Still dont get it. Using a 4K LG display with a Macbook and everything works as intended. Whats your specific issue? What does "tiny widgets" mean?

Completely incorrect. Plenty of actual reasons to dislike Apple, no need to fabricate new ones.

I'm typing this on a 4K monitor connected to a Mac and everything is perfect.

I don't remember what the default behavior is when MacOS sees a new 4K monitor, but you can go into the display preferences and choose "Larger Text" (essentially, 2X UI scaling) or "More Space" (no scaling, "tiny widgets") or incremental noninteger scaling modes in between.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dmin2flhod4rkqxfm494k/macos_d...

Does not that just result in a 1920×1080 resolution with low res text?

Try using the same screen on Linux, take a close picture of text and compare.

3rd party monitors have the HiDPI mode disabled.

I'm not sure Linux is the comparison point you want for "handles high resolution consistently with various monitors." I'm sure I could mess around with settings to get any behavior I want, but I've been wrangling multi-monitor high-res setups on Linux for over a decade and it's never been better than OS X's monitor handling. They both have plenty of issues.

I think I see the cause of confusion here.

After some googling, it looks like M1 (and I guess M2) Macs don't always expose HiDPI options for 3rd party displays. That sucks. WTF is Apple doing? I'm not sure if there are workarounds or what. I will research this before buying an Apple Silicon based Mac, that's for sure.

I have a Intel Mac (latest MacOS) and have never experienced this problem with a variety of 3rd party monitors over the years. So I didn't even realize this was an issue.

Additionally, I forgot that subpixel rendering is disabled by default. You can enable it with `defaults write -g CGFontRenderingFontSmoothingDisabled -bool NO` but I forgot that was a required step.

Well, apropos of anything else, I think they very deliberately "broke"/tweaked Display Stream Compression when they released the Pro Display XDR.

My cheesegrater Mac Pro with a beefy graphics card under Catalina, I was happily running 2 4K displays in HDR10, at 144Hz.

First beta of Big Sur, which came out with the Pro Display? I could drive them in HDR10 at 60Hz. 95Hz in SDR.

Was reproducible - by me, by many others.

Turn DSC 1.4 down to 1.2 on my monitors, and it got a bit better, HDR10 @ 75Hz, 120Hz SDR, IIRC.

That remained broken all through Big Sur, despite a huge number of reports.

Remained broken through Monterey too.

I believe it's fixed in Ventura, but I've since changed monitors.

Initially, people were wondering about the Pro Display's bandwidth and how it was doing 6K HDR and other USB connectivity, and it sure as hell seems like they messed with the DSC spec to make it happen, and 'screw other monitor owners'.

That's completely f'd up. Brings me one step closer to ditching Macs.

Honestly life has been turbulent the last few years and I just haven't had the energy to switch, even though I think everything I do at this point is easily doable in Linux anyway.

I have tons of issues hooking 4k monitors to my macbook but that is definitely not one of them.