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High-DPI displays and Linux

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Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#11

Post by te-x »

hpaavola wrote: post #8
chroma wrote: post #6

What a mess. I didn't know HiDPI was so spotty on Linux. It's unclear to me why people would subject themselves to such an experience. If you want a HiDPI laptop, why not spend a little more to get a retina mac? On a developer's salary, the difference is a rounding error.

I would not call it a mess. I run Ubuntu on Lenovo X1 Carbon and Asus Zenbook UX31A and on both machines all the software that I run except Steam work just fine. And OSX is not Linux. I don't want non-Linux OS.

It really isn't. I've been running fedora with gnome-shell for 3/4 months on hidpi and most things run fine. The applications I had problems were Chrome, it's solvable with 200% zoom, although the UI remains small and Netbeans, here it's more serious because the UI is more important than on Chrome. Another problem is the impossibility of having different scalings on different displays. Everything else that I've needed runs fine and It it's getting better with each gnome-shell release since 3.10. And anyone can try it before buying a display/laptop just by running the scaling command given on the article. In my opinion/case the sharpness of the fonts/icons/ui outweight the small problems that I've had, but using Netbeans and Chrome aren't mandatory to me.

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#12

Post by Aardwolf »

Somewhere in the 90's, games were in 320x200 pixel resolution, and the Windows 3.11 desktop was 640x480 pixels or so on a typical 386 computer.

Then up to around the year 2000, resolutions increased, going through such stages as 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024 (your CRT would flicker if much higher, and then LCDs came along pinning it at 1280x1024 for 17").

Then the resolution (or especially DPI) growth basically stopped for 10 years imho ("HD" was not really any higher at all than what a year 2000 CRT could do).

But now there's some growth again :) Why the problems though? has 10 years of the same DPI made developers forget about different DPIs?

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#13

Post by yaantc »

bitL wrote: post #9

If your display is over 1080p (I use 1920x1200), Linux (at least Mint 17) switches to HiDPI by default, reducing my effective resolution to 960x600... There is some obscure setting that can switch HiDPI off, but it's a mess overall for the time being as some apps still use HiDPI (like gdm).

I have the same display with Debian and no issue. So it's either introduced by Mint or Ubuntu (Mint is Ubuntu derived). Most likely by Mint, as the UI customization is very distro specific.

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#14

Post by quotemstr »

krmtl wrote: post #3

Firefox on Linux currently doesn't support a mixture of HiDPI and non-HiDPI monitors, it has a single DPI setting. I think it will be supported when this [1] bug is resolved. Shameless plug: I have written an addon to workaround this [2]. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975919 [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/autohidpi/

AutoHiDPI seems to look at the width of the active window rather than the size of the screen. This behavior seems like a bug.

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#15

Post by georgeecollins »

Aardwolf wrote: post #12

Somewhere in the 90's, games were in 320x200 pixel resolution, and the Windows 3.11 desktop was 640x480 pixels or so on a typical 386 computer. Then up to around the year 2000, resolutions increased, going through such stages as 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024 (your CRT would flicker if much higher, and then LCDs came along pinning it at 1280x1024 for 17"). Then the resolution (or especially DPI) growth basically sto…

Game developers don't traditionally think about their games in terms of DPI. Think about it: a game is played on a TV ot Monitor that can display 1920x1080 pixels, but what size is it? 23" diagonal? 30" diagonal? .. etc.

Game developers these days usually think of a PC or console game display in terms of pixel count and aspect ratio, not DPI

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#16

Post by andmarios »

chroma wrote: post #6

What a mess. I didn't know HiDPI was so spotty on Linux. It's unclear to me why people would subject themselves to such an experience. If you want a HiDPI laptop, why not spend a little more to get a retina mac? On a developer's salary, the difference is a rounding error.

It's unclear to me why Linux running on a retina mac wouldn't have the same resolution problems as Linux running on PC hardware with a similar display.

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#17

Post by zorbo »

Aardwolf wrote: post #12

Somewhere in the 90's, games were in 320x200 pixel resolution, and the Windows 3.11 desktop was 640x480 pixels or so on a typical 386 computer. Then up to around the year 2000, resolutions increased, going through such stages as 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024 (your CRT would flicker if much higher, and then LCDs came along pinning it at 1280x1024 for 17"). Then the resolution (or especially DPI) growth basically sto…

Resolution growth didn't really stop. It's just that vertical resolution growth took a huge backseat to horizontal res growth for a decade or so. I guess since vertical growth didn't really occur, there was little need for UI scaling.

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#18

Post by andmarios »

Imo Linux, KDE and most other software works nicely with HiDPI.

A small issue is GTK apps that don't respect DPI settings.

The most significant problem AFAIK is for people who switch frequently between different displays. There are a few settings here and there you have to adjust every time you switch between Hi and Lo-DPI.

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#19

Post by VLM »

Its a good article about High-DPI displays and Gnome, as the author writes "Your editor's experiments have mostly been with GNOME, so this article will have an unavoidable bias in that direction."

I've had 1600x1200 CRT or LCD on my main desktop since... 00s? Late 90s? If you make money typing at a desk, you're foolish not to splurge on desk, chair, lighting, quiet, keyboard... and monitor. I've been dealing with this class of problem since the 80s although it was a little different back then...

If gnome-less, "linux" or more accurately, FOSS in general, has no problem with high res displays, in fact its really nice, far from a problem.

I don't know if KDE in general has resolution problems. Konsole looks beautiful at high res and decent font. The only thing more flame war-ish than emacs vs vi is font choice, however I have noticed visible quality differences such that random font A in 2005 at 24 pt size looks much worse than it does at 10pt size, and this varies by font and over time.

An example of the above I have freebsd on the other machine on my desk and displaying Monospace in a konsole font size 12 is "normal" but when you kick it up to 13 it looks perma bold because thats the 1 pixel to 2 pixel transition for Monospace on that platform and exact config. Luxi Mono displays "normally" at 11, permabold at 12, and at very large sizes like 17 it looks very peculiar randomish parts of letters display as 1 or 2 pix wide. Nimbus Mono L Regular 16 looks nice to my eyes and thats mostly what I use on that machine at 1600x1200.

The biggest problem I have is finding really good UTF8 fonts. There's a nice test file called UTF-8-demo.txt Its mirrored and copied all over, here is one link:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt

I find this a true test of difficult display rendering on linux.

The ergonomics of widescreen for long term anything, including movie viewing, is another topic and I believe my multiple high res 4:3 monitors are a productivity booster for me, so until they break I'll keep them.

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#20

Post by klaasvakie »

bitL wrote: post #10
hpaavola wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not call it a mess. I run Ubuntu on Lenovo X1 Carbon and Asus Zenbook UX31A and on both machines all the software that I run except Steam work just fine. And OSX is not Linux. I don't want non-Linux OS.

How do you survive with UX31A's touchpad in Linux? On my UX32VD it's the most horrible part of Linux experience (also battery drained while idle in 2 hours (2 SSDs) doesn't help)

I don't have an UX31A, but an UX31E --- the touchpad is brilliant (I think mine has the elantech one)

Also, I get 7.5 hours on the battery, I wonder what went wrong between the UX31E and the UX31A?

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