I have the older 13" 3200x1800 screen and it is amazing. I put Ubuntu 18.04 on it since it wasn't available as a developer edition. The display scaling is my only problem but that's more a gnome thing. Running it with Windows was a almost perfect (why, Xilinx can you not do display scaling...). I thought I wouldn't notice the extra resolution due to the small screen but it both looks really nice for text and allows me to scale everything slightly smaller so that I can fit more on my screen for productivity. That being said, I use it as a laptop, on my lap. The extra resolution is pretty useless if I'm using it on a desk or table. But for that I have an XPS15 + 27" 4K setup.

As far as I know GNOME can do display scaling, but not fractional display scaling yet.

Yeah that's the problem. 2x is too big and 1x is too small on 3200x1800. Luckily there's a workaround to scale text to 1.5x which for most purposes is fine.

I like 2x scale on the XPS 13 9350 (with 3200x1800). It results in a super sharp 1600x900 which is ideal for the 13.3" screen site.

Give KDE Neon a try. I use it as my daily driver on a Latitude 7370 with the 3200x1800 display.

4K displays eat batteries (at least driving them). I'm very nomadic in my usage and I want a computer that I can do 8 hours of work on a single charge if I have to. Pretty much impossible with a 4K display, so I've gotten used to lower resolutions. Since I have vision issues (eye strain triggers ocular migraines), I usually have a massive font -- imagine full screening a console with only 32 lines of text. In that configuration, 4K is definitely overkill because there is very little difference to see. If you are young, with super power vision (like some people I know), I think it would make a pretty big difference in really tiny fonts and might be worth the power price. However, I think if I were going that route, I would be getting a 15" not a 13" -- I can't really see the advantage of the smaller format if you are tying yourself to a power cord anyway.

I'm curious, what machine are you using to achieve those? And do you have some special applications to help you in doing what you do?

Currently have a Toshiba KIRA V63, which unfortunately I think was only available in Japan. Basically i5 processor with 8 gigs of memory, SSD, integrated Intel graphics. The main power saving tool is Powertop. However, I run Arch and do not install GNOME, or KDE. I've got Xmonad for a window manager and I'm usually using Kitty as a terminal emulator. Work requires me to run Chromium (I write internal web systems for a travel tour company, and we deploy to Chrome, so I only need to make sure it works on that platform). I'm mostly spending my time in tmux with Emacs (in Evil mode).

I'm pretty careful about turning everything off -- for example bluetooth, etc. For maximum power savings I use a very high contrast colour scheme and turn the backlight down using xblacklight. Indoors, in the library for instance, I can happily turn it down to 7-11%. Outdoors, I usually need 70%. If I'm on the train or bus (I often work on the go), then I'm usually about 20%. The backlight is really the biggest thing to consider. It helps to spend some time in Powertop and see what's draining the battery.

Another important thing is that I run as little disk access as possible. Even with only 8 gigs of memory, I have no swap partition or swap file. I try to stay out of the browser and do as much as possible with TDD -- files will be cached by the OS. As much as possible I have no VMs running (obviously with the lack of memory) and as we've pretty much moved over to Docker this has helped out.

Apart from that I'm pretty anal about my machine. I don't allow anything to run that I'm not completely aware of. I've got a processor monitor running and if I notice it spike when I'm not doing anything, I track down what's going on. Same thing with memory.

Ah.. One more thing. I almost always have the WIFI turned off, unless I'm actually communicating with someone. I tend to work using pomodoros and spend 5 minutes every half an hour checking my email, etc. But I try to keep offline documentation, etc available.

I'm going to be replacing this machine soon (I think it's 3-4 years old now). I'll probably end up buying the V63's replacement (I forget the model number). It's supposed to have about 10% more battery, so I'm looking forward to seeing if I can relax some of my habits. If I'm not grinding the machine too much I can usually get 9-10 hours. However some days I only manage 6, which is a pain.

Agreed. I would have preferred a 2K screen, but I needed the better specs of the 4K model, and in practice having 4K didn't affect me. With TLP I get 8-10 hours of battery life on Ubuntu with the 4K display, and Ubuntu/Gnome handles the high DPI well.

What does affect me is the glossy display...

Do you actually get 8-10 hours of working battery life with that? If so, that's amazing to me. What do you use for backlight percentage?

Yup. Thanks to TLP I have 9 hours and 35 minutes left at the moment (88% battery) with 70% screen brightness, bluetooth and wifi enabled, several local dev servers running light workloads, and Firefox, Slack, Libreoffice and various other smaller apps open.

I have the 4k screen on older model. It makes the ui a bit sluggish unless I downscale it. I would have preferred a less fancy screen tbh for that reason (battery would be better too)

Mostly though, I'm jealous of a friends' macbook keyboard and trackpad. My particular xps is not amazing in those areas

I use both a last gen macbook and an xps 13 9360 every day. Even after three iterations of the new keyboard style, the macbooks do not have a decent keyboard. The keyboard of the xps is better (still not as good as the perfect keyboard of an X1 or a yoga) and way more quiet.

The trackpad of the XPS is worse than the macbook, but at least it feels OK. Overall, I prefer the input methods of the XPS.

I have a current XPS-13 for work, which I work as a developer. The size if it just makes it almost unusable by itself. When I have it docked, the laptop screen is set to a lower res and I it for my communication apps. I have two extra monitors on for everything else.

Obviously you are expected to use scaling on high PPI displays. Didn't you use any?

D'oh! Forgot about scaling up. Thanks for reminding me!

I have the XPS13 running at 3200x1800 in macOS - it's absolutely gorgeous.

I would agree, though running it in FHD should be much sharper than a lower density screen.