Unity 7 Is Now My Desktop, Wins Over Xfce On HiDPI

[Dukenukemx]

I mostly exclusively use Cinnamon on my Compaq laptop, but recently I wanted to resurrect an old Prostar/Clevo 5600P with a 1.8Ghz P4 and Radeon 7500. Sound wasn't working on it, so I boxed it in pieces and left it alone for nearly 10 years. Older and wiser, I heat gunned the south and northbridge chips to reflow it, and magically it works again.

Would be a pretty good laptop for basic web browsing and YouTube, but Windows XP is dated. So I put Ubuntu 13.10 which Unity obviously didn't support the Radeon 7500, and used software rendering which was super slow. Off to Mint 16 with Cinnamon, which showed the icons and Windows as black. Also was slow, but not nearly as slow as Unity.

XFCE ran just fine on it, but it looks dated and ugly. Then I put Kubuntu on it, and WoW is it fast. It looks appealing and no problems. Seriously, try KDE. I even put it on my Compaq laptop, since Cinnamon is having problems lately with the hybrid GPU's that's in it. Though for some reason KDE on Mint has problems with the Wifi, which I haven't bothered to get around fixing. At this point I'd be willing to reinstall Kubuntu over Mint 16, cause they haven't gotten around to fixing all the hybrid GPU problems with that UI. It likes to randomly freeze, usually when I'm using Firefox.

[realcnbs]

KDE is the most slow on benchmarks and in my personal opinion is messy too..

Unity is the best choice between performance, productivity and optical result.

Well it depends, to me unity was slow and buggy, it is not messy only because it has very little features to make mess of.
Also i've read that kubuntu is not the best option for KDE.

[mendieta]

KDE is the most slow on benchmarks and in my personal opinion is messy too..

Unity is the best choice between performance, productivity and optical result.

I'll give it a shot. I agree KDE has gotten messy. THings like Nepomuk and Akonadi killed it for me. I actually only use Plasma and a couple KDE apps: Dolphin, Digikam and Konsole. I love the System Settings (in Ubuntu, the settings used to be Menu items, as opposed to being consolidated in a GUI). All of that is great, but that's it. I always remove kdepim in my systems to avoid all the crap.

Then I use Chrome for the Web and email, PiTiVi for video editing, Synaptic for package management, tv-maxe for streamed media, etc.

[Michael]

Michael, did you try KDE?

Not interested/suitable to run KDE on my main desktop.

[GraysonPeddie]

I have set scale to 120% as default in chrome, most sites are playing nice upscaled, but some rare ones are not usable at all.

Could you please try my website to see if it works in yours? I want to make sure it works regardless of DPI.

http://graysonpeddie.com

Thanks.

[verde]

KDE is the most slow on benchmarks and in my personal opinion is messy too..

Unity is the best choice between performance, productivity and optical result.

[realcnbs]

I have set scale to 120% as default in chrome, most sites are playing nice upscaled, but some rare ones are not usable at all.

[mendieta]

Google Chrome?

Yeah, I have to second, or third the suggestion (or question) on KDE. It seems like Plasma is pretty scalable. Also, as for web browser, how does google chrome do in that monster resolution?

Now, regarding the eye strain, this is interesting. Having such a massive resolution on a relatively small screen is interesting: it'll make pictures look better, but you still want fonts to be similar size (but presumably better defined) than in a screen with similar size but smaller resolution. That's effectively what happens on cellphones. No surprise that Ubuntu's UI does well. And let me state one more time that I think Ubuntu's move into the mobile space was brilliant.

Cheers!

[HeavensRevenge]

Why not Gnome?

Gnome is the only DE to me that has the sexy sleekness reminiscent of OSX... hopefully you can update us on how Gnome works on that display of yours.

[raineee]

Why is this a news?
And I changed my desktop to LXDE.