Hmm. I was kicking the wheels on cinnamon the other day - but because it's not on Wayland it won't do mixed resolution displays out of the box, so it's not really viable for me.

A pity, as I dislike snaps and the generally dumbed down direction of recent Gnome, so it would otherwise have been a good fit for me. For now I'm (still) on Ubuntu though.

X11 has been able to do mixed resolution from the beginning.

http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/

This may be technically true, but since I don't want to spend a lot of time messing with command line tools then it might as well not be.

Edit - To add a little context since that on reflection seems too dismissive...

I did try a whole bunch of things a while back, include several variations on xrandr stuff. I never did get to a place where all the following were true:

  Both screens were operating at their maximum resolution
  All app windows were appropriately sized (readable fonts, correctly scaled menu bars, etc.)
  Neither screen was blurry due to scaling

I wouldn't swear it was impossible but with recent versions of Ubuntu under Wayland I could have all three without having to do anything at the command line.

I love the command line. I just don't find messing around with config to make the basic system stuff work properly edifying.

You're right I did face some issues too with this when one of the monitors was different but the solution was rather simple. Just had to add a Modeline in some file called 10-monitors.conf(1) and then it worked perfectly until I replaced the 4th monitor with the same configuration, then no such hack was required.

You're right it didn't work out of the box but it was very simple thing even though I'm relatively new to linux myself (relatively speaking)

(1) https://gist.github.com/r0xsh/4d1c7219ee63e4cee0c7fe1077559b...

It's possible I am misunderstanding something, but you can do mixed monitor resolutions on Linux Mint Cinnamon. I usually have two monitors hooked up to my desktop, a 1440p resolution monitor and a 1080p monitor. The 1440p monitor is running at 144hz with the 1080p monitor running at 60.

It is a bummer that it's not on Wayland, and seemingly they have no current plans on migrating.

You may want to give ARandR a shot: https://christian.amsuess.com/tools/arandr/

Perhaps have a look at Pop!OS - still not Wayland but all the good stuff of Ubuntu and none of the snaps.

No longer a question of elegance, but of practical importance anyway: Will they keep up with maintaing a Firefox package? (Or Chromium if you are so inclined?) And if they do, why could you not use the same on any Ubuntu variant after you remove snap?

They use flatpak (at least I think they do) for firefox. I just use the .deb for chrome.

I do not like their upgrade solution being "reinstall the OS".

Hm, that is strange, they have an upgrade process for the past 3 or 4 releases (presently done through the GUI), and they've had unofficial upgrade procedures for versions before that. I've recently got my hands on a notebook I had installed 2017-ish, and got it upgraded to 20.3 with a couple of "next-next-finish"-like wizards.

More here: https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/upgrad...