3 ms·

I just got a 4k laptop, but my monitor is 1080p, so I'm excited about Wayland getting better faster (it's the only good way I know of to have different scaling

I just got a 4k laptop, but my monitor is 1080p, so I'm excited about Wayland getting better faster (it's the only good way I know of to have different scaling across displays). I'm still finding all sorts of weird quirks in Linux with 4k...but, I'm also still finding quirks in lots of Windows software, too (games and music software, in particular, are prone to using their own UI toolkits and end up looking ridiculous because of it). So, I can't blame Linux for all of those problems; it's just a tricky problem, I guess.

CJefferson 10y ago
This is one thing that Mac seems to have gotten perfect nowadays, I connect my retina laptop to non-retina monitors, and every seems to work fine, all the time. Apple made one massive simplification -- apps only run at 1x size, or 2x size, and nothing else. This isn't theoretically "nice", but (for me) covers most use cases, and seems to have made the implementation much easier, as you can still design your interface pixel-wise, and just let the OS double scale everything.
- jakehilborn 10y ago
  OSX's scaling system is actually more flexible than just 1x and 2x. I often run my 4K monitor at the effective 1440p resolution. Applications such as Retina Display Manager let you choose between many more scaling sizes than the standard system settings.
  - Shish2k 10y ago
    AFAIK that's scaling the display, not scaling the applications?
  - anonova 10y ago
    OS X can only scale by powers of 2. If your monitor runs at native 4K (3840x2160), scaling ~1.28x renders to 6016x3384 and scales down by 2x to 3008x1692. Your example is at 1.5x (2560x1440), which renders to 5120x2880 and scales down by 2x to 2650x1440. The most efficient scale is 2x (1920x1080) because that can be rendered natively. So while you can have arbitrary effective resolutions, it's rather wasteful to render and can have serious performance implications when you're not using native or powers of 2.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  It seems like that would be an easy solution; but, for probably good reasons (though reasons I don't know), Windows and Linux don't do it that way. Gnome applications of recent vintage behave correctly, pretty much across the board. Firefox has some of its own configuration (for content, but the Gnome settings get applied to the UI), but behaves OK once configured. It's all the non-Gnome stuff that gets weird. Mostly games and music and graphics apps that don't use the system toolkit. Unfortunately, those are just the apps I most want to be able to cram a gazillion pixels onto the screen. I'm tinkering with audio again, on both Linux and Windows, and VSTs, in particular, are awful. Unusably small, in many cases (VSTs are, IMHO, already the ugliest UIs in the world). At least most of my actual software works OK; FL Studio go an update recently that make it's UI vector-based, I guess, as it is fully scalable across any size screen, and looks really good at any size. For reference on the ugliness of VST plugins (many of these are laughably expensive, like in the multiple hundreds of dollars for usually very simple DSP algorithms wrapped up in a ridiculous GUI): https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=vst%20plugins https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=vst%20plugins Now, just imagine them shrunk down to the size of a postage stamp...it's kinda like the thumbnails on image search, actually, on my 15" laptop display.

CJefferson 10y ago

This is one thing that Mac seems to have gotten perfect nowadays, I connect my retina laptop to non-retina monitors, and every seems to work fine, all the time. Apple made one massive simplification -- apps only run at 1x size, or 2x size, and nothing else. This isn't theoretically "nice", but (for me) covers most use cases, and seems to have made the implementation much easier, as you can still design your interface pixel-wise, and just let the OS double scale everything.

jakehilborn 10y ago
OSX's scaling system is actually more flexible than just 1x and 2x. I often run my 4K monitor at the effective 1440p resolution. Applications such as Retina Display Manager let you choose between many more scaling sizes than the standard system settings.
- Shish2k 10y ago
  AFAIK that's scaling the display, not scaling the applications?
- anonova 10y ago
  OS X can only scale by powers of 2. If your monitor runs at native 4K (3840x2160), scaling ~1.28x renders to 6016x3384 and scales down by 2x to 3008x1692. Your example is at 1.5x (2560x1440), which renders to 5120x2880 and scales down by 2x to 2650x1440. The most efficient scale is 2x (1920x1080) because that can be rendered natively. So while you can have arbitrary effective resolutions, it's rather wasteful to render and can have serious performance implications when you're not using native or powers of 2.
SwellJoe 10y ago
It seems like that would be an easy solution; but, for probably good reasons (though reasons I don't know), Windows and Linux don't do it that way. Gnome applications of recent vintage behave correctly, pretty much across the board. Firefox has some of its own configuration (for content, but the Gnome settings get applied to the UI), but behaves OK once configured. It's all the non-Gnome stuff that gets weird. Mostly games and music and graphics apps that don't use the system toolkit. Unfortunately, those are just the apps I most want to be able to cram a gazillion pixels onto the screen. I'm tinkering with audio again, on both Linux and Windows, and VSTs, in particular, are awful. Unusably small, in many cases (VSTs are, IMHO, already the ugliest UIs in the world). At least most of my actual software works OK; FL Studio go an update recently that make it's UI vector-based, I guess, as it is fully scalable across any size screen, and looks really good at any size. For reference on the ugliness of VST plugins (many of these are laughably expensive, like in the multiple hundreds of dollars for usually very simple DSP algorithms wrapped up in a ridiculous GUI): https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=vst%20plugins https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=vst%20plugins Now, just imagine them shrunk down to the size of a postage stamp...it's kinda like the thumbnails on image search, actually, on my 15" laptop display.