The text looks a lot nicer, without subpixel rendering which can also save computational power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering

Anecdotally, I've used HiDPI alongside 1x res monitors since 2015 now, and I can honestly say I don't care much about which one I'm using for reading and writing.

What does matter though is gray uniformity and the size of the color gamut. Especially for the work I do (video and photography).

Anecdotally, I find non-4K displays incredibly uncomfortable to use after using a 4K one for my desktop for 2 years.

I always disable this crap, fine with pixels %)) OK, I understand pixel interpolation is useful in printed media production, but on displays... Win95 still looks great to me.

It does make a huge difference for readability of Chinese/Japanese/Korean in small sizes (e.g. comparable to reading a normal book or paper).

Now, that makes a good point, thank you!

Well, people have different opinions about it. I personally hate visible pixels with passion. I was an early adopter of HiDPI displays (starting with IBM T221 back in 2007), and I don't understand how anybody could settle for less after they see this gorgeous high resolution.

It's probably the fact that most people haven't experienced it. Regular consumers think macbooks have magically "better" displays than most windows laptops but can't name the exact reason. But just getting a high DPI laptop/monitor gets the same effect.

As others have said, smooth, crisp font rendering. I’ve been using high DPI displays for almost 10 years now and would never consider going back. Using a 1440 monitor, say, feels to me like using a machine with a floppy disk: an anachronism.

My wife though swears she cannot tell the difference and doesn’t care which she uses. This boggles my mind and is actually a bit frustrating to me, but that’s my problem.

So, I’m interested in if you can tell the difference but don’t care or if it’s something else.

I’ve always used a Mac though, maybe that’s the difference? Never seen Linux/Windows in 4K.

I don't care that much but I do notice. Most PC laptops these days are 1080p and at their sizes this is generally 160+ PPI which is about the same as a 27" 4K display so it looks fine to me.

Apple also has made their text rendering look worse on non-retina screens a few versions back which exacerbates the problem compared to Windows and Linux.

I switch back and forth between modern High DPI displays and older ~1440p displays. I don't really care myself. High resolution has never mattered to me.

I'm the same way with video tho, I can still watch 480p YouTube video and it doesn't bother me at all. Whereas some people I know can't stand watching 1 second of video below 1080p.

1440p can be quite crisp if you're using pixel-perfect, antialiased rendering and looking at the whole screen. Even for text. Anything higher is either overkill or (most often) compensating for defects in the rendering pipeline.

(In fact, there's a viable argument that even 1080p ought to suffice, and 768p be "good enough for most uses".)

For me, it's all about text. I spend my whole day staring at text in some form - email, code, etc. A good high DPI display creates a much better text shape for the same physical size text on screen (and doesn't have as much of an issue with trying to snap vertical text to actual pixels, etc).

It makes reading a lot easier for me - and vastly decreases how tired I feel after a day of it.

I had an old iPad (before retina) and used it for general tasks, sometimes. My newer hiDPI iPad has become my primary device for everything but actual work.

I would never have read a book on the old iPad, I read several in hiDPI. It really changes the way you read if the fonts are (perceptually) as crisp as print.

Having said that, I still use a 1080p display for work and watching video

So my tiny iPad has like twice as many pixels as my big screen.

Fonts and GUI elements look much sharper. After going HighDPI i can't go back.

Honestly adwaita will look like crap no matter what the resolution is.

(And before you get upset about the Gnome dev's feelings getting hurt, they've decided that this is the best theme and no one should ever use anything different.)

That's why I use KDE, since I saw how Gnome devs treat font rendering issues from the community[1]. And for some reason this is the most popular linux DE. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787

You're not crazy, whatever Redhat decides eventually becomes popular because that's what people get paid to work with. It's very similar to the situation with Windows.

Also, I think most desktop Linux users that care probably use a small WM rather than either Gnome or KDE. Gnome also gets a lot of attention because GTK is easier to work with than QT.

I care but I don't understand the craziness about tiling wms, xfce etc. I like the convenience that KDE provides for me.

To me the guys who casually always mention "btw yeah I'm using this tiling wm and ..." are just smugly showing off, like vegans or people who own too expensive bicycles.

I don't think tiling WMs and Xfce can be lumped together like that. Xfce is very much a traditional DE with "batteries included"; it's more lightweight than Gnome and KDE, but still way closer to them than most lightweight WMs. I'd say it's closest to MATE (which, to remind, is itself a fork of Gnome from before it went nuts).

For a programmer, screen real estate (dependent on scaling). I look at 4k 100% scaling as having condensed two 1080p monitors without bezels.

4k is actually exactly 4 1080p screens' worth of pixels, unless you mean non-100% scaling.

Switching from 1900x1200 to a 4k monitor was night and day for me. So much less eye strain by the end of the day.

In the setup you like now, how far away is your monitor from your eyes? How many pages of text do you keep open typically? seen at once

Better text rendering is the main advantage. This means that you can set text sizes smaller and have a lot more usable screen real estate.

I tried using a 4K IPS display for usual programming tasks, but the usual fonts become so painfully tiny that it's just unbearable (and I have almost perfect vision). Combining a normal old display with modern 4K also creates lots of problems. For example, I drag windows and tool boxes a lot between desktops when working with code or in 3D. The perfect resolution for my old-school self is now a WQHD 2560*1440. Not in any "hi-dpi" sense.

It is for this reason I prefer 2 1080p monitors connected to my work laptop.

I prefer physical size for my screen real estate as opposed to jamming more onto a single display.

Scaling between different display sizes as you move windows around doesn't work well on Windows so I also prefer my laptop display to have the same resolution.

My wife takes a different approach: Giant, cheap 4k TV with windows spread out connected to her work machine.

>4K IPS display

It's not what person above suggests. It's about something like 5K display rendered in 200% resolution, so it's equivalent to 1440p. Then you can have slightly downscale fonts compared to "raw" 1440p since you'll still have more clarity due to higher pixels per inch.