My question is if that resolution is usable with 2x integer scaling (1440x960 effective screen real estate), because fractional scaling under Linux is still a bit rocky.

Fractional scaling works well on Plasma under Wayland if you're using an up to date distribution.

Though other things don't work well. Like Plasma's whole toolbar with clock widget etc. It freezes, and you can't interact with the frozen widgets. Only answers are kill and restart, reboot, or switch back to X. It'll get there, but it's still not at a level I would say is daily driver (for me - I like my toolbar clock to actually tell me the current time).

(Kubuntu with KDE project's PPA to be on latest stable)

I'd try with a rolling release and see if you still encounter the problems. I use Plasma panels with the clock widget and haven't experienced freezes or had to restart anything.

The DE itself, yes. This is true of GNOME as well once the hidden setting is enabled. Unfortunately there's still individual programs which don't behave correctly, which for now means that 1x or 2x displays are still best if a trouble-free, low-tinkering experience is the goal.

The GNOME setting is not hidden anymore, fractional scaling seems to be a first class citizen now.

My experience is that it makes a lot of things visibly blurry. Has that improved at all?

I use 150% on my main monitor and everything looks perfect except for two proprietary apps installed through flatpak: Zoom and Spotify. These two are not really known to be quality software in the first place so I think it is safe to blame them for this quirk.

Indeed; it works perfectly on my postmarketOS PinePhone, which has the most recent stable GNOME release.

No. It really isn't. I can tap a keyboard shortcut and change my desktop resolution in .1 increments and everything just works and scales up and down. I've run my internal laptop display at 1.7 for 3+ years. (Sway)

A friend of mine recently (2019 or '20) bought a laptop, new, with a 768p LCD display. It's ridiculous. In 2014 you could get a phone with a 1080p display, and it was 5" so it had a high pixel density too! Why does it feel like consumer electronics are going backwards?

It feels like those cursed 1366x768 panels will still be hanging around somewhere or another forever.

It costs much more to make bigger high resolution screens with good yields.

Perhaps because people realized that the pixel inflation is at some point counterproductive. If you can't distinguish pixels, what difference does it make?

What was the laptop?

I mean, yeah that resolution is ridiculous, but anything above 1080p on a screen less than ~14 inches is going to have diminishing returns and most of those returns will be in how "pretty" it is, not how useful it is.

Looking for a laptop for my Dad more recently (early 2023) there were no models with less than 1080 that were not also incredibly crumby in other respects (dog slow eMMC drives, too little RAM to run current Windows well especially once it swaps to that slow drive, awful looking keyboards, etc.). We checked for lower resolution screens because with his eyes higher is pretty pointless (and it might have reduced the price) but went with 1080 and set it to be scaled in the OS.

> In 2014 you could get a phone with a 1080p display

You can buy a full laptop fur a fair amount less than many phones with high-resolution screens though, possibly more so back then. What spec was his machine beyond the screen? Also: most people are closer to their phone screen in use than they are a laptop, perhaps making the case for higher resolutions there stronger.

Reliably producing those 720/768 displays at common laptop & tablet sizes was cheap so making laptops/tablets around them was cheap, and more than enough people thought it good enough (or didn't know better). Given our experience above, the economies of scale on 1080+ panels have changed such that the 1080 screens are in the sweet zone.

The fact that $1,000+ 15-17in 1080p laptops are still being sold today is just atrocious.

> No one has mentioned the 2880x1920 resolution display.

fyi: On their specification page[0] they list both 2880x1920 (s/b 3:2 aspect ratio) and that the screen is a 16:10 aspect ratio. I'm sure the 16:10 aspect ratio is a typo since 2880x1920 is used in multiple places.

[0] https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starlite-specification