Yarek writes...

Hello, long time listener, coder QA member, rare feedbacker here.

So I've been listening to the today's Coder Radio (ep 575 to be precise), and there were two takes in it that felt underwhelming to me.

The first one is the one about the "omakub" thingy, especially the sustainability part. I feel like this take (https://coder.show/575?t=1314) is a bit uninformed. I've skimmed through the omakub repository and what's inside, and while there are things that are shoddily done, it mostly installs stuff from Ubuntu's own apt repository; whenever something has its own repo, it is used, and there are things installed with snap. Some things are installed from their latest github releases, and the scripts go for dynamic latest instead of embedding it, so you are likely to have what works. After you have the stuff installed, snaps and debs get upgraded together with everything else, and the problem of glibc versions is alleviated; for stuff installed from github, you run omakub again. Stuff like zellij (no idea what it is) looks like your typical fully-statically-linked thing, so it will survive updates even if everything else falls flat, and lazygit/ohmy$SHELL are of no big concern. In any case, the next big of what the scripts are doing is tweaking your gsettings and other configs, which you gotta do no matter what your installation scheme is.

Thus, I think the concern is fully misplaced here.

Flatpaks are orthogonal here because while they, as all software, suffer from the same problem of keeping up, they just conveniently move it elsewhere (and ship their own glibc, lol). You will still run into things like "the author stopped caring about building the flatpak but the runtime it depends on is now obsolete and insecure, so what do I do now?".

But yeah, it looks shoddy, almost like reinventing ansible but without the good parts.

The second take is the one about high-DPI monitors and Mike's Dev 1. I'm mildly surprised you got a 4k version in the first place, I seem to remember there ever had been only a FullHD version... except maybe HP snuck the UHD option in when I wasn't looking. Anyway, I'm on 4k laptops since 2017 or 2018, and for the life of me I've never had the problems Mike described. And I'm very demanding of text on my screens, too.

I've been using GNOME, Plasma, and even WindowMaker. I remember the time when X11 programs on Wayland Plasma only had two options — tiny or blurry, with nothing in between, which only got fixed in Plasma 5.26. That said, I feel like what Mike may be experiencing, since he's apparently on GNOME, is one of the following:

 * He's using xterm, urxvt, or some other X11-only terminal which have never been HiDPI-aware and never will be. The only way around them is to make their font bigger, and you need to tweak some things to convince them to use a font different from misc-fixed which only comes in a handful of tiny sizes.

 * He's using a legacy bitmap font. Those don't scale up well and have awful support in recent toolkits, because library authors (of Pango/Harfbuzz/Cairo/Qt/graphite) like to fix what's not broken and to split every aspect of font handling into its own separate library, so you can never tell which component makes your fonts render like shite.

 Otherwise, I'm genuinely curious to know what his setup is so that it's as broken as described. Maybe I could help setting it up so it doesn't suck...

 Oh, and Framework 13 with v1 display is worse, way worse: at 1x, things are tiny, at 2x, they are huge, and in between fractional scaling is still a sad sad story.

 Best regards!