32" 4k display at fraction scaling of 1.5 (150%) is fine for my day-to-day work (Excel, VS Code, Word, Web browsing, Teams etc.). It delivers sharp enough text at an effective resolution of 2560x1440 px. There are many 32" 4k displays that are affordable and good enough for office workers. I work in a brightly lit room, so I find that monitor brightness (over 350 nits) is the most important monitor feature for me, over text sharpness, color accuracy, or refresh rate.

For me it would be 16-27" 4k is fine, but and as you go up to 32" I'd be wanting 5 or 6k ideally as it's quite noticable for text (even when high DPI scaling is working and across operating systems).

So MacOS supports only a handful of low dpi resolutions and high dpi must be an integer multiple of one of those?

It doesn't have to be but it's really designed to run at exactly 2x scale.

What makes you say that? Unless I am mistaken, it’s only the Pro models who run at 2x by default.

I have dual 27" monitors, both at work and at home. At work, they're 4K monitors, because that's all they have in this size for some reason (LG if it makes a difference). At home, my own monitors are ASUS ProArt 1440p monitors. I run Linux in both places.

I really like my 1440p monitors at home more than the 4K monitors at work. At work, I'm always dealing with scaling and font size issues, but at home everything looks perfect. So I think you're onto something here: 1440p just seems to be a better resolution on a 27" panel.

Yup, 27" 4k with a Mac is truly awful. Don't do it. Get a 5k display.

Disagree completely. Works great for me.

If you're running the 4k display at 1440p, I'd agreed. But I run two 4k 60hz displays on a 16" MacBook Pro work laptop at 2880x1440 effective resolution and it looks fine to me. Yes, it doesn't look as good as the Studio Display I have on my personal Mac. But even though I have the MacBook Pro screen right next to the 27" monitors, I just don't notice the difference as I switch between them all day long.

I'm not saying there is no difference. But I suspect how one reacts to it is highly dependent on the person. I wear glasses that aren't perfectly focused for either screen, but they're good enough to get the job done - and mostly importantly, I get to use my two 4k 27" monitors to give me the same effective resolution as a Studio Display at far less money than two Studio Displays.

If you actually care about this stuff you are going to run something like https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay which easily allows for HiDPI @ 4K resolution, it does not "look bizarre" or "require fractional scaling". This is what the OP is about. I do the same thing, I run native res w/ HiDPI on a 27" 4K screen as my only monitor, works great.

Unfortunately BetterDisplay cannot set HiDPI @ 4K on the M5 machines - that was the first thing I tried.

Sure, and that is the real tragedy here. The person I'm replying to is just pointing out that native support for high res sucks, which is true, but the real problem is what limits there are on 3rd party support.

27" 4k is totally fine on Windows 11 (not a gamer). Everything is sharp at 150% scale.

Windows does ha not have this issue.

That's what I'm pointing out. The person I replied to thinks it does: "I have personally refused to accept in the past that 27 inch 4k isn’t as bad as people say and got one myself only to regret buying it. Get the correct size and scaling and your life will be peaceful. I would recommend the same for Linux and Windows too tbh but people who game might be fine with other sizes and resolutions."