I'm on Windows and can confirm 1. is an issue. Windows lets users scale UIs to be readable at high DPI on small screens. Doesn't work on all UIs (e.g. QGIS). So maybe not all OS's, but two important ones.

> You could say the same for any arbitrary DPI; 96dpi isn't "Required", we got by fine with 72dpi. It's all about ergonomics as far as I'm concerned.

I think the point the parent is making is that human vision has limited resolution. I.e. for a given screen size & distance from the screen, you cannot notice any difference in DPI past a point. The parent is suggesting that 1080p & 27" with a typical viewing distance is already higher resolution than the eye can resolve. Looking at my 1080p 27" screen from a metre away with 20/20 vision I am inclined to agree!

Are you sure you have 20/20 vision? I can absolutely resolve individual pixels with zero effort whatsoever on 1080p 27-inch displays.

Back when I had a 27-inch 1080p display at work, my MacBook's 13-inch Retina Display effectively became my main monitor. The 27-inch monitor was relegated to displaying documentation and secondary content, because I found its low resolution totally eye straining

Edit: I might have found it so eye straining because MacOS does not support sub pixel rendering. That means a lot of people will need a 4K or Retina monitor to have a comfortable viewing experience on the Mac.

You can still turn it on although it requires the command line.

That combined with the fairly massive software complexity of subpixel rendering is probably why mac dropped it.

If you can't see the difference between 4k and 1080p on a 24" monitor, then you probably need reading glasses. On a 27" monitor it's even worse. It's not so much that you can "see" the pixels, sub pixel rendering and anti-aliasing go a long way to making the actual blocky pixels go away, the difference is crisp letters versus blurry ones.

Maybe, just maybe, one could talk about how crisp text appears on 4k _without_ being rude.

Haven't seen any scaling issues on Windows in years. Last time was Inkscape but they fixed that.

I know my company's ones do.

I've now reverted to RDP-ing from my old laptop, and using the newer one for video calls, scrum boards, Spotify and other stuff that doesn't require a VPN connection or access to my dev machine. It mostly works OK in that configuration.

I've seen other weird things happen when using other Terminal Services clients, though.

Low DPI monitors are pretty much unusable since MacOS dropped subpixel rendering - with fonts being a blurry mess. You can only really use MacOS with high DPI monitors now for all day working. It’s a huge problem for everyone I know who wants to plug their MacBook into a normal DPI display. Not that the subpixel/hinting was ever that good - Linux has always had much better font rendering in my opinion across a wider range of displays.

Nonsense, fonts look fine on non-Retina monitors; they were fine on my old 24" 1920x1200 monitor and are fine on my new 27" 2560x1440 one. Can I see a difference if I drag window from the external monitor to the built-in Retina display? Yes, but text is not blurry at all on the external monitor.

If it matters, "Use font smoothing when available" is checked in System Preferences (which only appears to have an effect on the Retina display, not the monitor).

As an aside, I wonder whether the article's explanation of how font hinting works -- I confess for all these years I didn't know the point of "hinting" was to make sure that fonts lined up with a rasterized grid! -- explains why I always found fonts to look a little worse on Windows than MacOS. Not less legible -- arguably hinted fonts are less "fuzzy" than non-hinted fonts on lower-resolution screens, which (I presume) is what people who prefer hinted fonts prefer about them -- but just a little off at smaller sizes. The answer is because they literally are off at smaller sizes.

[1]: https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/subpixel-hinting.htm...

What does not work perfect is mixing hidpi and lowdpi screens. On wayland with wayland compatible apps it works fine but on X11 or with xwayland apps like electron it will not scale properly when you move the window to the other screen, it will scale to one screen and be wrong when moved over. Overall I don't find this to be too much of an issue and when chrome gets proper wayland support the problem will be 99% solved.

It's good to hear things aren't as bad as some have suggested.

PyCharm had high CPU consumption issues with a Macbook connected to a 4k display running in a scaled resolution. Native 4k was fine, using the default resolution was fine but "more space" made it use tons of CPU since it had to rescale text and UI elements on the CPU.

There is an option to change the scale manually (-Dsun.java2d.uiScale=<floating point value> in the JVM rags), but I don’t know if it helps or not.

It's why I actively avoid monitors with small pixels. My trusty old Dell U3011 and the two rotated 1600x1200's flanking it suit me just fine.

I've no inclination to change my OS, either, just for the sake of fonts.

Kudos to those commenters still on CRT displays. One complaint I have with LCD's is reset lag time, which can make it tricky to catch early BIOS messages.

I think the problem is right there. You’re living in the past so you get the past’s problem.

I haven’t seen a BIOS message in a decade.

I’m sure those U3011 are beautiful and hard to let go (I used to have a U27) but it’s also hard to look at a low-dpi screen once you’ve seen the light

BTW what's wrong with BIOS or UEFI messages? I much prefer them to cosmetic boot graphics.

In fact historically, some of the higher-end hardware yielding the best performance during operation (an axis along which I optimize) actually added time to the boot sequence. The storage subsystem on my workstation is backed by a mix of four Intel enterprise-grade SSD's in RAID-0 (raw speed) and 8 big spinning platters in RAID-6 (capacity), plugged into an Areca 1882ix RAID card w/ 4GB dedicated BBU cache. Unfortunately that card adds a non-bypassable 30 seconds to the boot sequence, no matter what system you plug it into. But once there, it screams. It's only just the last couple years PCI-NVMe drives have come out that can match (or finally beat) the performance metrics I've been hitting for ages.

So I actually kind of feel like I've been living in the future, and the rest of the world just caught up ;-).

Same. I haven’t run into any apps that don’t support high dpi mode. Even terminal apps look great on my Retina 4k iMac screen.

Before getting this machine nearly a year ago, I couldn't natively view high dpi graphics for web projects I’d work on, which was a problem since there are billions of high dpi devices out there.

Added bonus: wide gamut is a thing and there's increasing support for this in browsers, including new color spaces: https://lea.verou.me/2020/04/lch-colors-in-css-what-why-and-...

The version of pgAdmin not based on electron had pixelated fonts on a 5k iMac. I haven't checked recently.

Audacity has extremely low framerates and chugging when interacting with the waveform on retina screens. Even running in low DPI mode doesn't fix it. Only runs nice on non-retina displays.

The post I quoted was: "No matter what operating system you're on". I quoted that particular bit for a reason.

The ergonomics of better screen resolution don't change just because your OS isn't good at dealing with high resolution.

When you pick an operating system (if you have the choice), there are a lot of factors, it's good to know what's important to you and choose appropriately.

It's almost as if there's more operating systems than MacOS...