> Good luck getting multiple different sized monitors to work well out of the box (e.g. laptop + external) on Linux,

Just Works™ actually. Using a laptop/external simultaneous combo at different resolutions right now, and it's literally perfect. It even gets the scaling right. Not a second of configuration.

Lucky. I'm currently on a 20.04 install with a 1080p laptop + 4k, and the scaling options are 100% or 200% for a monitor with fractional scaling I can apply with tinkering that applies to both at the same time. I just sort of have it in a non-optimal for either monitor state but I'm sure there's some way which I didnt find when I first installed it to make it okay. On a different machine and combination of monitors I've gotten it to work but with a lot of xrandr tinkering instead. I'm hopeful that your comment might suggest that next time I upgrade it'll work out of the box.

Ubuntu's upstream and release schedule ensures that its packages are relatively out of date. It might be worth trying 21.04 for real fractional scaling with Wayland or a different distro with recent packages and Wayland.

You're almost certainly right, as far as I can tell it should be fine with Wayland and 21.04 but I am just tired of reinstalling my OS every 6 months and don't trust direct upgrades much since they lose me even more time diagnosing an issue in the cases where they do break something.

I've upgraded a few of my systems from 20.04 to 21.04 without an issue. If you take a btrfs snapshot before upgrading, you can roll back the changes if it turns out there's an issue with them.

It's not lucky, it's just that I know better than to install Ubuntu. Ubuntu's been a bad choice from the beginning and intentionally goes against the defaults of upstream providers. Random corporate distributions never know better than upstream.

Ok, that's fair. Maybe I'll finally decide that Ubuntu has more drawbacks than advantages for me (and it does have both) and finally switch to Debian directly.

This is more than basic functionality, but I'm experiencing limitations with multiple monitors that I don't get in Windows. The bundled remote Screen Sharing in GNOME does not work in that setup. VSync (on NVidia, possibly not a driver issue) doesn't work well, resulting in tearing in one consistent.

Vanilla Fedora user here, after years of Mac and Windows. It works really well these days. Multiple monitors, including a 5k monitor. And personally, I find Gnome to be almost as good as the mainstream desktops and even better in some ways. YMMV.

Gnome shell is the least distracting desktop concept I ever used. I always liked desktops and tiling is to extreme for me. So far everyone I upgraded to gnome shell has been happy since.

Which 5k monitor are you using? Been thinking of upgrading recently and 4k scaled to 1080p doesn't cut it for my 1440p loving needs.

I have the original one made for Mac, with only thunderbolt inputs. It's nice:

- 5k

- Built in webcam

- Built in speakers

- Built in mic

All work on Fedora. Thinking about it now, I realize that I may be overselling it in that I did have to tinker to get brightness adjusting to work. I installed this [0] tool, and mapped +/- to Super +, and Super - so that I can quickly adjust brightness.

So, it's definitely not as seamless a setup as the Mac, but it was honestly not bad at all and is a great setup.

[0] https://github.com/chrisdavies/lg

> Good luck getting multiple different sized monitors to work well out of the box (e.g. laptop + external) on Linux, sometimes even with tinkering you are left with subpar scaling on one

It sounds like you might still be using Xorg?

These are all solved problems in Wayland (that is, as long as the applications are native Wayland clients, and not running through XWayland) but some people are still reluctant or unable (see NVidia EGLStream debacle) to migrate yet.

> Ubuntu which is likely the most user-friendly distro.

I think this is the biggest issue in the Linux user Space. This is simply a wrong assumption for at least a few years now.

Ubuntu, for some reason, tends more break way more dramatic than other distros (usually something with complex deps)