Agree. It’s a shame the Linux community is so set in its ways. All I really want is decent, grown-up looking Arch Linux laptop with reasonable battery life and performance that boots to CLI and has retina resolution (>200ppi). People imagine retina must be all about graphics, but for me it’s 90% for sharp text. It doubles the amount of time I can use a computer before my brain starts flagging. I use a MacBook Pro because of retina. I wish the rest of the industry would get their shit together, it’s like they have a huge collective blind spot. It’s bizarre to me that PPI is almost never listed on spec sheets and I have to calculate it myself to find out if the screen is going to make my eyes and brain hurt. And they almost all fall short. Outside Apple, high PPI seems to be limited to ‘gamer’ laptops with flashing multicoloured lights for overgrown children. I wish someone would just make a decent plain aluminium laptop with a sharp screen. End rant. Sorry.

100% agreed. My dream machine would be an M2+ Air running a stable release of Debian with full hardware support. (And I mean full hardware support, including the fingerprint scanner, trackpad gestures, properly handling the notch where applicable, etc.)

Apparently Asahi recently published their first alpha release. Does anyone know how close it is to being usable as a daily driver?

Also, has anyone tried the Tuxedo laptop that came up in another recent thread? I'd be surprised if the trackpad entirely held up, and I'm personally against including USB-A or proprietary charging ports in any new hardware, but it is at least the first Linux laptop I've seen with a high-DPI screen. Inclusion of a Dvorak layout option is also a nice touch (Apple still forces me to pop out and rearrange the keys, which feels like a ridiculous kludge for such expensive devices). If Ryzen 7 is halfway competitive with M1's efficiency, I could see this being a very attractive option for a lot of people.

[1]: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Notebooks/...

If all the apple hardware including their gpu (maybe except particularly proprietary things like Touch ID / Secure Enclave) were supported well on Linux and power management we’re sufficiently figured out to not bea total disaster, would that be ok or is it unacceptable that the thing came with nonfree software or to risk apple’s future hardware being unsupportable?

That would be more than OK. I have no hard rules about free vs non-free, I’m pragmatic. But I don’t see that happening. Apple don’t want to put time into helping support other OSes on their hardware, it’s not something they want to do and that’s their call. At least they design good computers. What frustrates me is that no one else in the industry gives the slightest f** about pixel density, even when Apple has demonstrated for years that people really value sharpness. Other manufacturers don’t even mention pixel density, it feels like they’re denying reality. Anyone who looks at an Apple screen can see the difference. My elderly mother said ‘wow’ when she saw her first retina laptop screen. It’s just a different experience. It’s weird how this has been the situation for so many years now.

> What frustrates me is that no one else in the industry gives the slightest fuck about pixel density, even when Apple has demonstrated for years that people really value sharpness.

It's not that they don't, it's that they can't. There's no way to make a high ppi laptop that's small and light and doesn't kill the battery in 3 hours of use.

GPUs that drive that many pixels are power hungry. Apple designs their own integrated GPUs now.

There's also this weird meme that Linux HiDPI isn't ready or something. Back in 2001 I had a small 1600x1200 dell desktop monitor at work, and an even higher DPI Sony Trinitron CRT at home.

They were both unusable under Windows, and probably MacOS 9/10.0, but worked fine out of the box in Debian (once you set the DPI correctly in xfree86's config file).

High DPI support for Linux has strictly regressed since then, since, for some reason, people think Apple's scaling hacks are capable of pixel perfect rendering, and ported them to Linux.

It's not just resolution. Color gamut and accuracy is also derided for no reason. You might get downvoted for suggesting a screen in 2022 should have P3 coverage when 4-year-old mid-range smart phones do. It's really odd to me too because many web developers are working in browser with designers, game devs have graphics, people do graphical hobbies, etc. so it's an important feature to 'doing work' but last I checked zero Linux laptops were shipping with gamuts beyond sRGB.

I don't know if there's data to support this but from what I can tell Linux users are just poorer on average. So it's not like they think low res screens are "sufficient", most of them just don't think it's justified to pay twice as much for a better screen and the market just reflects this. Or maybe I'm just projecting my own views on the issue.

Doesn't matter though because things are changing, native Linux device makers like S76 and Tuxedo provide have started providing 4k screens on their models.

> I don't know if there's data to support this but from what I can tell Linux users are just poorer on average.

> Or maybe I'm just projecting my own views on the issue.

Bringing a flat nothing to go against an anecdote isn't very helpful at figuring out what's right.

Sometimes it's useful to point out flimsy evidence, but they already did that. You need to bring your own thoughts in this situation.

I have used 1080p all my life and never thought that I need it to be higher resolution. So for me the risk of Linux high DPI support not working, high cost and higher power usage make no sense to me.

I've had a 2560x1440 27" for a long time and recently switched to 4K scaled to 2560x1440 and the difference is absolutely crazy. Everything is so sharp and crisp, letters look so much better, way easier on the eyes. And that's with plenty of people on here claiming that macOS does a bad job downscaling by non-integer values, not that I'd notice anything wrong. I remember my first retina laptop screen felt just as crazy good.

Don't knock it till you try it. 80% of my usage is text - terminal, code or my notes. Even most of my web usage is text.

I won't go less than a high dpi screen, preferably near 4k.

I'm happy with what I have. Why try for more, that just leads to misery when things "have" to be a certain way for you to be happy.

It's the sunset cigar thing. Guy watches the sunset from his porch every evening. One day he smokes a cigar at the same time. Loves it. Now he HAS to smoke a cigar every evening or he can't enjoy it. What has he gained?

A man sleeps on the floor every night; one night he sleeps on a mattress and now needs a mattress every night…

Bad analogy. Nobody is satisfied with sleeping on a bare floor.

> I think the issue is much less shiny/matte and much more high-res/low-res.

I definitely wish it were easier to get a matte+high-res combo.