I have both a MBP and a Windows workstation hooked up to a 4k monitor, and the difference in high-DPI support is night and day.

macOS and mac apps support high-DPI essentially flawlessly. On Windows even system dialogs have blurry text, as do many third-party apps (such as Mathematica until the very latest release).

Apps need to be updated to enable proper hi-res, yes, but that is not Windows' fault if Wolfram does not do so.

The problem is that Windows has way better backwards compatibility, while Apple routinely kills old tech. So app developers have to keep up, which is good for the user.

On the other hand, of course, you can still run very old apps in Windows, while Apple does not even support 32-bit, modern OpenGL or Vulkan.

That doesn't explain the system dialogs. Microsoft's development style is to just accrete more stuff; that's how you get two Settings dialogs for example.

We were talking about third-party apps, not Windows' own apps (which are indeed a mess).

A handful of downvotes yet no comments except @millstone's (thanks!).

Why?

Text in Windows also looks like garbage. Code is easier to read on MacOS. Even a non-retina Mac looks better than a high DPI Windows. Not sure if it's the system font choice, anti-aliasing, font weight...

I also think that Apple's decision to only support 1x or 2x to be the right choice. It's the wild west on Windows when it comes to high DPI. Half the UI in windows is either scaled up to "retina" and the other half is tiny boxes or text. As a result, objects are always the "correct" size relative to other objects around it.

I use both macOS and Windows, and text looks fine to me in both, and I know I am sensitive to this because I got crazy trying to get it working a few years ago in Linux and once fighting with ClearType. But in Windows 10 out of the box, never had an issue.

The problem you describe is probably old applications which haven’t been properly updated to support hi-res. If they do custom drawing or controls or frameworks, Windows cannot do anything to fix it.

ClearType is strange. I've gotten used to the way that my Linux system renders text, which is part of the reason why I like it so much. Using small fonts on macOS is always super blurry, while small fonts on Windows look like bitmap fonts and have clear subpixel hinting artifacts. On a HiDPI screen, they all look pretty similar.

Windows may support hires, but doesn't have high quality icons, and most of the apps are a bit rough. Doubly so if you drag a window from one monitor to another.

I forgot when was the last time I've ever looked at icons on Windows. I just press Win key and start to type name of the application and it shows up in a list. In most cases it takes one to 2 letters of typing as I guess Windows remembers your stats.

I do have very few icons in a normally hidden taskbar but as I set their size to tiny they have no particular look at all. I just distinguish them by color pattern.

Not sure what problems you have with dragging. I have 2 32" 4K monitors hooked up (one is vertical position) and do not experience any particular problems.

> 2 32" 4K monitors hooked up

Two identical monitors is the happy path. Nonidentical ones get interesting.

I have a small high-ppi laptop hooked up to a large low-ppi monitor, and that confuses a number of apps when moved to the monitor they didn't start on. Most notably Visual Studio; some widgets are the wrong size, and the text is slightly blurred due to some up/downscaling issues.

I'm talking about how the magnification for third party apps is often weird. SQL Server Management studio for me is almost always in the wrong zoom factor. RDP gets confused. Etc.

Most of these things have probably been fixed, but I'm not sure. Windows devs?

SSMS has the worst text rendering of any tool I regularly use on windows. It's not a tie. I'm not sure how this is possible, since SSMS is built on a Visual Studio shell, but I see what I see.

Its out of the box configs are horrible. They use Courier New.

Although I haven't regularly used SSMS in a while (thanks to Azure Data Studio), the first thing I used to do was change the fonts to the "new" (15 year old) ClearType fonts. Like Consolas everywhere.

Then it looks way better.

It's not fixed. Many, many apps go haywire for me in HiDPI.

Right click on the icon and look at the compatibility tab.

he's talking about apps that don't behave according to windows scaling (happens) or monitor scaling I think.

I have two monitors and windows scales apps equally on both even though one is 5120x1440 and the other is 1080p. The result is that I either pick small icons on the big monitor or big icons on the small monitor.

Totally agree. I would love to spend Windows prices to get that kind of power. And it would run cool. But I just don't have the time to fiddle with Windows.

Then again, maybe it won't be so bad. Worth a try at some point just setting up a couple of my elixir and ember projects to run off WSL2.

Definitely try WSL2, it's a huge improvement over WSL1 and it's finally at the point where I can honestly say it's usable for what I need it for.

My 15" Lenovo C940 with the 4K screen is a _much_ higher resolution in pixels-per-inch than the so-called "retina" screen.

And all the software "just works" at this resolution nicely.

Are you running Windows or Linux on that? I'm a MacOS user but I'd love to know if it's possible to have a good high-res-screen experience on a Linux laptop.

Windows, of course. It would probably be an awful experience on Linux. You want the "happy path" of NVIDIA Windows drivers, etc. Of course, Windows has first-class support for Linux so you can have the best of both worlds.