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“No scaling” is a state of mind. It’s a fiction we hold onto from our purely bitmapped, pixel art past. If your OS doesn’t adapt to high DPI monitors cleanly, c

“No scaling” is a state of mind. It’s a fiction we hold onto from our purely bitmapped, pixel art past. If your OS doesn’t adapt to high DPI monitors cleanly, change your OS.

bcheung 7y ago
Even if the OS supports it, many apps still write their own UI primitives and won't scale with the OS scaling, or when they do, it's not uniform so the text is either obnoxiously huge, or the UI affordances are way too small. Working with a larger screen without scaling makes this problem go away. I personally have 2 x 4K monitors at 32" and find it quite ideal.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Unfortunately with really large monitors, you have to turn your head a lot.
  - penagwin 7y ago
    If you have a high-res, large monitor, you want to arrange your windows like a grid. You don't want to actually use Google Chrome at full 4k with no scaling across the entire screen.
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      Still have to move your head. My 24 is big enough to require a modest amount of movement.
    - tracker1 7y ago
      I mostly grid at 42" (moom is awesome)... still have to move my head. The mac/ubuntu top menu is a bit annoying on a really big display. Still prefer it to a couple smaller screens.
- robertoandred 7y ago
  That's a Windows problem. Macs have had high-dpi screens that work perfectly for seven years now.
  - chupasaurus 7y ago
    The only thing macOS does is downscaling by a factor of 2 the oversized rendering resolution (virtual display on X server). For certain dpi it works fine, for certain it would blur everything (i.e. the screen I use atm is 24" 4K with 185 ppi). Windows 10 has no problems rendering on ANY DPI, certain apps and frameworks ignore it though which is not a problem of OS.
    - sjwright 7y ago
      Downscaling the screen at "retina" resolutions works way better than your intuitions assume. I thought it would be terrible and ugly, but I was wrong. And I'm normally super picky about things being pixel-perfect. The way macOS does it is perfect 99 percent of the time—and it guarantees no weirdness when app developers have differing ideas about how their app should react to scaling. Apple got this one right and everyone else should just copy them.
- nybble41 7y ago
  The fact that some apps get it wrong isn't a great justification for making all the other well-behaved apps look worse. Just add an option to scale specific apps in the window manager (faking the screen resolution, DPI, etc.) and let everything else run at full resolution.
adamzochowski 7y ago
The people who say "No Scaling" mean that they want to use screen to fit more things. It is not state of mind about past pixels, but about how much stuff you can fit on the screen. how many lines of code. How many sidebars in your utilities, etc. People who say "Scaling" are a different breed. Some like it because for them smoother fonts are more readable. To others, scaling presents ability map physical dimensions to screen. Saying this, I agree that OS and software has to support alternative scalings, and ability to make things larger or smaller. I wish we could just pinch zoom apps on Windows and Linux.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  People have different preferences for how big items on the screen should be. But everyone will take more DPI if you offer it. Nobody is actually for or against scaling itself. It only becomes a question of scaling or not if you artificially lock in a screen beforehand, and that screen is in a certain DPI range. If you used a same-size 8k screen you'd have basically nobody calling for "no scaling", instead you'd have arguments like 2x vs. 3x vs. 4x.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    Exactly... if my 42" was 8K instead of 4K, I'd probably just go 2x and live at that. I do like the slightly smoother fonts, but really like effectively 4x what a 1080p native display at 1x gives, without borders/lines etc.
penagwin 7y ago
I want "No scaling" So I can have up to 4 1080p windows, or even more all visible at once. If I scale it to 1440p, then I lose that real estate. The problem is that at screen sizes less than 30" it's basically impossible to read text at 4k. Even at 31" it's a bit small. > If your OS doesn’t adapt to high DPI monitors cleanly, change your OS. Genuinely curious what modern OS's don't have high DPI support? AFAIK Windows, OSX, and all the modern linux distros (and their DE's) support it. Either way, it's usually not the OS, it's usually random programs that don't want to scale well.
- ricardobeat 7y ago
  This? https://www.amazon.com/Philips-436M6VBPAB-DisplayHDR1000-MultiView-DisplayPort/dp/B07RK4VGLF/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=philips+43+monitor&qid=1561580692&s=gateway&sr=8-5 https://www.amazon.com/Philips-436M6VBPAB-DisplayHDR1000-Mul... Apple was selling these in store until not long ago. Should cover that use case (4 HD screens) fine, but the pixel density is terrible for using at scaled 4K.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- SECProto 7y ago
  > The problem is that at screen sizes less than 30" it's basically impossible to read text at 4k. Even at 31" it's a bit small. I have a laptop with a 12" 4k screen. I can read it just fine. I do scale it 200%, but that just means I would be able to read text just fine at 24" 4k with no scaling. It's all preference and how well the OS handles it. I think everyone can agree that the are still issues to work through on the OS side w.r.t. display scaling. Edit: I misunderstood your last comment. Maybe it isn't the OS's fault when programs don't scale well... but the OS should have an override that lies to the program to force scaling. Hacky though that may be, it would work well, at least for an even 200% scale factor.

“No scaling” is a state of mind. It’s a fiction we hold onto from our purely bitmapped, pixel art past. If your OS doesn’t adapt to high DPI monitors cleanly, change your OS.

bcheung 7y ago

Even if the OS supports it, many apps still write their own UI primitives and won't scale with the OS scaling, or when they do, it's not uniform so the text is either obnoxiously huge, or the UI affordances are way too small. Working with a larger screen without scaling makes this problem go away. I personally have 2 x 4K monitors at 32" and find it quite ideal.

mixmastamyk 7y ago
Unfortunately with really large monitors, you have to turn your head a lot.
- penagwin 7y ago
  If you have a high-res, large monitor, you want to arrange your windows like a grid. You don't want to actually use Google Chrome at full 4k with no scaling across the entire screen.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Still have to move your head. My 24 is big enough to require a modest amount of movement.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    I mostly grid at 42" (moom is awesome)... still have to move my head. The mac/ubuntu top menu is a bit annoying on a really big display. Still prefer it to a couple smaller screens.
robertoandred 7y ago
That's a Windows problem. Macs have had high-dpi screens that work perfectly for seven years now.
- chupasaurus 7y ago
  The only thing macOS does is downscaling by a factor of 2 the oversized rendering resolution (virtual display on X server). For certain dpi it works fine, for certain it would blur everything (i.e. the screen I use atm is 24" 4K with 185 ppi). Windows 10 has no problems rendering on ANY DPI, certain apps and frameworks ignore it though which is not a problem of OS.
  - sjwright 7y ago
    Downscaling the screen at "retina" resolutions works way better than your intuitions assume. I thought it would be terrible and ugly, but I was wrong. And I'm normally super picky about things being pixel-perfect. The way macOS does it is perfect 99 percent of the time—and it guarantees no weirdness when app developers have differing ideas about how their app should react to scaling. Apple got this one right and everyone else should just copy them.
nybble41 7y ago
The fact that some apps get it wrong isn't a great justification for making all the other well-behaved apps look worse. Just add an option to scale specific apps in the window manager (faking the screen resolution, DPI, etc.) and let everything else run at full resolution.

adamzochowski 7y ago

The people who say "No Scaling" mean that they want to use screen to fit more things. It is not state of mind about past pixels, but about how much stuff you can fit on the screen. how many lines of code. How many sidebars in your utilities, etc. People who say "Scaling" are a different breed. Some like it because for them smoother fonts are more readable. To others, scaling presents ability map physical dimensions to screen. Saying this, I agree that OS and software has to support alternative scalings, and ability to make things larger or smaller. I wish we could just pinch zoom apps on Windows and Linux.

Dylan16807 7y ago
People have different preferences for how big items on the screen should be. But everyone will take more DPI if you offer it. Nobody is actually for or against scaling itself. It only becomes a question of scaling or not if you artificially lock in a screen beforehand, and that screen is in a certain DPI range. If you used a same-size 8k screen you'd have basically nobody calling for "no scaling", instead you'd have arguments like 2x vs. 3x vs. 4x.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Exactly... if my 42" was 8K instead of 4K, I'd probably just go 2x and live at that. I do like the slightly smoother fonts, but really like effectively 4x what a 1080p native display at 1x gives, without borders/lines etc.

penagwin 7y ago

I want "No scaling" So I can have up to 4 1080p windows, or even more all visible at once. If I scale it to 1440p, then I lose that real estate. The problem is that at screen sizes less than 30" it's basically impossible to read text at 4k. Even at 31" it's a bit small. > If your OS doesn’t adapt to high DPI monitors cleanly, change your OS. Genuinely curious what modern OS's don't have high DPI support? AFAIK Windows, OSX, and all the modern linux distros (and their DE's) support it. Either way, it's usually not the OS, it's usually random programs that don't want to scale well.

ricardobeat 7y ago
This? https://www.amazon.com/Philips-436M6VBPAB-DisplayHDR1000-MultiView-DisplayPort/dp/B07RK4VGLF/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=philips+43+monitor&qid=1561580692&s=gateway&sr=8-5 https://www.amazon.com/Philips-436M6VBPAB-DisplayHDR1000-Mul... Apple was selling these in store until not long ago. Should cover that use case (4 HD screens) fine, but the pixel density is terrible for using at scaled 4K.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
SECProto 7y ago
> The problem is that at screen sizes less than 30" it's basically impossible to read text at 4k. Even at 31" it's a bit small. I have a laptop with a 12" 4k screen. I can read it just fine. I do scale it 200%, but that just means I would be able to read text just fine at 24" 4k with no scaling. It's all preference and how well the OS handles it. I think everyone can agree that the are still issues to work through on the OS side w.r.t. display scaling. Edit: I misunderstood your last comment. Maybe it isn't the OS's fault when programs don't scale well... but the OS should have an override that lies to the program to force scaling. Hacky though that may be, it would work well, at least for an even 200% scale factor.