The problematic scaling is really a huge pain point. And it is not even recent, since HiDPI screens are on the market for a long time now. Both for desktops and

The problematic scaling is really a huge pain point. And it is not even recent, since HiDPI screens are on the market for a long time now. Both for desktops and on laptops. tl;dr: I gave up on a 27" 4k (163dpi) screen because working with 150% scaling, vim in the terminal never was a sharp as on the WQHD (108dpi), and working exhausted me quickly. Sold the 4k, got a 109dpi ultrawide and am happy again. Long rant: I've been using multi screen setups for a long time (both privately and professionally). So when one of my home displays finally had to be replaced, I went with a nice, modern LG 4k 27" (163dpi) with a great panel; figuring I'll get a second one of these if I'm happy with the first one. Since my other screen was still a WQHD 27" (2560x1440, ~108dpi) I had to scale 100% on the old screen and 150% on the new one. This of course worked poorly (both in Windows and Linux), but I didn't expect this to be great anyway. Since the age of my WQHD was way too obvious anyway, I got rid of that and only lived with a single 4k screen for a few months. While the display itself was amazing, scaling on Linux (KDE on Arch) was a pain. At 150% everything had a nice size, but for the love of god I could get no combination of font face, font size, terminal emulator and scaling that allowed me to happily work with source code in vim for 8h per day, and that did not make the rest of the UI unusable small (and usually I'm the guy who is told "Oh, that's so small! How can you even work with that?"). Eventually I realized that I needed glasses, but while those did slightly improve the situation on the receiving end, it didn't fix the issues with fractional scaling. In the end, instead of getting another 4k screen, I sold the 4k again and got a 34" UWQHD (3440x1440, ~109dpi) which is 34% wider than my old 27" WQHD (I could continue to rant how I had to order three well-reviewed displays until I got one that was good, but I'll spare you). I'm now happy again. Honestly, I am not sure if fractional scaling will ever work really well. In the end, it is always fractional. Of course instead of rendering at 1x resolution and then scale up by 1.5x, we could render at 3x resolution and the scale down by 2x, but then every UI framework needs to be adapted, old applications need to be made aware of this, and what about those that are not maintained anymore... and not even considering the extra CPU time (and power draw on laptops) to render four times the pixels.