it as it meanwhile becomes obsolete. This is not really an "open source desktop" problem so much as a FreeBSD problem.

Yeah, I think it really comes down to the fact that the only way to have every detail on your system exactly the way you want it would take more time than you'll have in your life, so we make compromises. Commercial software & community-driven open source software offer different sets of compromises

I think you have misinterpreted the parent comment.

The point is precisely that manual tweaks to drivers selection, kernel settings, and Xorg/wayland, survive in modern desktop Linux mostly as an example of cargo cult. They aren't necessary, or even advisable in most cases.

> And since you like i3, might want to try Sway – HiDPI is much better supported on Wayland ;)

I don't understand why people say that ; I had my first hidpi screen in 2014 and it worked fine from day 1 on X - to the extent apps & toolkits themselves supported it; the only two that took their time were chrome and firefox but even today they work fine ; the last remaining bastion is TCL/Tk but this does not even work natively on wayland anyways.

here's how it looks for me today on X11 : https://i.imgur.com/VfWisJ7.png

I would gladly make a comparative sway screenshot but it is unbearably slow on my machine (maybe due to nvidia drivers), the keymap is incorrect, and half the programs I want to use don't even launch

Now try having a HiDPI and a LoDPI monitor connected at the same time :)

Wayland fractional scaling doesn't work for Chromium and Electron apps, with X11 it's at least possible to make it work.

> At least on 12-stable (idk if it made it into a 12.x-release) EVDEV_SUPPORT is enabled out of the box

The GENERIC kernel configuration for FreeBSD-12.x-release does not support EVDEV out of the box. It is there however for both 12 stable and of course head.

Yeah, not in 12.0. it will in 12.1, I just didn't know if it might be out already. I don't follow releases, CURRENT all the things :)

> And since you like i3, might want to try Sway – HiDPI is much better supported on Wayland ;)

Seconding this.

Long time Windows, Linux AND i3 user.

When I (for the Nth time) tried Sway recently, I was blown away by the multi-display support and how well it handled DPI-differences between those.

It was without a doubt the best HiDPI experience I’ve had on any OS so far.

If you’ve tried Sway in the past and given up on it (like I did), for lack of maturity or whatever, do give it a spin now.

IMO it’s finally ready. It’s finally here.

I've gone from i3 -> sway -> i3. Maybe it has gotten better since I last used it; but generally I disliked it.

There are 3 distinct issues I've had (one of which I believe was a Wayland-related problem).

(1) I dislike how you can resize a window horizontal & vertical at the same time. Grab a corner, and adjust. I distinctly think that this is a feature and not a bug, I just don't like it. I vastly prefer i3's method of 'Adjust vertical' OR 'Adjust Horizontal' depending on where your mouse is.

(2) Window-title bar. The size of the font/title bar dynamically changing. Lets say I have firefox open with 3 xterm windows in a even 2x2 matrix. I might have 10 Tabs in Firefox open. As I cycle through the firefox tabs the height of the title-bar changes to reflect the website name. With some sites the font size and/or style changes (from default) too. This causes the titlebar size to change by 1-2 pixels. That causes a screen refresh/redraw and my 2x2 window matrix is no longer 'aligned'. The lack of alignment doesn't bother me, but the 'flicker' it causes does.

(3) Wayland specific: screenshots. I need to be able to take screenshots for parts of my job. I've worked around most of these issues (FireFox has a screenshot tool built-in,etc..) but once in a while I'll need to grab an xterm or something else. [ok this has just devolved into a rant.]

I only have one 4k screen, and had some issues with scaling, but I'd be willing to take another stab at Sway.

I take screenshots All. The. Time. Multiple per day, usually just a part of a screen for pasting into an email or IM. Windows win+shift+s works great for this. I couldn’t live without an analogous feature.

screenshots work, grim can do screenshots and chained with slurp you can select a region as well

  bindsym Print exec grim -g "$(slurp)" "$HOME/screenshot-$(date).png"

I could have sworn I tried this. Thanks for posting. I'll bookmark it if/when I go back to Wayland.

It'd be nice to diff a gist of an updated sysctl/rc.conf for this / whatever you use updated to 12.x.

I took a better look at some man pages and updated the article to remove unnecessary tunables.