3 ms·

As much as I want to do this, Apple has spoiled me with seamless high-DPI display support. I cringe every time I see 1366x768.

mceachen 7y ago
FWIW, Windows laptops (that you can then install Linux on) have had hidpi screens for more than 15 years (!!), and Ubuntu's fractional scaling works really well right out of the box now.
- Groxx 7y ago
  "have had" and "works reliably" are very different things. Every Windows and Linux machine I've used has had issues with individual apps, and most of the time I've plugged them into things that cross multiple scaling factors simultaneously, they've have had rather significant issues (when it isn't just "issues with everything except device-native"). I haven't had an issue with that at all in a few years now on my Mac, and I plug it into literally 10x more screens and configurations.
  - mceachen 7y ago
    Just to add to the anecdata, my MBP would kernel panic ~25% of the time it was plugged into a 4k displayport 1.1 monitor. I'm glad your system is stable, though!
jjoonathan 7y ago
And spotlight. Why is desktop search so bad everywhere else?
- bobbiechen 7y ago
  True. I recently picked up Albert [1] on my Ubuntu machine because I was missing spotlight search. So far it works well - it would have been nice if something like it was included by default. https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert
- robk 7y ago
  Everything is soooo good on pc
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    I am forced to use Windows most of the time. The fact that its desktop search is soooo bad is a daily bummer and makes me look forward to opening my MBP.
    - snazz 7y ago
      It seems like part of Microsoft's goal here was to direct traffic to Edge and Bing at the expense of actual usability. See also: the "help system". Luckily there's a lot of third-party stuff to replace the search feature.
- JadeNB 7y ago
  I don't understand the people for whom Spotlight works. I tend to open Spotlight, and start typing in the name of a file I'm looking for. Consistently, reproducibly, for many different files, it'll fill in the name of the file at a certain point, but then, if I keep typing that very name, it'll switch to a different match. That is, if the name is `abcdefgh` and I type `abc`, then it'll complete it; but if momentum carries me and I type `abcd`, then it'll drop the desired file entirely off the list of suggestions, and give me a different, non-matching one.
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    Huh, interesting, because that exact problem is one of my key complaints with windows search, while I've never noticed it with spotlight -- and I've been using spotlight daily since Tiger. Well, that's not quite true, for a few years after spotlight was released it would get slow after a while, so I mainly stuck with Quicksilver. Eventually spotlight got faster, but I never had that particular problem with it, even though I very regularly have that particular problem on Windows.
henriquez 7y ago
The high-dpi support really is a big deal. No other OS (Windows or Linux) comes close to handling it as seamlessly. I run Gnome in Ubuntu and have got it to a "serviceable" state by being able to set pixel density on a per-app basis by editing launcher files (depending on which display it's running on), but that's not something an average user would be able to figure out (or should have to). Apple has done a great job with their window manager and support for varying DPI between displays. It's just a shame their OS is otherwise such a walled garden, and their hardware is a bad joke ($6k for an 8 core desktop with a years old GPU and no storage, come on.) It really boiled down to a "pick your poison" scenario for me and I sided with the OS (and hardware) that lets me tinker to my heart's content.
- kyuudou 7y ago
  This was the game-changer for me. When I first saw 2012 MBP Retina I was sold. Build quality is overall so much better than its class, although Thinkpads are solid stuff as well (good enough for the ISS, anyway). The rest of your comment I align with also.
- frank2 7y ago
  Mac text rendering is blurrier than Windows text rendering (and I have learned of no way of changing that despite my having used a Mac for 10 years). Worse, if for some reason you want to change the size of the elements on the display, the only way I know how to do that on a Mac (namely, to use System Preferences :: Displays to change the "resolution" to some value other than "default for display") makes the text much blurrier. I don't have a Retina display on my Mac, but someone who does claims that even on Retina, he prefers Windows because of the blurriness of the Mac In contrast, if you can be somewhat picky about which apps you use, text on Windows is just as sharp no matter how big or small you configure the elements on the screen relative to the default size. (In most Mac apps, it is easy to adjust the size of the text in the main pane, but all the other text and all the other non-textual elements, e.g., icons, stay at the default size.) >Apple has done a great job with their window manager and support for varying DPI between displays. That might be true, but the Mac does a poor job accommodating sub-par or non-standard human visual systems (and I would guess that people who cannot easily control how far their eyes are from the screen -- e.g., people living in a small van -- would find a Mac frustrating as well relative to Windows).
mulmen 7y ago
I recently bought at 49” ultrawide monitor. Both my MacBooks can drive the native resolution in Windows but not MacOS. Apple refuses to fix their broken driver or even acknowledge it is a problem. Workaround is to provide two inputs to the monitor and run it in picture by picture mode. This is ok but when waking from sleep MacOS gets confused about what monitors windows were on and the arrangement of the panels. This has always been a problem and why I got away from dual/multi panels in the first place. MacOS support for that has always been abysmal. It’s one of the first examples of Apple gear not “Just working (tm)”. I suppose it’s my fault for not buying a monitor with an Apple logo on it. I find myself wondering why I deal with the headaches in MacOS. I switched because it was easy. Now Apple is making it hard. At this point fighting with Linux actually appears to be easier than using MacOS.
- hollandheese 7y ago
  Have you tried SwitchResX? It can often enable resolutions on monitors that Apple won't let you access by default.
  - mulmen 7y ago
    That was suggested in some of the forum threads I read. It doesn’t solve the problem though. It just scales the image up and provides the same quality I have now. There were also some suggested profile hacks which I think is what SwitchResX does. You can also option-click on the scaled options in display manager and get more options but none of those are reasonable either. The whole reason I use Macs is because I don’t have to constantly hack and fiddle with them. At that point I may as well install a Linux or BSD. The software quality from Apple was never great but it is really falling off a cliff recently. It’s getting to a point I wonder why I pay the premium.
- twicetwice 7y ago
  That's how I felt when I used a Mac for work. Linux doesn't work just the way I want right out of the box, but neither did the Mac, and at least Linux gives me the tools to change and fix the things I didn't like. Granted, my monitors are 1080p and 720p (ugh), so I haven't had to wrangle with high DPI issues, which does not sound fun.
Myrmornis 7y ago
Exactly. I would love to use Linux, but switching back to the traditional-resolution laptop screens after working on the high-res MacbookPro screens is not something I ever want to do. It would be fantastic if Linux came to support it well.

mceachen 7y ago

FWIW, Windows laptops (that you can then install Linux on) have had hidpi screens for more than 15 years (!!), and Ubuntu's fractional scaling works really well right out of the box now.

Groxx 7y ago
"have had" and "works reliably" are very different things. Every Windows and Linux machine I've used has had issues with individual apps, and most of the time I've plugged them into things that cross multiple scaling factors simultaneously, they've have had rather significant issues (when it isn't just "issues with everything except device-native"). I haven't had an issue with that at all in a few years now on my Mac, and I plug it into literally 10x more screens and configurations.
- mceachen 7y ago
  Just to add to the anecdata, my MBP would kernel panic ~25% of the time it was plugged into a 4k displayport 1.1 monitor. I'm glad your system is stable, though!

jjoonathan 7y ago

And spotlight. Why is desktop search so bad everywhere else?

bobbiechen 7y ago
True. I recently picked up Albert [1] on my Ubuntu machine because I was missing spotlight search. So far it works well - it would have been nice if something like it was included by default. https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert
robk 7y ago
Everything is soooo good on pc
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  I am forced to use Windows most of the time. The fact that its desktop search is soooo bad is a daily bummer and makes me look forward to opening my MBP.
  - snazz 7y ago
    It seems like part of Microsoft's goal here was to direct traffic to Edge and Bing at the expense of actual usability. See also: the "help system". Luckily there's a lot of third-party stuff to replace the search feature.
JadeNB 7y ago
I don't understand the people for whom Spotlight works. I tend to open Spotlight, and start typing in the name of a file I'm looking for. Consistently, reproducibly, for many different files, it'll fill in the name of the file at a certain point, but then, if I keep typing that very name, it'll switch to a different match. That is, if the name is `abcdefgh` and I type `abc`, then it'll complete it; but if momentum carries me and I type `abcd`, then it'll drop the desired file entirely off the list of suggestions, and give me a different, non-matching one.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  Huh, interesting, because that exact problem is one of my key complaints with windows search, while I've never noticed it with spotlight -- and I've been using spotlight daily since Tiger. Well, that's not quite true, for a few years after spotlight was released it would get slow after a while, so I mainly stuck with Quicksilver. Eventually spotlight got faster, but I never had that particular problem with it, even though I very regularly have that particular problem on Windows.

henriquez 7y ago

The high-dpi support really is a big deal. No other OS (Windows or Linux) comes close to handling it as seamlessly. I run Gnome in Ubuntu and have got it to a "serviceable" state by being able to set pixel density on a per-app basis by editing launcher files (depending on which display it's running on), but that's not something an average user would be able to figure out (or should have to). Apple has done a great job with their window manager and support for varying DPI between displays. It's just a shame their OS is otherwise such a walled garden, and their hardware is a bad joke ($6k for an 8 core desktop with a years old GPU and no storage, come on.) It really boiled down to a "pick your poison" scenario for me and I sided with the OS (and hardware) that lets me tinker to my heart's content.

kyuudou 7y ago
This was the game-changer for me. When I first saw 2012 MBP Retina I was sold. Build quality is overall so much better than its class, although Thinkpads are solid stuff as well (good enough for the ISS, anyway). The rest of your comment I align with also.
frank2 7y ago
Mac text rendering is blurrier than Windows text rendering (and I have learned of no way of changing that despite my having used a Mac for 10 years). Worse, if for some reason you want to change the size of the elements on the display, the only way I know how to do that on a Mac (namely, to use System Preferences :: Displays to change the "resolution" to some value other than "default for display") makes the text much blurrier. I don't have a Retina display on my Mac, but someone who does claims that even on Retina, he prefers Windows because of the blurriness of the Mac In contrast, if you can be somewhat picky about which apps you use, text on Windows is just as sharp no matter how big or small you configure the elements on the screen relative to the default size. (In most Mac apps, it is easy to adjust the size of the text in the main pane, but all the other text and all the other non-textual elements, e.g., icons, stay at the default size.) >Apple has done a great job with their window manager and support for varying DPI between displays. That might be true, but the Mac does a poor job accommodating sub-par or non-standard human visual systems (and I would guess that people who cannot easily control how far their eyes are from the screen -- e.g., people living in a small van -- would find a Mac frustrating as well relative to Windows).

mulmen 7y ago

I recently bought at 49” ultrawide monitor. Both my MacBooks can drive the native resolution in Windows but not MacOS. Apple refuses to fix their broken driver or even acknowledge it is a problem. Workaround is to provide two inputs to the monitor and run it in picture by picture mode. This is ok but when waking from sleep MacOS gets confused about what monitors windows were on and the arrangement of the panels. This has always been a problem and why I got away from dual/multi panels in the first place. MacOS support for that has always been abysmal. It’s one of the first examples of Apple gear not “Just working (tm)”. I suppose it’s my fault for not buying a monitor with an Apple logo on it. I find myself wondering why I deal with the headaches in MacOS. I switched because it was easy. Now Apple is making it hard. At this point fighting with Linux actually appears to be easier than using MacOS.

hollandheese 7y ago
Have you tried SwitchResX? It can often enable resolutions on monitors that Apple won't let you access by default.
- mulmen 7y ago
  That was suggested in some of the forum threads I read. It doesn’t solve the problem though. It just scales the image up and provides the same quality I have now. There were also some suggested profile hacks which I think is what SwitchResX does. You can also option-click on the scaled options in display manager and get more options but none of those are reasonable either. The whole reason I use Macs is because I don’t have to constantly hack and fiddle with them. At that point I may as well install a Linux or BSD. The software quality from Apple was never great but it is really falling off a cliff recently. It’s getting to a point I wonder why I pay the premium.
twicetwice 7y ago
That's how I felt when I used a Mac for work. Linux doesn't work just the way I want right out of the box, but neither did the Mac, and at least Linux gives me the tools to change and fix the things I didn't like. Granted, my monitors are 1080p and 720p (ugh), so I haven't had to wrangle with high DPI issues, which does not sound fun.

Myrmornis 7y ago

Exactly. I would love to use Linux, but switching back to the traditional-resolution laptop screens after working on the high-res MacbookPro screens is not something I ever want to do. It would be fantastic if Linux came to support it well.