5 ms·

What's the situation on GNU/Linux?

by riquito 13y ago

benjaminwootton 13y ago
I had the same question. A 3200x1800 resolution on a laptop sounds wonderful!
- kolme 13y ago
  As an owner of a ASUS Zenbook I can confirm it is a pleasure, almost orgasmic, to program on such resolutions :)
rbanffy 13y ago
Well... X knows about dpi for ages. Unfortunately, people have been using pixel-based shortcuts for ages too for almost everything. The way Apple used to "fix" it is curious considering NeXT was, AFAIK, dpi-aware from the start.
- joosters 13y ago
  Not so curious. As numerous comments here show, just about every display subsystem (be it X, Mac OS or Windows) has been DPI-aware for some time, but the 3rd party software that runs on these systems has made woeful use of it. Apple's fix gave consistent, reliable results.
lvillani 13y ago
Some basic support was introduced in Gnome 3.10 (and Gtk+) (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzMDY http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzMDY) thanks to some Chromebook Pixels donated by individuals and Intel (http://www.gnome.org/news/2013/07/gnome-receives-hardware-donations-to-assist-with-high-definition-support/ http://www.gnome.org/news/2013/07/gnome-receives-hardware-do...). After googling for about five seconds I found a review and the TL;DR is "it kinda works, but there are bugs" (like Windows, see http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3270 http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3270). Never tried first hand, hope to have a chance with the Retina MacBook Pro I'm buying at the end of March.
tenfingers 13y ago
Fonts specified in points are correctly rendered using the DPI setting correctly, as it has always been. So, as far as 99% of my work is concerned (terminals and text editors), there is no problem. However GUI elements of most programs are still specified using pixels, so buttons, menus and some icons might look "tight" around the text if the theme is sized using pixels. Recent GTK/QT versions do support point units, so it mostly depends on the theme you choose. These toolkits also always (historically) had resizable dialogs, contrarily to window and mac, so even with "bad" support for high DPI, the text will be readable and the interface will be scalable. Legacy apps, such as WindowMaker dockapps (which are historically sized as 64x64) though will be unreadable. Frankly, I can already cannot read them anymore. Given the configurability of most programs, I would say it's really not a problem. Most of the other programs will be adapted very quickly.
- BHSPitMonkey 13y ago
  Would some smart window manager additions be in order here? I could envision a titlebar context menu option to force a window (or all of an app's windows, probably) to render at 2x (composited by the WM) so that we have control over all the edge cases.
  - tenfingers 13y ago
    With composition, this would be easily done (ie: upscale the target window). A plugin for compiz would be very easy to do and control from the user perspective, but that actually would be half resolution.
kolme 13y ago
Gnome 3.10 has it mostly right. I find there are less issues on Gnome than on Windows. But then there's the problem when you open an app which is not native GTK/Gnome, for example Libre Office, where the fonts look OK but the icons are minuscule. The Desktop itself and the Gnome applications look awesome on high DPIs. Also Firefox works flawlessly, though on Linux you have to manually set the option "layout.css.devPixelsPerPx" on about:config.
computer 13y ago
I took a screenshot of the GIMP on 256 DPI: http://i.imgur.com/2GpqyND.png http://i.imgur.com/2GpqyND.png (XFCE4)
marcosdumay 13y ago
KDE looked like this at the late 90's. Then they added settings for the default font size (or did I just find it by then?), and started improving. Now, with KDE 4, everything scales all the time, there aren't even many bitmaps anymore because they break in any kind of display. But, yeah, a few applications can't deal with it.
Touche 13y ago
Not very well. Chromium/Chrome is almost unusable, ditto for Skype. Firefox is ok, but many of the icons are quite small and hard to decipher, and you have to use NoSquint to make the pages readable. The Dev Tools are even worse. Gnome terminal looks good though :) Many Gnome apps are fine, but Gnome 3 itself has problem.s
- esamatti 13y ago
  Here's the Chrome issue https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143619 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143619 I think it should be an easy fix since Chrome OS already supports hidpi displays. At least some work has been done recently: https://codereview.chromium.org/27156003/ https://codereview.chromium.org/27156003/ http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/ui/base/resource/resource_bundle.cc?r1=244302&r2=244301&pathrev=244302 http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/ui/base/reso... So maybe Chrome 33-34?
bsimpson 13y ago
Openbox looks good on my Chromebook Pixel: https://github-camo.global.ssl.fastly.net/52b6558796f033771c261a6b921c3565864c4680/687474703a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f394a56694536422e706e67 https://github-camo.global.ssl.fastly.net/52b6558796f033771c... Elementary doesn't. They don't support high-DPI.

What's the situation on GNU/Linux?

by riquito 13y ago

What's the situation on GNU/Linux?

benjaminwootton 13y ago

I had the same question. A 3200x1800 resolution on a laptop sounds wonderful!

kolme 13y ago
As an owner of a ASUS Zenbook I can confirm it is a pleasure, almost orgasmic, to program on such resolutions :)

rbanffy 13y ago

Well... X knows about dpi for ages. Unfortunately, people have been using pixel-based shortcuts for ages too for almost everything. The way Apple used to "fix" it is curious considering NeXT was, AFAIK, dpi-aware from the start.

joosters 13y ago
Not so curious. As numerous comments here show, just about every display subsystem (be it X, Mac OS or Windows) has been DPI-aware for some time, but the 3rd party software that runs on these systems has made woeful use of it. Apple's fix gave consistent, reliable results.

lvillani 13y ago

Some basic support was introduced in Gnome 3.10 (and Gtk+) (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzMDY http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzMDY) thanks to some Chromebook Pixels donated by individuals and Intel (http://www.gnome.org/news/2013/07/gnome-receives-hardware-donations-to-assist-with-high-definition-support/ http://www.gnome.org/news/2013/07/gnome-receives-hardware-do...). After googling for about five seconds I found a review and the TL;DR is "it kinda works, but there are bugs" (like Windows, see http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3270 http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3270). Never tried first hand, hope to have a chance with the Retina MacBook Pro I'm buying at the end of March.

tenfingers 13y ago

Fonts specified in points are correctly rendered using the DPI setting correctly, as it has always been. So, as far as 99% of my work is concerned (terminals and text editors), there is no problem. However GUI elements of most programs are still specified using pixels, so buttons, menus and some icons might look "tight" around the text if the theme is sized using pixels. Recent GTK/QT versions do support point units, so it mostly depends on the theme you choose. These toolkits also always (historically) had resizable dialogs, contrarily to window and mac, so even with "bad" support for high DPI, the text will be readable and the interface will be scalable. Legacy apps, such as WindowMaker dockapps (which are historically sized as 64x64) though will be unreadable. Frankly, I can already cannot read them anymore. Given the configurability of most programs, I would say it's really not a problem. Most of the other programs will be adapted very quickly.

BHSPitMonkey 13y ago
Would some smart window manager additions be in order here? I could envision a titlebar context menu option to force a window (or all of an app's windows, probably) to render at 2x (composited by the WM) so that we have control over all the edge cases.
- tenfingers 13y ago
  With composition, this would be easily done (ie: upscale the target window). A plugin for compiz would be very easy to do and control from the user perspective, but that actually would be half resolution.

kolme 13y ago

Gnome 3.10 has it mostly right. I find there are less issues on Gnome than on Windows. But then there's the problem when you open an app which is not native GTK/Gnome, for example Libre Office, where the fonts look OK but the icons are minuscule. The Desktop itself and the Gnome applications look awesome on high DPIs. Also Firefox works flawlessly, though on Linux you have to manually set the option "layout.css.devPixelsPerPx" on about:config.

computer 13y ago

I took a screenshot of the GIMP on 256 DPI: http://i.imgur.com/2GpqyND.png http://i.imgur.com/2GpqyND.png (XFCE4)

marcosdumay 13y ago

KDE looked like this at the late 90's. Then they added settings for the default font size (or did I just find it by then?), and started improving. Now, with KDE 4, everything scales all the time, there aren't even many bitmaps anymore because they break in any kind of display. But, yeah, a few applications can't deal with it.

Touche 13y ago

Not very well. Chromium/Chrome is almost unusable, ditto for Skype. Firefox is ok, but many of the icons are quite small and hard to decipher, and you have to use NoSquint to make the pages readable. The Dev Tools are even worse. Gnome terminal looks good though :) Many Gnome apps are fine, but Gnome 3 itself has problem.s

esamatti 13y ago
Here's the Chrome issue https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143619 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143619 I think it should be an easy fix since Chrome OS already supports hidpi displays. At least some work has been done recently: https://codereview.chromium.org/27156003/ https://codereview.chromium.org/27156003/ http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/ui/base/resource/resource_bundle.cc?r1=244302&r2=244301&pathrev=244302 http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/ui/base/reso... So maybe Chrome 33-34?

bsimpson 13y ago

Openbox looks good on my Chromebook Pixel: https://github-camo.global.ssl.fastly.net/52b6558796f033771c261a6b921c3565864c4680/687474703a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f394a56694536422e706e67 https://github-camo.global.ssl.fastly.net/52b6558796f033771c... Elementary doesn't. They don't support high-DPI.