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Widows 10 handles different scaling (zoom) between monitors far better than any Linux distro I have used. A window keeps the zoom of where it came from until it

Widows 10 handles different scaling (zoom) between monitors far better than any Linux distro I have used. A window keeps the zoom of where it came from until it is entirely on the new monitor. Works pretty well.

skrowl 10y ago
While I get that it's uncool to like Windows on HN, I really like Windows 10. With WSL, all of the CLI tools I need for development are here along with better hardware support (including suspend / resume, high DPI monitor support, latest GPU drivers / etc). Plugging two 4K monitors into my laptop (which has a native 1080p display) is an awful experience when booted into Ubuntu. You either have to set the DPI to make the laptop display unusable or set it to make the 4K monitors look like $hit. Plus... you know... games.
- problems 10y ago
  Windows isn't the best at multi-DPI in general though either. Only recently did Firefox on Windows get multi-DPI support - not sure if Chrome does yet because I gave up on it and went to dual 4K because the scaling was easier. If you want to see really good multi-DPI support, OSX is really good at it with most apps supporting it out of the box. Multi-DPI is kind of a hack in general though and is likely to cause issues unless applications have been tested for it very thoroughly, it causes serious issues on major frameworks like Electron and Qt - though both of their support for it is improving slowly. If you want things to work smoothly for now, try to stick to 1 DPI setting.
  - calferreira 10y ago
    I think you're confusing Windows DPI scaling availability vs lack of support from the apps you use. It's not windows fault the apps don't take advantage of DPI. You can also disable dpi scaling for individual apps.
    - lighthazard 10y ago
      The problem isn't just scaling between two different resolutions, it's the inconsistencies (yes, apps don't take advantage but that's not the only issue). For example, if I want 200% 4k (my monitor) and 100% 1080p (my 2 side monitors), I have to choose between ultra-tiny text on my 4k with regular text or blurry text on my 1080ps. http://i.imgur.com/o1S8ZUt.png http://i.imgur.com/o1S8ZUt.png
      - tbyehl 10y ago
        Is that Windows 10? On my Windows 10 Ent desktop I'm able to set the scale factor of each display independently. http://imgur.com/a/5378F http://imgur.com/a/5378F
        lighthazard 10y ago
        This is Windows 10. How do I enable that option?
        dahauns 10y ago
        Erm...click on the display you want to change (1,2,3) and simply drag the slider?
    - problems 10y ago
      You're right, but even many builtin Microsoft apps - while they supported DPI scaling - did not support multi-DPI switching and rather than scaling properly just scaled pixels and looked blurry. It's "not Windows fault", sure but it certainly makes it a worse experience than other platforms like OSX where multi-DPI is much more commonly supported.
      - hackmiester 10y ago
        I would much prefer the Windows behavior to what I see on Linux. Right now, if I open an app that doesn't support high DPI, it is just unusable because it is so tiny.
  - Zeklandia 10y ago
    Chrome hast had DPI scaling since 2015 on Windows. I remember having to report lots of initial bugs. Now it works fine.
    - problems 10y ago
      DPI scaling yes, but not multi-DPI, when dragging from a 100 DPI monitor to a 300 DPI one text should remain sharp and not blurred by scaling pixels. Or even vice versa.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - planteen 10y ago
    Yes, it's true that there are issues. It seems like most Microsoft apps handle multi-DPI well. By comparison, on Fedora 25 (the latest release), the only program I have found that handles multi-DPI is Terminal. Firefox doesn't do it.
    - problems 10y ago
      Yeah, Windows support is better than Linux for it, but it's still pretty iffy. While IE and a few other things do, even stuff like Windows Explorer and OneNote doesn't handle multi-DPI well or even just runtime DPI changes in general, I'll RDP my box from a 100 DPI system and have my session screwed up when I come back to my system. If you're making a decision about whether to make a purchase, don't make it unless you're prepared to do it all at once. Stick to ~100 DPI until you can make a commitment to go all at once.
- 8xde0wcNwpslOw 10y ago
  >While I get that it's uncool to like Windows on HN That has not been my experience here at all. There is a rather active, and sometimes vocal, Windows fan base around here. Misconceptions about the current state of desktop Linux are commonly seen as it seems most people around here only use either Mac or Windows.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    Agreed, while I see some MS/Windows hate... some of it technical, some political, and a mix of founded/fud... There's been a fair amount of counter to that. I mostly use mac at work, mostly windows at home, and a bit of linux for servers, and my htpc (most of my casual browsing at home)... Each experience is fairly different. And they all have pluses and minuses. That said, more often than not, I prefer the Windows UI desktop/menu, but osx & unity app integration and linux/bash shell environment. I wish that Ubuntu/unity would integrate more of the menu/taskbar features found in windows. (And bring back natural scrolling checkbox)
    - freeone3000 10y ago
      Microsoft integrated Ubuntu instead.
j_s 10y ago
Windows also gets my vote when it comes to the per-app volume mixer controls which have been awesome since Windows Vista. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/12/15/volume-control-in-vista/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/12/15/vo...
- vetinari 10y ago
  Pulse Audio solves the same thing for Linux.
- randkyp 10y ago
  This feature comes by default with PulseAudio, maybe Ubuntu doesn't expose it well enough in their audio settings. I think Gnome Settings has it, KDE definitely does.
- riskable 10y ago
  PulseAudio provides this feature and actually provides more features and functionality than Windows. Ubuntu's default mixer isn't the greatest so I recommend this instead: sudo apt install pavucontrol You can then find it in the application menu labeled, "PulseAudio Volume Control". It lets you set the volume for individual applications (and with Chrome, individual tabs!) and also pick which output/input device will be used. It lets you configure some neat tricks. For example, you can setup an audio device that forwards to another computer running PulseAudio, an RTP receiver, and a few other similar protocols then set say, Spotify to output to that device. So if you have some network-enabled audio receiver somewhere in your house/office/whatever you can send audio from your Linux workstation to it. You can of course also pass that audio through various filters/plugins to mess with the sound before it goes out to the remote receiver. For example, equalize it, noise removal, etc. PulseAudio supports LADSPA plugins so if you wanted to you could setup a little Raspberry Pi audio receiver at your front door and yell at solicitors in a robotic voice from your desktop. All with a bit of PulseAudio configuration fiddling =)
  - drostie 10y ago
    I still remember the first time I was in a computer lab and I leaned too far away from my computer and my headphones that were blaring music popped out... and the whole room WASN'T subjected to the same loud music. And I opened up the Kubuntu audio controls and plugged in my headphones and the volume slider suddenly jumped up, then I unplugged again and it muted again. "Woah." I remember trying it on whatever Windows computers were in the lab just to make sure I wasn't crazy and that this wasn't there all along, and sure enough, they kept the same volume no matter whether the headphones were plugged in or not. One of the first PulseAudio victories I remember, at a time when I vaguely recall that it was a newcomer and people were really pissed at PulseAudio's bugs and recommending just straight ALSA instead.
godelski 10y ago
I've always resorted to xrander and can get the screen looking pretty good. Though I really think something like this should just work.
Latty 10y ago
My experience (currently running two 27" panels at 3840x2160 and one 27" panel at 2560x1440 in KDE for most stuff, Windows for gaming, and previously had one of the first edition retina MBPs with external non-retina displays): OS X, years ago when the first retina MBP was released, did everything right. It was seamless from monitor to monitor, scaling done well. Windows 10, now: OK, ish. Most applications scale badly with blurry text because it's just literally scaling the image afterwards. Newer applications are fine. The actual scaling isn't great - having a window half on one monitor and half on the other leads it to 'picking one' and looking weird on the other. KDE, now: Pretty good. Correct scaling once you set it up. The autodetection can be dodgy, and the DPI scaling for text isn't linked to the rendering scaling for windows, for some reason. The GUI still only gives you a single scaling option for all monitors, but the autodetection can do different for each monitor, and environment variables can be set to solve it manually. The actual scaling is perfect for the vast majority of things. Things scale correctly and no blurriness. The only application that doesn't handle scaling is Unity3D, so everything is tiny (no fallback to raw image scaling). In general, it's what you'd expect for interace stuff across the platforms - Linux does it right, but the interfaces around it are bad, Windows does it fine for new stuff, old stuff (which is most stuff) sucks, but the interfaces are OK for doing it, and OS X gets it all right. Edit: Just to be clear, it's only the Unity3D editor that doesn't do scaling, the actual games work fine, as you'd expect they just get the full space and the game chooses how to render to it. To be fair to Unity about the editor, they support scaling on OS X, and the Linux build is still a beta. It is annoying though.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  I use this on Windows 10: http://windows10_dpi_blurry_fix.xpexplorer.com/ http://windows10_dpi_blurry_fix.xpexplorer.com/ and it works fine. If you have blurry text, disable DPI scaling in that app (right-click -> Properties -> Compatibility -> Disable DPI scaling) and this will take over and make it usable. There are a couple of applications that act wrong no matter what (Battle.net for example), but most of the time this fixes it well enough.
  - Latty 10y ago
    I only use Windows 10 for gaming, so fortunately I don't really need to worry. Useful for those who use Windows all the time, though.
zerocrates 10y ago
I get correct auto scaling-switching like this on Gnome 3 with Wayland, but only for a subset of programs (basically those that are fairly vanilla GTK+3), and at the cost of weird bugs with Wayland and program support thereof that still crop up fairly regularly.

skrowl 10y ago

While I get that it's uncool to like Windows on HN, I really like Windows 10. With WSL, all of the CLI tools I need for development are here along with better hardware support (including suspend / resume, high DPI monitor support, latest GPU drivers / etc). Plugging two 4K monitors into my laptop (which has a native 1080p display) is an awful experience when booted into Ubuntu. You either have to set the DPI to make the laptop display unusable or set it to make the 4K monitors look like $hit. Plus... you know... games.

problems 10y ago
Windows isn't the best at multi-DPI in general though either. Only recently did Firefox on Windows get multi-DPI support - not sure if Chrome does yet because I gave up on it and went to dual 4K because the scaling was easier. If you want to see really good multi-DPI support, OSX is really good at it with most apps supporting it out of the box. Multi-DPI is kind of a hack in general though and is likely to cause issues unless applications have been tested for it very thoroughly, it causes serious issues on major frameworks like Electron and Qt - though both of their support for it is improving slowly. If you want things to work smoothly for now, try to stick to 1 DPI setting.
- calferreira 10y ago
  I think you're confusing Windows DPI scaling availability vs lack of support from the apps you use. It's not windows fault the apps don't take advantage of DPI. You can also disable dpi scaling for individual apps.
  - lighthazard 10y ago
    The problem isn't just scaling between two different resolutions, it's the inconsistencies (yes, apps don't take advantage but that's not the only issue). For example, if I want 200% 4k (my monitor) and 100% 1080p (my 2 side monitors), I have to choose between ultra-tiny text on my 4k with regular text or blurry text on my 1080ps. http://i.imgur.com/o1S8ZUt.png http://i.imgur.com/o1S8ZUt.png
    - tbyehl 10y ago
      Is that Windows 10? On my Windows 10 Ent desktop I'm able to set the scale factor of each display independently. http://imgur.com/a/5378F http://imgur.com/a/5378F
      - lighthazard 10y ago
        This is Windows 10. How do I enable that option?
        dahauns 10y ago
        Erm...click on the display you want to change (1,2,3) and simply drag the slider?
  - problems 10y ago
    You're right, but even many builtin Microsoft apps - while they supported DPI scaling - did not support multi-DPI switching and rather than scaling properly just scaled pixels and looked blurry. It's "not Windows fault", sure but it certainly makes it a worse experience than other platforms like OSX where multi-DPI is much more commonly supported.
    - hackmiester 10y ago
      I would much prefer the Windows behavior to what I see on Linux. Right now, if I open an app that doesn't support high DPI, it is just unusable because it is so tiny.
- Zeklandia 10y ago
  Chrome hast had DPI scaling since 2015 on Windows. I remember having to report lots of initial bugs. Now it works fine.
  - problems 10y ago
    DPI scaling yes, but not multi-DPI, when dragging from a 100 DPI monitor to a 300 DPI one text should remain sharp and not blurred by scaling pixels. Or even vice versa.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- planteen 10y ago
  Yes, it's true that there are issues. It seems like most Microsoft apps handle multi-DPI well. By comparison, on Fedora 25 (the latest release), the only program I have found that handles multi-DPI is Terminal. Firefox doesn't do it.
  - problems 10y ago
    Yeah, Windows support is better than Linux for it, but it's still pretty iffy. While IE and a few other things do, even stuff like Windows Explorer and OneNote doesn't handle multi-DPI well or even just runtime DPI changes in general, I'll RDP my box from a 100 DPI system and have my session screwed up when I come back to my system. If you're making a decision about whether to make a purchase, don't make it unless you're prepared to do it all at once. Stick to ~100 DPI until you can make a commitment to go all at once.
8xde0wcNwpslOw 10y ago
>While I get that it's uncool to like Windows on HN That has not been my experience here at all. There is a rather active, and sometimes vocal, Windows fan base around here. Misconceptions about the current state of desktop Linux are commonly seen as it seems most people around here only use either Mac or Windows.
- tracker1 10y ago
  Agreed, while I see some MS/Windows hate... some of it technical, some political, and a mix of founded/fud... There's been a fair amount of counter to that. I mostly use mac at work, mostly windows at home, and a bit of linux for servers, and my htpc (most of my casual browsing at home)... Each experience is fairly different. And they all have pluses and minuses. That said, more often than not, I prefer the Windows UI desktop/menu, but osx & unity app integration and linux/bash shell environment. I wish that Ubuntu/unity would integrate more of the menu/taskbar features found in windows. (And bring back natural scrolling checkbox)
  - freeone3000 10y ago
    Microsoft integrated Ubuntu instead.

j_s 10y ago

Windows also gets my vote when it comes to the per-app volume mixer controls which have been awesome since Windows Vista. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/12/15/volume-control-in-vista/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/12/15/vo...

vetinari 10y ago
Pulse Audio solves the same thing for Linux.
randkyp 10y ago
This feature comes by default with PulseAudio, maybe Ubuntu doesn't expose it well enough in their audio settings. I think Gnome Settings has it, KDE definitely does.
riskable 10y ago
PulseAudio provides this feature and actually provides more features and functionality than Windows. Ubuntu's default mixer isn't the greatest so I recommend this instead: sudo apt install pavucontrol You can then find it in the application menu labeled, "PulseAudio Volume Control". It lets you set the volume for individual applications (and with Chrome, individual tabs!) and also pick which output/input device will be used. It lets you configure some neat tricks. For example, you can setup an audio device that forwards to another computer running PulseAudio, an RTP receiver, and a few other similar protocols then set say, Spotify to output to that device. So if you have some network-enabled audio receiver somewhere in your house/office/whatever you can send audio from your Linux workstation to it. You can of course also pass that audio through various filters/plugins to mess with the sound before it goes out to the remote receiver. For example, equalize it, noise removal, etc. PulseAudio supports LADSPA plugins so if you wanted to you could setup a little Raspberry Pi audio receiver at your front door and yell at solicitors in a robotic voice from your desktop. All with a bit of PulseAudio configuration fiddling =)
- drostie 10y ago
  I still remember the first time I was in a computer lab and I leaned too far away from my computer and my headphones that were blaring music popped out... and the whole room WASN'T subjected to the same loud music. And I opened up the Kubuntu audio controls and plugged in my headphones and the volume slider suddenly jumped up, then I unplugged again and it muted again. "Woah." I remember trying it on whatever Windows computers were in the lab just to make sure I wasn't crazy and that this wasn't there all along, and sure enough, they kept the same volume no matter whether the headphones were plugged in or not. One of the first PulseAudio victories I remember, at a time when I vaguely recall that it was a newcomer and people were really pissed at PulseAudio's bugs and recommending just straight ALSA instead.

godelski 10y ago

I've always resorted to xrander and can get the screen looking pretty good. Though I really think something like this should just work.

Latty 10y ago

My experience (currently running two 27" panels at 3840x2160 and one 27" panel at 2560x1440 in KDE for most stuff, Windows for gaming, and previously had one of the first edition retina MBPs with external non-retina displays): OS X, years ago when the first retina MBP was released, did everything right. It was seamless from monitor to monitor, scaling done well. Windows 10, now: OK, ish. Most applications scale badly with blurry text because it's just literally scaling the image afterwards. Newer applications are fine. The actual scaling isn't great - having a window half on one monitor and half on the other leads it to 'picking one' and looking weird on the other. KDE, now: Pretty good. Correct scaling once you set it up. The autodetection can be dodgy, and the DPI scaling for text isn't linked to the rendering scaling for windows, for some reason. The GUI still only gives you a single scaling option for all monitors, but the autodetection can do different for each monitor, and environment variables can be set to solve it manually. The actual scaling is perfect for the vast majority of things. Things scale correctly and no blurriness. The only application that doesn't handle scaling is Unity3D, so everything is tiny (no fallback to raw image scaling). In general, it's what you'd expect for interace stuff across the platforms - Linux does it right, but the interfaces around it are bad, Windows does it fine for new stuff, old stuff (which is most stuff) sucks, but the interfaces are OK for doing it, and OS X gets it all right. Edit: Just to be clear, it's only the Unity3D editor that doesn't do scaling, the actual games work fine, as you'd expect they just get the full space and the game chooses how to render to it. To be fair to Unity about the editor, they support scaling on OS X, and the Linux build is still a beta. It is annoying though.

cookiecaper 10y ago
I use this on Windows 10: http://windows10_dpi_blurry_fix.xpexplorer.com/ http://windows10_dpi_blurry_fix.xpexplorer.com/ and it works fine. If you have blurry text, disable DPI scaling in that app (right-click -> Properties -> Compatibility -> Disable DPI scaling) and this will take over and make it usable. There are a couple of applications that act wrong no matter what (Battle.net for example), but most of the time this fixes it well enough.
- Latty 10y ago
  I only use Windows 10 for gaming, so fortunately I don't really need to worry. Useful for those who use Windows all the time, though.

zerocrates 10y ago

I get correct auto scaling-switching like this on Gnome 3 with Wayland, but only for a subset of programs (basically those that are fairly vanilla GTK+3), and at the cost of weird bugs with Wayland and program support thereof that still crop up fairly regularly.