Your defensiveness about your preferred OS blinds you to the point I'm trying to make. There's a reason that there's an entire page on the ArchWiki dedicated to tweaking for HiDPI: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI

The fact is, it's not uniformly supported yet across Linux distros. Qt apps should theoretically be DPI-aware, but that's no guarantee either. See the various bugs filed against VLC, for instance: https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/17823

If your goal is to prove that it can be done, then I'm sure you'd be perfectly happy with KDE or KaOS in order to prevent someone from downloading an app that might not be HiDPI compliant.

But for the average person, it might be more trouble than it's worth. Or they might not like KDE. In which case, my recommendation that it might be better to stick with 1080P for now still stands.

Apologies: I reread your posts again and now I see that I interpreted your post out of context, you were specifically talking about high resolutions.

The problem IMO is you just say Linux isn't there yet.

You state it like a fact. You say it with no reservation about this being a very high resolution display etc.

In my opinion it wouldn't be less serious if I said Mac and Windows aren't really there yet because their package managers really doesn't compare to apt. Note: I don't say this. (At least not anymore : )

For HiDPI screens? Linux really truly isn't there yet. I say this as someone who has used almost entirely linux desktops and laptops for years, and not exclusively for a long time before that, and who finds nearly everything about a linux desktop better than the alternatives (yes, really).

But my HiDPI laptop brings me frequent pain that I wasn't anticipating and it's not clear there's even a path forward to solving those problems in a consistent way. It's a whack-a-mole problem.

I got it working really well for me.

Please share your list of annoyances, I want to help :)

Off the top of my head ...

Many applications use toolkits that are unable / unwilling to scale. Arduino IDE is a good example - lots of bugs filed about it, some fixes ostensibly out there, but I've spent hours with no success -- the UI is unreadably tiny on my 3yo 3200x1800 laptop.

You can tweak your desktop (I use KDE) and many (but not all) other applications to scale up, but as soon as you plug in a monitor with different characteristics (I frequently plug into a 22" 1600x1200 LCD) things are going to look horrendous on at least one of your screens.

If you fix those two, I'll come up with some more. :)

First one - IntelliJ (which Android IDE is based off) supports scaling nowadays.

Try running

  xrandr --dpi 200

(try it with lower values like 144 if that's too large)

and restart Android IDE.

Second monitor: you need to render the second screen at High DPI and then downscale. Example script (with two monitors):

  xrandr --output eDP-1 --off
  xrandr --output DP-2-1 --left-of eDP-1
  xrandr --output DP-2-1 --right-of DP-2-2
  xrandr --output DP-2-2 --scale 1.5x1.5 --pos 0x0
  xrandr --output DP-2-1 --scale 1.5x1.5 --pos 2880x0

Hi, and thanks for the hints. These were discussed over at arduino.cc a while back, and I had some small measure of success with them, but it was very messy to get this working with the apps that needed them (only). And, ultimately, it broke savagely with problem #2 -- when I move between displays with drastically different DPI's. I don't think that second problem is totally intractable ... but I do think it's a long way of being fixed (on any platform).

EDIT: Oh, and yes, the 'scaling support' feature was added into the version that I was trialling of arduino IDE a while back (I forget the #'s). It was meant to have been resolved, but I noted on the various forums that lots of people (including myself) couldn't get it to play nice. Investigations were on-going whether it was a KDE, xorg/wayland, nvidia, phase of the moon, or some other related problem.

Did you try it? What issues are remaining? Links to the bug tracker reports? Legitimately curious.

> Many applications use toolkits that are unable / unwilling to scale.

Isn't that true on every platform?

Well, except Mac OS. There are ways to "forget" about scaling and render in pixel terms, but chances are your app already looks like shit if this applies to you. The native UI toolkit renders to points which are scaled pixels.

Then there's image/graphic density; I can live with that.

The only thing that can be a problem on OS X, and I do mean ONLY thing that I've run into, is some games don't scale at all. So you'll open a game that draws into its window (I recently experienced this with Shenzhen I/O) and everything in the window is rendered like you had one to one pixel scaling. It works perfectly, everything is really tiny.

If you put it in full screen the monitor gets adjusted and it's not an issue.

At the same time other games don't have the problem. For example I've been playing Stardew Valley and it works perfectly fine in windowed mode looking exactly the way you'd want it to.

But normal applications based on UIKit and not a GL surface or something else like that? It's perfect.

> Isn't that true on every platform?

I'm assuming so.

I've been using KDE as primary environment on laptop & desktop since the late 1990's. At dayjob I have to suck it up and use Win7 - typically as a VM (local or remote) running over RDP or VNC - but occasionally native boot. It really breaks badly with high DPI, but it's quite an old OS. I rarely touch MS Windows 8(.1) but when I did, on this hardware, it was struggling to maintain sanity with scaling. I've avoided playing with MS Windows 10, and OSX -- of course, OSX tends to run on its own hardware, so has a bit of an advantage there. I do have a MBP somewhere, and could try cranking it up on the high-DPI 32" monitor ... but a) I'm happy to defer to the expertise of people who have done this and are more familiar with the platform, and b) it won't help me (as I'm not going to move platforms).

The quality of a package manager is of much less importance to a desktop system user than the (un)readability display, I would think.

That is a very dangerous statement tbh. In general it is much more important for any system to have its foundations robust.

A package management system is a convenience, not a requirement for desktop users. Chromebooks have one of the most robust and well built foundations I've ever seen, and the platform lacks any semblance of low level package management.

Very few people are going to be using KDE apps exclusively. For a start, it doesn't have a modern web browser, and a huge amount of stuff relies on one these days.

KDE Neon that I use currently comes with Firefox as tha default browser out of the box.

For me at least that is the only modern browser I want.