Infinite Mac

For fuzz, anti and anti-aliasing issues, you can sometimes make them worse with a HiDPI display.

All of these issues really boil down to render resolution not integer scaling to the display resolution.

If the render resolution is an integer multiple of the display resolution or vice versa, you will generally always get beautiful crisp rendering - this is exactly the approach Apple adopted, and is why they had to use some slightly less common resolutions like 5k on some devices - 2560x1440/"QHD" has integer scaling factor of exactly 2 for a 5k display etc.

The problem though is that outside of Apple devices, almost no hiDPI display will neatly integer sale. The vast majority of Hi-DPI monitors on sale today are 4k, and only 1080p really has a useable integer scaling factor there. 1080p of "useable" screen real estate on a 4k monitor is going to make all UI elements too big usually though... So you are forced to non-integer scaling and images that will not cleanly map to the grid of pixels in the monitor, which is where the fuzz and anti-aliasing etc starts... 1440p of "usable" space does not cleanly map to a 4k monitor, but many people run them this way.

5k is frankly a brilliant resolution for high quality ~200ppi style HiDPI rendering on 27 inch displays with 2x integer scaling for macOS and Windows especially, its tragic the resolution hasn't become more mainstream.

There is also its cousin https://system7.app/

Yes, with https://leaningtech.com/webvm-server-less-x86-virtual-machin.... Wild stuff.

This was followed up with KDX, an idiosyncratic, extremely curious program that even offered a native Linux binary (that still works!). The program was (closed-source) freeware, and without a viable business model behind it, the developers eventually moved on. But I think that dynamic supported a refreshing alternative experience that flew beneath the radar, took the path less traveled, and achieved closure: my memory of KDX is of a quietly efficient program that felt largely finished. My goodness literally nothing feels like that anymore.

It's still offered for download by some of the few remaining Hotline/KDX-compatible file servers that are still floating around out there, like https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php (scroll down to the KDX heading).

I definitely recommend downloading it for the sole reason that, connected to a server, bunch of windows open (what do you expect, it came from Mac OS, of course it's a GUI program), transfers flying along... it'll be using 8MB of RAM. Yes, on Linux.

Finished. Compact. Efficient.

I wish I could pull out some references for similar programs like it, but I have none :( the closest I can come ideologically is LIST.COM for MS-DOS (!). Ha.

But on the subject of file transfer itself, if anyone's curious, a very obscure alternative to Bittorrent and news servers besides Hotline/KDX is DC++. There are quite a few DC++ servers still out there, mostly in Russia (or at least there were when I last checked). I don't remember what client I used when I played with it a while ago, but I remember one of its features was that it would show the total amount of data available across all of the servers currently connected (the protocol works very similarly to Bittorrent but users send full directory trees to the "trackers"). Well, after connecting to every server I could find >:D my client started having serious swap issues so I had to give up, but for a little while there I think the statusbar was showing something like 4 PB+ available. Fun times.

Vectors will scale to any pixel density, but they look irritatingly fuzzy at the lower pixel densities you commonly see in large widescreen monitors.

Obviously it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but decades ago bitmapped fonts could give you crisp text on any monitor, and in 2022 I'm using a popular, >$1300, very favorably reviewed monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy. It's plugged into my Macbook Pro right now, and the difference in how well the text renders on the two displays is plain.

I guess as soon as Apple started making laptops with 300dpi screens, it became okay to render fuzzy text on any screen that wasn't 300dpi.