Re:Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
by shaan7 on Saturday April 03, 2021 @07:36AM
(#26680163)
Interesting. Apart from the per-display scaling (which is basically a Xorg limitation as you said) I had the opposite experience on my XPS 13. At the end I did not want a 4K display but Dell did not offer me the option. So I just used 1080p scaled most of the time.
Battery life was stupid on Windows (~3-4 hours max, while Linux did 7-8 with moderate load). Somehow on Windows the fan would always be running even without any significant activity in Resource Monitor.
I remember playing 4K videos on Linux (Firefox though, and I only tested YouTube) without any trouble (with monitor disconnected though, due to what you described earlier).
Touchpad would work sweet on Linux but needed some tweaking on Windows (otherwise it'd 2-finger scroll too fast sometimes).
Re:Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
by freebuju on Saturday April 03, 2021 @06:27AM
(#26679810)
Video tearing could be because of xorg. Try Wayland with HW decode, you have to manually enable it. Both chrome & Firefox support this now.
My experience is different from yours. With Wayland I had smoother graphics than xorg.
- when using external display, video tearing would be visible either on internal or external display
- Xorg doesn't really support different scaling for different displays, and Wayland has other issues
- battery life is shorter than on Windows
- graphics performance is worse, at least in Firefox/Chrome (smooth animations on Windows would be choppy on Linux)
- touchpad is not great on Windows, but it's even worse on Linux (even after fiddling with settings, and trying many solutions, using it on Windows feels better)