High-DPI displays and Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#91

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Nov 21, 2014, 11:57 PM UTC

graycoder wrote: post #32

bryanlarsen wrote: post #26

I have a Thinkpad Yoga 2 Pro (3200x1800 @ 13"), and often use an external monitor. My "solution" is to turn off HiDPI and rely on the zoom features in all of my apps. (terminal, emacs & browsers) Browser windows on the laptop usually run at a zoom of 200%, whereas windows on the external display run at 90%. Annoying, but the beautiful text is worth the bother.

What OS/Distro do you run? I've read some rather worrying things about the linux support and haven't taken windows off yet. I've been living in VMs, which are surprisingly snappy.

You can probably boot it up from a USB stick and check whether everything works. Did that on my last Dell before getting rid of Windows.

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#92

Post by leeoniya » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 12:20 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #79

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…

The development you're describing is the timeline of how this stuff trickled into inexpensive consumer hardware. Expensive workstations already had big monitors and 1280x1024 resolutions in the 1980's. Also, on a related tangent: prior to 1970, computers already ran with processor clocks over 30 Mhz, with 32 bit (or larger) words, and virtual memory. These things did not show up in the Intel 80368 and start to be sup…

http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/0/1792/348195-j...

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#93

Post by jblow » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 12:36 AM UTC

Random mom-and-pop folks have been able to buy high-DPI laptops at Best Buy for well over a year. (And higher DPI than discussed in this article; for example, 3200x1800).

In computer lifecycle terms that is a long time and it is a little bit embarrassing that Linux works as poorly as it does in these situations. (Windows ain't so great at it either, which reflects poorly on Microsoft, but it still handles the situation a lot better than Linux does.)

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#94

Post by hornetblack » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 1:58 AM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #26

I have a Thinkpad Yoga 2 Pro (3200x1800 @ 13"), and often use an external monitor. My "solution" is to turn off HiDPI and rely on the zoom features in all of my apps. (terminal, emacs & browsers) Browser windows on the laptop usually run at a zoom of 200%, whereas windows on the external display run at 90%. Annoying, but the beautiful text is worth the bother.

Even with a 1920x1080@13" I needed to change settings. Mainly just changing the font size in gnome-tweak-tool. And I just zoom manually in Firefox because my external monitor is much lower res (1280x1024@19").

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#95

Post by phkahler » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 2:21 AM UTC

sampo wrote: post #53

phkahler wrote: post #42

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.

That's why HTML was intended for dynamic layout. People who want to specify fixed layouts are doing it wrong.

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#96

Post by mikeyouse » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 2:25 AM UTC

andor wrote: post #86

k__ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It often is better to sell cheap stuff to many people, than to sell expensive stuff to a few. VW bought Porsche, Fiat bought Ferrari etc. :D

Actually, Porsche bought VW: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_Automobil_Holding_SE

It's a bit more complicated than that.. VW bought Porsche Automobile, but Porsche SE owns most of voting shares in VW. A good descriptor of the mess:

http://www.automobilemag.com/features/news/0911_porsche_and_...

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#97

Post by oofabz » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 2:53 AM UTC

sampo wrote: post #40

marcosdumay wrote: post #24

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?

My guess is psychology: The default theme in KDE looks really alien, after having used Ubuntu for a long time. I am sure there would be a familiar looking Ambiance theme for KDE, too, but maybe people give up before trying to change and tweak themes.

KDE looks more like Mac or Windows than Gnome 3 does. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, I like Gnome 3. But KDE doesn't look particularly alien to me; it looks like a normal, boring PC desktop.

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#98

Post by protomyth » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 3:26 AM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #90

bla2 wrote: post #50

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

It does work well. The other day, there was an article on someone who did an extreme test on pixel scaling, and an Apple software engineer wrote the following comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634895 The part of the comment that I found the most interesting was his take on a solution: 1. Make everything vectors. You'll have to choose between weird antialiasing artifacts and potential pixel cracks; either…

I'm curious about this. Aren't fonts vector files with some hinting?

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#99

Post by rythie » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 8:18 AM UTC

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…

In the CRT days people would change resolution to get the DPI/text/widget size they wanted, almost no one I saw was using the highest resolution of their monitor as a result. It was easy to buy a CRT because you just picked the size/cost you wanted and knew that you could just set the resolution.

LCDs introduced the problem of a fixed resolution, where basically you have to choose the right resolution at the time you bought it. There were 1920x1200 laptops [1] and 4k 22inch (T221) screens 10 years ago, it was clear this problem was coming, though the software never changed to become resolution scalable.

[1] http://forums.thedigitalfix.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-2...

Re: High-DPI displays and Linux

#100

Post by coldtea » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 8:40 AM UTC

kps wrote: post #73

bhauer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree that the stagnation in resolution evolution was an artifact of the CRT to LCD conversion. I put the blame on the convergence of the living room and desktop display markets and the disturbing marketing effectiveness of the "HD" moniker [1]. Resolution didn't simply stagnate; it regressed. In approximately 2000, Dell sold laptops with 1600x1200 LCD displays. Once "HD" appeared, display manufacturers lost…

I blame porn, and more generally, the desire for flashy colours in the consumer market. Circa 1990 we had 1600×1200 monochrome CRTs at work, and nothing I've used since has equaled them for text. Considering displays as effectively limited by signal bandwidth, colour forces a √3 drop in linear resolution.

>Circa 1990 we had 1600×1200 monochrome CRTs at work, and nothing I've used since has equaled them for text.

Really? I've used monochrome hi-res CRTs in the early nineties (made by SUN for its workstations nonetheless) and they were shite -- (not to mention the text rendering of the software at the time was shite too).

I actually think you're just seeing those things through rose-colored glasses. Try a modern 5K retina iMac or 4K dell monitor.