This is the issue in a nutshell for me. I wish I’d bought a FHD 1080 screen instead of 4K on my XPS 13 for this very issue. Wayland isn’t an option for me yet

This is the issue in a nutshell for me. I wish I’d bought a FHD 1080 screen instead of 4K on my XPS 13 for this very issue. Wayland isn’t an option for me yet because I need screensharing under Hangouts, etc. You can’t mix the HiDPI internal screen with, say, a 1440 external monitor with Gnome on X11. Scaling is applied equally across both. Also if you drop back to plain text e.g. during boot up the internal screen will show text at 100% scaling and the text is tiny. I guess that might be something BIOS could take care of but it’s currently a problem. Sorry, can’t offer comparisons to Windows, I just work with macOS and Linux.