6 ms·

I can't wait to see all the broken applications/unreadable small fonts on my Linux. I've been excited for a high density display since Apple announced the reti

by vladev 13y ago

I can't wait to see all the broken applications/unreadable small fonts on my Linux. I've been excited for a high density display since Apple announced the retina display, but I have a gut feeling that it will take a lot of time for the Linux desktop to support it properly, if ever.

krenoten 13y ago
You're talking about Linux, not a BSD. There are many desktop users who are capable of developing support, and I'd be surprised if nobody is already working on similar things for retina.
- papsosouid 13y ago
  >You're talking about Linux, not a BSD. No, he is talking about desktop environments and windowing systems that run on both, and have very little to do with either. What was your remark supposed to be implying?
xixora1 13y ago
It should be pretty well supported. 140ppi isn't a massive leap over current displays that are common in laptops. 11.6" at 1366x768 is similar... density wise.
bashtoni 13y ago
I'm typing this in Debain Linux on a Chromebook Pixel, which has a 239 dpi display, significantly higher than this Asus monitor. Everything works very nicely once I've tweaked a few settings, specifically adding zoom in Chrome and setting appropriate font scaling in Gnome 3.
dman 13y ago
Both dwm and xfce have worked just fine on my chromebook pixel. This is on debian 7. The only two applications that have given me issues are ones that do their own custom rendering - Chromium and Sublime text. Both of them have some UI text that cannot be resized and does not appear to respect system dpi settings.
- seabee 13y ago
  It seems ironic that Chromium should give you issues on a Chromebook. Does (non-free) Chrome work?
  - dman 13y ago
    On ChromeOS chrome works just fine. On debian webpages are rendered perfectly because I can change font settings for those, but the tab titles are drawn with text that is too small. There is no setting exposed currently from what I can tell to control the font of the tab titles.
- leejoramo 13y ago
  Have you tried Sublime Text 3 beta? I know that it is suppose to support support Retina under Mac OS X.
  - nobodyshere 13y ago
    He's talking about linux machine. Sublime Text 2 seems to support retina displays just fine with mac os.
mike_esspe 13y ago
My screen is 166dpi (1920x1080, 13"), I run Ubuntu and have minor problem only with Intellij. They use their own font scaling, and it interferes with button placement on some windows.
- CJefferson 13y ago
  Could you describe how to adjust the dpi? I would like to try changing it on my current laptop, to get a feel for if my apps will work in future. I realise I should be able to read the docs, but I have found lots of different suggestions on how to do it, while you have successfully!
  - mike_esspe 13y ago
    Unity tweak tool -> Fonts -> text scaling factor. And for chromium I set default zoom to 125% in browser settings.
  - sp332 13y ago
    There are a few ways to change the "text scaling factor" http://askubuntu.com/questions/60044/how-do-i-change-the-font-dpi-settings http://askubuntu.com/questions/60044/how-do-i-change-the-fon... but that doesn't change the real DPI that X uses. If your hardware supports XRANDR, it should automatically configure your device. If it gets a wrong value or you just want to override it: http://wiki.debian.org/XStrikeForce/HowToRandR12#III.3._Changing_DPI_and_DisplaySize http://wiki.debian.org/XStrikeForce/HowToRandR12#III.3._Chan...
  - bsimpson 13y ago
    I'm using the dpi flag in X. Not sure if it would do the right thing on multiple monitors, but it works great on my Pixel: https://github.com/appsforartists/pixel_webdev/blob/master/root/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc https://github.com/appsforartists/pixel_webdev/blob/master/r...
- PlaneSploit 13y ago
  What kind of display is that?
Elv13 13y ago
Most Linux DE work just fine with higher DPI settings. KDE apps look as awesome as OSX apps.
surrealize 13y ago
Linux has always handled font scaling better than windows in my experience. Windows has a tradition/culture/tendency toward building user interfaces by positioning UI elements in absolute pixel coordinates. But linux UI toolkits put much more of an emphasis on automatic/scalable layout.
- quanticle 13y ago
  Font scaling works just fine on Linux. The problem is icons. Many Linux programs don't have icons for high resolution displays, so while menus and toolbars look fine, icons are unclickably small.
bsimpson 13y ago
Here's my Pixel running Sublime on Openbox: https://github.com/appsforartists/pixel_webdev https://github.com/appsforartists/pixel_webdev It's almost perfect. There's some descender clipping on the tab label and the subheadings in the Command Palette are tiny. Most apps I've tried work well using the DPI flag in xserverrc. Ones that use custom ui, like HipChat, are unusable though. Linux really needs a better UI toolkit story.
- dman 13y ago
  The better UI toolkit is called Qt.
jlgreco 13y ago
Going to add to what others are saying, this has not been a problem for me with my chromebook pixel. I set my default scaling in chromium to 125%, and have urxvt rendering a nice freetype font that I adjust the size to on the fly depending on the task (I have opted to let Xft believe that the display is 96ppi. I tried both ways and prefer it that way.)
anonymous 13y ago
Hopefully compositors will be able to auto-scale windows in the future. Either by some automagic divination that the program is stuck in the '80s, or with a simple rightclick->holy fuck this shit makes me squint fix it pls.
legulere 13y ago
You only have to wait for the next wayland/weston version. The gnome team made a proposal for supporting HiDPI displays similiarly to how it's handled in OS X: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rvtiZb_Sm9C9718IoYQgnpzkirdl-wJZBBu_qLgaYyY/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rvtiZb_Sm9C9718IoYQgnpzk... It's already merged into wayland and weston: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-May/009368.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-May... Hopefully wayland support for gnome 3.10 will be ready, so this can also be supported in Gnome.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  I'd love if the high-level APIs dealt with physical dimensions rather than pixel counts, scaled or not... How hard would it be to just ignore the physical properties of the display?
  - oofabz 13y ago
    Arbitrary scaling makes images blurry, even vector graphics. It's a difficult problem to solve because computer graphics are highly aliased - they have many details only one pixel wide. We have solved this problem with fonts, which have hinting and subpixel antialiasing. But we don't have software to do this for graphics. There is no image format with hinting, and no rendering library to do subpixel antialiasing. Hinting is difficult to do well, fonts are hinted by hand. It is a very time-consuming process and most graphic artists will not be good at it. If your screen is sufficiently high-resolution, say 300+ dpi, you can get away without these tricks. But if you have a 140 dpi screen, and you want to scale everything 150%, it's necessary or everything will look blurry. If you only allow pixel doubling, none of this is a problem. You can scale any graphic by 2x without ruining fine detail like thin lines.

by vladev 13y ago

krenoten 13y ago

You're talking about Linux, not a BSD. There are many desktop users who are capable of developing support, and I'd be surprised if nobody is already working on similar things for retina.

papsosouid 13y ago
>You're talking about Linux, not a BSD. No, he is talking about desktop environments and windowing systems that run on both, and have very little to do with either. What was your remark supposed to be implying?

xixora1 13y ago

It should be pretty well supported. 140ppi isn't a massive leap over current displays that are common in laptops. 11.6" at 1366x768 is similar... density wise.

bashtoni 13y ago

I'm typing this in Debain Linux on a Chromebook Pixel, which has a 239 dpi display, significantly higher than this Asus monitor. Everything works very nicely once I've tweaked a few settings, specifically adding zoom in Chrome and setting appropriate font scaling in Gnome 3.

dman 13y ago

Both dwm and xfce have worked just fine on my chromebook pixel. This is on debian 7. The only two applications that have given me issues are ones that do their own custom rendering - Chromium and Sublime text. Both of them have some UI text that cannot be resized and does not appear to respect system dpi settings.

seabee 13y ago
It seems ironic that Chromium should give you issues on a Chromebook. Does (non-free) Chrome work?
- dman 13y ago
  On ChromeOS chrome works just fine. On debian webpages are rendered perfectly because I can change font settings for those, but the tab titles are drawn with text that is too small. There is no setting exposed currently from what I can tell to control the font of the tab titles.
leejoramo 13y ago
Have you tried Sublime Text 3 beta? I know that it is suppose to support support Retina under Mac OS X.
- nobodyshere 13y ago
  He's talking about linux machine. Sublime Text 2 seems to support retina displays just fine with mac os.

mike_esspe 13y ago

My screen is 166dpi (1920x1080, 13"), I run Ubuntu and have minor problem only with Intellij. They use their own font scaling, and it interferes with button placement on some windows.

CJefferson 13y ago
Could you describe how to adjust the dpi? I would like to try changing it on my current laptop, to get a feel for if my apps will work in future. I realise I should be able to read the docs, but I have found lots of different suggestions on how to do it, while you have successfully!
- mike_esspe 13y ago
  Unity tweak tool -> Fonts -> text scaling factor. And for chromium I set default zoom to 125% in browser settings.
- sp332 13y ago
  There are a few ways to change the "text scaling factor" http://askubuntu.com/questions/60044/how-do-i-change-the-font-dpi-settings http://askubuntu.com/questions/60044/how-do-i-change-the-fon... but that doesn't change the real DPI that X uses. If your hardware supports XRANDR, it should automatically configure your device. If it gets a wrong value or you just want to override it: http://wiki.debian.org/XStrikeForce/HowToRandR12#III.3._Changing_DPI_and_DisplaySize http://wiki.debian.org/XStrikeForce/HowToRandR12#III.3._Chan...
- bsimpson 13y ago
  I'm using the dpi flag in X. Not sure if it would do the right thing on multiple monitors, but it works great on my Pixel: https://github.com/appsforartists/pixel_webdev/blob/master/root/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc https://github.com/appsforartists/pixel_webdev/blob/master/r...
PlaneSploit 13y ago
What kind of display is that?

Elv13 13y ago

Most Linux DE work just fine with higher DPI settings. KDE apps look as awesome as OSX apps.

surrealize 13y ago

Linux has always handled font scaling better than windows in my experience. Windows has a tradition/culture/tendency toward building user interfaces by positioning UI elements in absolute pixel coordinates. But linux UI toolkits put much more of an emphasis on automatic/scalable layout.

quanticle 13y ago
Font scaling works just fine on Linux. The problem is icons. Many Linux programs don't have icons for high resolution displays, so while menus and toolbars look fine, icons are unclickably small.

bsimpson 13y ago

Here's my Pixel running Sublime on Openbox: https://github.com/appsforartists/pixel_webdev https://github.com/appsforartists/pixel_webdev It's almost perfect. There's some descender clipping on the tab label and the subheadings in the Command Palette are tiny. Most apps I've tried work well using the DPI flag in xserverrc. Ones that use custom ui, like HipChat, are unusable though. Linux really needs a better UI toolkit story.

dman 13y ago
The better UI toolkit is called Qt.

jlgreco 13y ago

Going to add to what others are saying, this has not been a problem for me with my chromebook pixel. I set my default scaling in chromium to 125%, and have urxvt rendering a nice freetype font that I adjust the size to on the fly depending on the task (I have opted to let Xft believe that the display is 96ppi. I tried both ways and prefer it that way.)

anonymous 13y ago

Hopefully compositors will be able to auto-scale windows in the future. Either by some automagic divination that the program is stuck in the '80s, or with a simple rightclick->holy fuck this shit makes me squint fix it pls.

legulere 13y ago

You only have to wait for the next wayland/weston version. The gnome team made a proposal for supporting HiDPI displays similiarly to how it's handled in OS X: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rvtiZb_Sm9C9718IoYQgnpzkirdl-wJZBBu_qLgaYyY/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rvtiZb_Sm9C9718IoYQgnpzk... It's already merged into wayland and weston: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-May/009368.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-May... Hopefully wayland support for gnome 3.10 will be ready, so this can also be supported in Gnome.

rbanffy 13y ago
I'd love if the high-level APIs dealt with physical dimensions rather than pixel counts, scaled or not... How hard would it be to just ignore the physical properties of the display?
- oofabz 13y ago
  Arbitrary scaling makes images blurry, even vector graphics. It's a difficult problem to solve because computer graphics are highly aliased - they have many details only one pixel wide. We have solved this problem with fonts, which have hinting and subpixel antialiasing. But we don't have software to do this for graphics. There is no image format with hinting, and no rendering library to do subpixel antialiasing. Hinting is difficult to do well, fonts are hinted by hand. It is a very time-consuming process and most graphic artists will not be good at it. If your screen is sufficiently high-resolution, say 300+ dpi, you can get away without these tricks. But if you have a 140 dpi screen, and you want to scale everything 150%, it's necessary or everything will look blurry. If you only allow pixel doubling, none of this is a problem. You can scale any graphic by 2x without ruining fine detail like thin lines.