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Ubuntu and Gnome handles doubled resolution just fine, much like the retina MacBooks. It’s the fractional scaling required for all the other resolutions in bet

Ubuntu and Gnome handles doubled resolution just fine, much like the retina MacBooks. It’s the fractional scaling required for all the other resolutions in between which is troublesome, and I believe that applies to Macs too. In this space, I think the only contender doing it really well is Microsoft Windows. That said, I prefer Linux. For me having a few warts here and there is an perfectly acceptable price to pay for having a full computing environment I can fully trust and adapt to my needs.

coldtea 8y ago
>Ubuntu and Gnome handles doubled resolution just fine, much like the retina MacBooks. Not if many apps don't have, and will not soon get, double-density assets.
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  Then their assets will look like they would on low dpi displays, which sounds like "just fine" for me. (I'm a high dpi screen user)
  - coldtea 8y ago
    For the non-discerning user, yes, that would be just fine. Was responding to the argument that it works just as good as in MacOs though -- where companies were swift to change assets.
lozenge 8y ago
Retina MacBook renders text at 4x while scaling other things 2x as I understand it. It looks great.
joombaga 8y ago
> Ubuntu and Gnome handles doubled resolution just fine, much like the retina MacBooks. Not if you have a secondary monitor that doesn't need doubled, e.g. laptop built-in 4k with a 1920x1080 external. As far as I know this is an X problem.
- om42 8y ago
  It is an X problem, there's (sorta) support for fractional scaling in Wayland
  - magicbuzz 8y ago
    It’s also an app issue. I run a 4K monitor on Ubuntu and the majority of apps take the entire screen when they start or open a window. And in many apps I have to tweak things so it becomes readable.
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
The advantage Apple had was owning the hardware, you don't need fractional scaling if you don't offer any hardware with fractional scaling. Windows has been getting better but it's still not brilliant, even with resolution independent frameworks like WPF there are a ton of issues. Ubuntu/Gnome was completely broken for me when I tried it last year. KDE was the best of the desktops but still not as good as MacOS.
- fgonzag 8y ago
  But you still could use an external display, which could conceivably require fractional scaling.
kitsunesoba 8y ago
Through rendering at a larger resolution internally and then scaling the rendered image back down, macOS supports fractional scaling to some degree. It taxes the GPU more than 2x does and isn’t as flexible as a slider, but it also cleanly avoids issues that’d normally come with fractional scaling. So for example a MacBook Pro with a native resolution of 2880x1800 and native effective 2x of 1440x900 can also run at effective 1680x1050 or effective 1920x1200. This works on external displays as well.
baybal2 8y ago
GTK does not have this requirement. I just have to know the correct DPI. Fonts are rendered natively at whatever resolution, so are the vector or procedurally drawn widgets. The only things that are not rendered at native resolution are pixmaps, which are exceedingly rare in a well designed program (svg is used everywhere in GTK ecosystem)
neverminder 8y ago
I have no problems with fractional scaling (150%) on my dual 27 inch 4K monitors, apart from one annoying bug that sometimes resets scaling to 100% after screen lock. Same could be said about my laptop, 13 inch 2560x1700 also 150% scaling. I'm running Unity on both obviously since Gnome doesn't even support fractional scaling, which is highly disappointing.

coldtea 8y ago

>Ubuntu and Gnome handles doubled resolution just fine, much like the retina MacBooks. Not if many apps don't have, and will not soon get, double-density assets.

seba_dos1 8y ago
Then their assets will look like they would on low dpi displays, which sounds like "just fine" for me. (I'm a high dpi screen user)
- coldtea 8y ago
  For the non-discerning user, yes, that would be just fine. Was responding to the argument that it works just as good as in MacOs though -- where companies were swift to change assets.

lozenge 8y ago

Retina MacBook renders text at 4x while scaling other things 2x as I understand it. It looks great.

joombaga 8y ago

> Ubuntu and Gnome handles doubled resolution just fine, much like the retina MacBooks. Not if you have a secondary monitor that doesn't need doubled, e.g. laptop built-in 4k with a 1920x1080 external. As far as I know this is an X problem.

om42 8y ago
It is an X problem, there's (sorta) support for fractional scaling in Wayland
- magicbuzz 8y ago
  It’s also an app issue. I run a 4K monitor on Ubuntu and the majority of apps take the entire screen when they start or open a window. And in many apps I have to tweak things so it becomes readable.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago

The advantage Apple had was owning the hardware, you don't need fractional scaling if you don't offer any hardware with fractional scaling. Windows has been getting better but it's still not brilliant, even with resolution independent frameworks like WPF there are a ton of issues. Ubuntu/Gnome was completely broken for me when I tried it last year. KDE was the best of the desktops but still not as good as MacOS.

fgonzag 8y ago
But you still could use an external display, which could conceivably require fractional scaling.

kitsunesoba 8y ago

Through rendering at a larger resolution internally and then scaling the rendered image back down, macOS supports fractional scaling to some degree. It taxes the GPU more than 2x does and isn’t as flexible as a slider, but it also cleanly avoids issues that’d normally come with fractional scaling. So for example a MacBook Pro with a native resolution of 2880x1800 and native effective 2x of 1440x900 can also run at effective 1680x1050 or effective 1920x1200. This works on external displays as well.

baybal2 8y ago

GTK does not have this requirement. I just have to know the correct DPI. Fonts are rendered natively at whatever resolution, so are the vector or procedurally drawn widgets. The only things that are not rendered at native resolution are pixmaps, which are exceedingly rare in a well designed program (svg is used everywhere in GTK ecosystem)

neverminder 8y ago

I have no problems with fractional scaling (150%) on my dual 27 inch 4K monitors, apart from one annoying bug that sometimes resets scaling to 100% after screen lock. Same could be said about my laptop, 13 inch 2560x1700 also 150% scaling. I'm running Unity on both obviously since Gnome doesn't even support fractional scaling, which is highly disappointing.