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Why can’t I see the difference? Does this only work for older, standard resolution screens?
by hyperhello 2y ago
Why can’t I see the difference? Does this only work for older, standard resolution screens?
- __mharrison__ 2y agoI could only see the difference when I viewed the images at 250x.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Cort3z 2y agoClick the picture to get a full resolution version. On my phone it's quite obvious. But to my eyes it just looks like someone made it bolder, not less blurry.
- KronisLV 2y agoOff: https://blog.aktsbot.in/img/stem-darkening-off.png https://blog.aktsbot.in/img/stem-darkening-off.png On: https://blog.aktsbot.in/img/stem-darkening-on.png https://blog.aktsbot.in/img/stem-darkening-on.png Personally, I never had issues with fonts on any OS that much except when I connected my M1 MacBook to a 1080p monitor, then it felt like the fonts had no anti-aliasing at all.
- pjerem 2y agoMacOS have always had the best font rendering on HiDPI screens and also the worst on Low-DPI. Windows is historically very good on Low-DPI but they also managed to be great on HiDPI. Linux, well, it depends on so much things … you can achieve good on both but you’d better be ok with integer scaling and not have multiple displays with different DPI.
- michaelmrose 2y agoX has supported scaling forever. Integer scale up everything scale down the lower DPI monitor or monitors. xrandr --scale, xorg.conf, or nvidia-settings GUI and save to xorg config
- cehrlich 2y agoMacs used to have good font rendering on Low-DPI displays (I would say the best, but I suppose that’s a matter of opinion) Then Mojave switched to Metal and removed subpixel AA, and now it’s the worst. Thread from when it happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476873
- kelnos 2y agoIt's funny to read that thread (from 6 years ago, wow time flies) and see complaints that a lot of people have low-dpi external displays. But I think some of the rebuttal comments in that article rang true even then, and certainly do now: if you are spending money on an Apple laptop or workstation, Apple is going to expect you to spend money on hi-dpi external monitors.
- nasretdinov 2y agoYeah, the issue is that 6 years ago your only option for a highdpi monitor with the correct scale (e.g. for 27'' it needs to be 5k, not 4k) would be the iMac or the XDR display that costs over $5k... Now that Apple sells their own (very decent) monitor at somewhat more affordable price it makes sense to use it as an external display, I agree.
- necovek 2y agoI'll reiterate a comment I made elsewhere in this thread. With my vision corrected, 4k at 24" (~190ppi) needs subpixel rendering for crisp fonts. I would expect 5k at 27" or 6k at 32" (both around ~215ppi) would be the same, so my only option for comfortable external use with a Mac is really 8k at 32". I know that I am an outlier as I get my vision corrected with glasses/contacts to better than 20/20 (outside that 5%-95% group I guess), but I was perfectly well served by subpixel rendering (and continue to be). Luckily, Mac is only for work, and it is passable with 32" at 4k, but I can use Linux everywhere else for much nicer fonts. Unluckily, work is 8+h :)
- shiroiushi 2y agoSounds like you need to get a new job where you can use Linux. (For reference, I'm typing this at work, on a Linux laptop.)
- orangeboats 2y agoYou can have displays with different DPI on Linux and achieve good font rendering. But it requires the latest versions of your favourite DE (like GNOME 45+ and KDE 6.x) and you'd need to give up X11 (which does not support mixed DPI very well).
- michaelmrose 2y agoX11 handles mixed DPI fine. Monitor configuration GUI for DE don't support the required option however both X and nvidia-settings do
- orangeboats 2y agoX11 quite literally doesn't have the notion of DPI, there is only a single coordinate space. Xrandr is per-output and not per-window.
- michaelmrose 2y agoI'm literally sitting at a station with 3 monitors 2 high DPI and 1 low DPI wherein UI elements of a window moved from one monitor to the other are identically sized and this was the case when all 3 monitors were different sizes and DPI as well. In this case the UI is scaled up by an integer factor on all screens so as to look nice on the highest DPI screen. It is scaled down from the higher resolution by a decimal factor that could be but needn't be an integer. If the factor is proportional to the difference in DPI the result is UI elements being sized precisely the same size across different size and dpi monitors. All monitors share a singular scaling factor and DPI. Apps thus need to support high DPI but needn't do anything smart to support scaling because it happens outside of the apps remit. This can be achieved again with xrandr --scale OR in the nvidia-settings GUI by setting viewport in to a higher resolution than viewport out. No the result isn't blurry.
- orangeboats 2y agoFirst thing first, the X11 protocol is not aware of DPI. Period. And that has implications. You can apply all sorts of hackish solutions on top of it but (1) the solutions will most likely be out-of-band (not pure X11) and involve DBus/envvars/Xft.dpi, and (2) per-output. Out-of-band solutions are effectively bandaids and they unnecessarily increase development difficulty of GUI programs on Linux, since developers now have to be aware of the various side channels (fragmentation!) that communicate the DPI scale. This is why SDL2 for the longest period did not support HiDPI on X11, but does on Wayland, MacOS, and Windows. A COSMIC dev just recently made a complaint about XSettings too! [0] You can't just ignore those problems, "Linux is hard to develop for, blah blah fragmentation blah blah" I am sure you have heard of. Another thing. Per-output HiDPI is fine when all your programs support high DPI, but it's unworkable if you want to mix LoDPI and HiDPI applications in a single screen, i.e. if an application has better user experience if it is upscaled and blurry (!), you are SOL unless you want to apply scaling to your entire desktop. You also lose the opportunity to implement some neat features like temporarily scaling up a window if it is being magnified or screenshot. (The idea's been floating about in the KDE community) Finally, we can argue for days, but the HiDPI page on Arch wiki already says a lot when a good 90% of the article is about acheiving good DPI scaling on X11 [1]. Even the Wayland sections have an XWayland subsection in them... [0]: https://tech.lgbt/@drakulix/113029499719670970 https://tech.lgbt/@drakulix/113029499719670970 [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI#Xorg https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI#Xorg
- lostmsu 2y agoDoes it have anything to do with DPI? I thought basically the state is Windows rules, MacOS and Linux suck on non-integer scaling ratios. For integer nobody has problems AFAIK.
- dangitman 2y ago[dead]
- lproven 2y ago> MacOS have always had the best font rendering on HiDPI screens and also the worst on Low-DPI. No it hasn't. Maybe to you "always" means "since 2014" but if so that means you are very young and you should not generalise from that. I've been using Macs since 1988 and Mac OS X since 2001 and it used to be great on SD screens. I used to use Safari on Windows XP because its font rendering was so much better than the built-in Windows Truetype renderer. This change is new and recent. It is absolutely not "always".
- setopt 2y agoThat’s because MacOS got rid of subpixel antialiasing sometime after launching Retina screens, which makes non-hiDPI screens have quite awful font rendering. I sometimes switch to a bitmap font like Fixedsys Excelsior or GNU Unifont when using MacOS with a low-resolution monitor to compensate (with antialiasing off so the bitmap font looks crisp). Also, JetBrains Mono somehow looks good on lowres screens even though it’s not a bitmap font, it seems to not blur as much as other fonts when it gets antialiased.
- WesolyKubeczek 2y agoThe “sometime” happened in macOS Big Sur. Prior to that in Mojave and Catalina, you could enable it back by twiddling a hidden preference with the word “legacy” in it. It somehow was worse than what you got in High Sierra and prior anyway.
- jillesvangurp 2y agoThey don't sell anything without hiDPI for quite some time now (a decade?). Making their software look good on obsolete screens is understandably not a priority for them. And if you are happy to plug in something that old, you are kind of signaling that you don't really care about what things look like anyway. So, why bother to make that look good?
- gond 2y ago> you don't really care about what things look like anyway. That statement has no connection to the premise. There are multiple reasons to use an old screen besides the mentioned reason of not caring for x.
- setopt 2y agoThere are plenty of non-hiDPI screens from other vendors on the market, especially “large” screens that are “medium” in price. In an office you’re not always free to order a screen from any vendor you want (due to their framework agreements), unless of course you’re paying for that hardware privately. I care about how things look, and have spent more time than I want to admit configuring MacOS apps to look good on the screens available to me. I just don’t care enough to buy an expensive office screen with my own cash if my employer can’t provide one.
- rubslopes 2y agoBetterDisplay HiDPI feature (available on the free version) much improves font rendering on external displays: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay This helped me a lot, I was about to ditch my external monitor because of blurriness.
- hedora 2y agoYeah; something seems wrong with their setup. I’ve seen Linux render fonts like that, but not recently. I’d probably look into debugging my setup if that’s what my desktop looked like.
- konart 2y agoLook at the 'e' for example. Night and day difference. PS: talking about screenshots in the article.