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High-DPI displays and Linux

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51–60 of 106 posts

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#51

I see that phrasing all the time: "Well, KDE can do what we are looking for, but GNOME does it in a hackish way. As we use GNOME, our review is all about it, and as a conclusion, Linux is no good." Why do these people insist on using GNOME after all?

KDE hidpi resolution is worse.

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#52
post #50

OS X has the best highdpi implementation at the moment, and use the pixel scaling approach. It seems to work well there.

The problem is that the fallback of scaling twice and getting a bit pixelated stuff isn't working all the time under gnome

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#53

For web browsers I thought CTRL+ and CRTL- were for dealing with this, but I think that is stored on a site by site basis. Something similar for the UI would be nice too, but IMHO should be kept independent of the "data" the app displays.

> For web browsers I thought CTRL+ and CRTL- were for dealing with this, but I think that is stored on a site by site basis.

CTRL-+ can really break the page layout in surprisingly varied ways.

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#54
post #8
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.

Right, you shouldn't have to switch operating systems to get the benefits. It seems perfectly reasonable to expect the display subsystem of your preferred OS to support HiDPI mode, however it chooses to do so.

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#56
post #35
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it stopped. I just tossed a 10 year old CRT with a 2560x2048 resolution. The key is that tech switched over to favoring LCDs which are finally catching up, and in some cases, passing CRT.

Sure, but if it had been a 15" 1024x768 monitor you wouldn't have kept it 10 years :)

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#57
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 not about the money. Some people actually want to customize their systems in ways that Apple does not support.

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#58

I thought the whole point of High-DPI was to was to free us from the need to render graphics pixel-perfect at native resolution. While scaling bitmaps will probably be necessary for photographs and most video for a long time, can't everything else be rendered using SVG? Does such an environment already exist?

There was a good discussion of this topic yesterday in the iPhone screen thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634662

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#59

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

Everyone thinks in terms of pixel count.

That's why going to a high-pixel-count display for the same physical dimensions screws everything up.

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#60
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.

Subjecting oneself to OS X is even worse =p
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