I have been using linux for almost 20 years now and it never stopped to amaze me.
recently we bought a drawing tablet (screen ones). my wife uses windows so she installed the drivers, installed the configuration program and so on. After hours and hours she called me to say “i finally got it working” and i felt the frustration in her voice.
i just tried to get it working on my machine, i’m using swaywm mind you. as i connected the hdmi it just got recognized as a second monitor. but the mapping was off, it tried to map the whole width of the working area to the tablet. so i just put this in the config:
input INPUT_NAME { map_to_output OUTPUT_NAME map_to_region OUTPUT_X OUTPUT_Y WIDTH HEIGHT }
and that’s it! no drivers no nothing. i love linux!
so i just put this in the config:
Now the question is, is that something your wife would have thought of or found out and implemented without issues? That’s the part keeping Windows users on Windows. They tend to not like messing with the scary looking code.
i’m not trying to convert her, it’s just that i’m comfortable in doing this, it feels natural to me.
I like these kinds of posts. You should write up something on the Arch wiki, if you haven’t. Maybe I can learn how to do such things in 20 years, too
It really isn’t magic, which is exactly why Linux is so amazing. You can use any tiling window manager and it will act the same way. It will detect the screen of the device and give you ways of altering it to your liking with a few lines of text. And it’s all documented how to do it.
Sway is almost perfection, consistent, reliable, simple, doesn’t lock up. If anyone hacks in window controls let me know, more convenient for HTPC Big Screen Sway.
How frustrated was your wife after that?
she was just happy for me.
<3
Linux is a toss up with random hardware tbh
Look it’s no competition
But Windows just lost
Yeah, I suppose. I wonder how long it would take me to find out how to do that, assuming I don’t give up first.
Then again, I don’t even know what swaywm is, so maybe on other types of Linux it would be easier?
i think gnome and kde both have graphical interfaces for this. i like doing config files.
It definitely sounds easier, in that case.