I have a high-res XPS 13. I can't speak for unity, I use Xfce on it. After a bit of setup (set Xft/DPI, panel size, fonts), most things work pretty well. There'

I have a high-res XPS 13. I can't speak for unity, I use Xfce on it. After a bit of setup (set Xft/DPI, panel size, fonts), most things work pretty well. There's a few special snowflake apps that need custom setup - firefox ignores system dpi, but has its own layout.css.devPixelsPerPx setting that works well. Rarely there'll be an app that ignores dpi and doesn't have its own settings, which you can use xfwm's full-screen-zoom feature to make usable. The main problem comes when you connect to a (normal-resolution) external monitor, because in X, different monitors (which are just views onto the same underlying X screen) can't have different DPIs. To solve that I set the system dpi correct for the external monitor, and use xrandr screen scaling, ie `xrandr --output eDP1 --scale 0.5x0.5`. (Which means I'm not taking advantage of the high res then, but when I'm using my giant external monitor, it and my laptop are pretty far from my eyes, so I don't care so much. I use a fork of xrandr which uses exact pixel quadrupling when you set a scale of 0.5x0.5, by default it blurs to antialias everything even when it doesn't need to, ie reciprocal-integer scaling values). I have a pair of scripts[0] that run when I plug and unplug my external monitor that make the change reasonably seamless (except for having to restart firefox). [0] https://github.com/SimonWoolf/dotfiles/blob/master/.useHighDpi.sh https://github.com/SimonWoolf/dotfiles/blob/master/.useHighD... and https://github.com/SimonWoolf/dotfiles/blob/master/.useScreenScaling.sh https://github.com/SimonWoolf/dotfiles/blob/master/.useScree...