3 Feb 2014 vicious   » (Master)

New computer, still with MATE …

I just got a new work laptop, the Dell XPS 13 developer edition.  Even for a day installed GNOME 3 on it.  Then I realized that I can’t work with two different desktops at the same time, so I went back to MATE.  I can’t change my work computer to GNOME because the dual-monitor support is terrible in GNOME shell.  Oddly it seems that dual monitor is a corner case for GNOME devs now.  Strange as Linux is more used in the “workstation” market than “home desktop” market, and if I look around the offices here, whoever can (has funding) does have a dual monitor setup on their workstation.  GNOME sucks as a workstation.  It might be fine as a place to launch a web browser, email, chat, whatever it is that kids do nowdays.

The other thing is that this has a pretty high DPI, and EVERY desktop kind of sucks at this.  I don’t think that mid 30′s is too old to use computers, but there are things which are definitely harder on this thing and require squinting.  My eyesight is not what it used to be, but it’s not that bad.  I can get most (but not all) fonts to be bigger.  But for example chrome I can’t get to be bigger everywhere, that is, yes on the webpages, but no on the tab headers.  Also UI elements in other things are tiny, like scrollbars are suddenly hard to hit because they are tiny.  Why don’t these things also scale?  That’s annoying.  Smaller resolution is OK, but blurry and sucky.

Another annoying thing is this really godawful thing called a click-pad.  It makes the assumption that just because you can do something, you should.  So the top of the “buttons” are now also place where the “mouse” moves.  So by pressing the button I am also moving the mouse, often clicking somewhere else.  So now if I want to click on something two things happen: 1) the mouse jumps somewhere completely different 2) or I can’t hit it.  Put that together with the small controls and you have a recipe for disaster.  I continually click on things I don’t want to.

Ahh well … There are nice things about the laptop too, like the size, and the case.  Though it doesn’t have a lock hole, which is really anoying … in a coffee shop, am I supposed to take the laptop to the bathroom with me?  I know it’s small, but taking your laptop with you to pee is kind of weird.  Oh yeah … ended on another complaint …


Syndicated 2014-02-03 19:53:56 from The Spectre of Math

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