I've been using WSL and a lot of unix tools on Windows. I have a simple reason: Windows is a much better desktop environment.

I tried to switch from macOS to Linux. I've found workarounds / alternatives to almost all of my issues on Linux. One issue seems to be unfixable though;

I have a 4K monitor and pretty much required to use fractional scaling. Windows and macOS does it perfectly. I had good luck with Pop!_OS but 1.5x scaling is always blurry on Linux. Apparently it can not do non integer scaling so the current hack is to scale 3x and then resize the framebuffer to half the size. Nope.

So I switched to the next best thing: Windows with WSL.

I actually switched to XFCE a couple years ago because I think it's a much better desktop environment than Windows with regards to activities that I do for work like running lots of Docker images.

XFCE has features that you need 7+ Taskbar Tweaker for on Windows, like being able to middle-click a taskbar button to close it's window. Any feature XFCE didn't have such as "move a window to another monitor with a hotkey" were easy to script with xdotools or other similar utilities. With the recent release of XFCE (4.16 I think?) we got fractional scaling as well.

I also found it easier to add custom commands to Thunar's context menu than Windows Explorer. Thunar also has tabs and so does the XFCE terminal emulator.

Beyond that, I'm no longer constantly fighting with Windows Updates, Windows Firewall or Windows Defender or navigating the fragmented landscape of shells (PowerShell, Cmd, Git-Bash, Cygwin, etc.) just to get my job done.

When I setup a Linux workstation (Manjaro is my preferred distro), it stays the way I configured it without Microsoft constantly changing things out from under me - so I feel like I actually own the system.

> "FCE has features that you need 7+ Taskbar Tweaker for on Windows, like being able to middle-click a taskbar button to close it's window"

Middle click on a taskbar window preview popup closes the window on Windows without having any taskbar tweakers installed.

Yeah, it's just annoying to me because you have to wait for the pop-up.

I'm a big XFCE fan but multimonitor support is still iffy, especially if one is a HDPI one and another not, as the scaling applies to all monitors.

Yeah - my solution was to not do that because I don't like having multiple monitors with mismatched resolutions anyway and I don't care for HiDPI for work. Every monitor I own is 1080p, even my laptop screen. My Macbook Pro is the only HiDPI computer screen here.

I'm not even sure what the point of HiDPI is though. It never made a difference for my work as a web developer. I understand it's more pixels per inch and less pixelation for high-res images, but if everything is getting scaled up what's the difference?

My (Windows 10) gaming rig used to be hooked up to a 4K 50" Samsung TV but I think the max I could get was 60Hz. Games and movies look pretty good there, but eventually I switched to a cheap 1080p/144hz gaming monitor because I play Rocket League mainly and that is a fast action e-sports game where you want to see as many FPS as possible.

I don't know about gaming but for daily desktop applications and coding I would never ever use a low dpi display again.

On a 1080p I can easily see individual pixels from a mile away and everything looks simply bad. I can not stand text on a low dpi screen.

Also, when I use 1.5x scaling, I have 1.5x more real estate. Hence my requirement for the fractional scaling. Even on 2x scaling (effectively turning it into a 1080p display) everything looks much better than a native 1080p display.

> I have a 4K monitor and pretty much required to use fractional scaling.

On Linux, another workaround is to set the font scaling to 1.5× (or whatever) but leave the display scaling at 1×. This leaves everything sharp with big enough text to read easily.

Haven't used desktop Linuxes or Windows for about decade as macOS + Linux servers has provided useful common ground for both use cases. But even ten years ago KDE was a lot more nicer to use than Windows and I would assume they have gone a lot further in the mean time. For HiDPI stuff that sound real PITA if that hasn't been yet worked out :/

Fractional scaling will require Wayland, which is only usable on Gnome or Sway right now.

I'm on Pop! 20.10 and, the fraction scaling option is available. I don't use fractional scaling, though, not even on my mac. Integer scaling is always going to be sharper and less resource intensive, no matter the DE.

Well I have a 27" 4k monitor. On 1x, the text is not readable. On 2x everything is absurdly large.

My windows display settings lists 150% as recommended and it works the best: https://s3.eknkc.com/x/2020/12/25/Bv55iSLhjp.png

This is the exact reason I switched back as well (next to Lightroom). It just works.

But it is extremely sad to ditch an entire OS for lack of what seems a manageable issue, fractional scaling. I wish it wouldn't be necessary.

I do 2x scaling on a 4K monitor (on Windows).

Yeah it does integer scaling. I need 1.5x though.

Both OS's have up and downsides. What's wrong with emulating parts of other OS's you like, in the OS you like?

Imagine, how much further Linux would be if people (and Microsoft) had used all the energy of trying to make Windows work like Linux instead of actually improving Linux.

There has been lots of projects with that goal like Cygwin, Mingw, WSL*. Different virtualization glue layers etc.

For most of the part there has been lots of effort to different runtimes (PHP, Python, Docker etc) to make them work better with Windows and the end result usually is that it's a lot more easier to have the same stuff running on top of Real Linux instad of different kind of kludges the Windows versions require.

Then i would need to emulate windows software on linux to do my job. And for me, borrowing features beats emulating software which may or may not work.

Recently switched from Linux to Windows after WSL2 came out. I grew tired of the various shortcomings in Linux, hence the switch.

Windows has its quirks, but I can say I prefer it at this point. And still do all my development in WSL, so win win.

I prefer the Windows desktop over the various Linux desktops I've looked at. I've got Ubuntu 20 in a VMWare machine when I need it.