Products · Product
X11
Raised as a usability problem by 20 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2012–2025), in 19 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Windows can't move between different-DPI monitors without restarting appUnreviewed
20122026- Windows cannot move between monitors with different DPI without restarting the app2023-12-04
- Mixing HiDPI and regular DPI monitors on X11 is so hard the commenter switched back to Windows2023-05-11
- Laptop and external monitor can't have different DPI, forcing scripts and Firefox restarts2016-06-01
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 20 complaints
- Non-technical users must set text size per monitor, exposing implementation details they shouldn't need to see2025-06-26
- Same scale factor gives very different UI sizes across displays, so users keep readjusting2025-06-25
- Screen recording drops the display refresh rate, making 4k 144hz use a very bad experience2024-10-29
- Can only inject characters present in the current keyboard layout, causing failures2024-08-07
- Windows cannot move between monitors with different DPI without restarting the app2023-12-04
- Developers must enumerate all visuals and match masks to get default formats2023-09-01
- Mixing HiDPI and regular DPI monitors on X11 is so hard the commenter switched back to Windows2023-05-11
- Must manually rearrange monitors every time they are plugged in2022-07-08
- Can't tell whether a wildcard setting affects a given program without restarting it2022-04-07
- Every settings change requires restarting the whole window manager, plus extra third-party tools2021-04-10
- Key mappings made with X tools vanish when switching to the console2020-12-16
- Trial and error editing of magic numbers in xorg conf to get touchpad working2020-05-21
- Scaling settings don't work, so the user must hack xrandr DPI commands to fix text2020-05-10
- Spending hours or days trying to get display resolution working via X config2019-10-14
- Compiling a working X11 requires finding the right set of many separate sub-projects2017-02-13
- Many X applications look obsolete and ugly out of the box2016-11-17
- Laptop and external monitor can't have different DPI, forcing scripts and Firefox restarts2016-06-01
- Session management options were hidden from the main UI and buried in system settings2015-03-04
- X11 apps are inconsistent, poorly designed, and bad at error recovery, frustrating users2012-09-16
- X11 applications feel painful to use compared with Mac interfaces2012-07-26