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Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

He might not "be everyone" but his priorities are relevant to more people than your priorities by a factor of perhaps 100:1 or more.

I haven't met a single person that didn't immediately appreciate the benefits of HiDPI when they saw it.

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Well you sure convinced me with your accurate statistics. You talk of benefits as if higher dpi cures cancer, it looks better and that's it. I really don't know what the big deal is, I have a HiDPI screen, works fine under linux as most of my work is done in terminals all I've had to "configure" was turning off hinting for my emulators and that was that. But they are waay more important things I would like from my machine so there's no need to be condescending just because you and your friends were impressed by the high res screens.

You seriously think more than 1% of computer users care about some esoteric configuration flexibility of a Linux window manager? How insular is your view of the world?

Oh, and higher DPI cures cancer.

I honestly don't care what "hinting for my emulators" means or why it matters that it's off.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. I just want to get work done in a sane way. Linux is insane to any normal human being.

Since when is this a forum for normal human beings?

It's certainly not a forum for one single particular type of computer enthusiast.

Right... which makes it kind of ridiculous to claim that any mention of configuring Linux to work with HiDPI is "bullshit." Because there are a lot of Linux enthusiasts here.

Far be it for me to defend somebody else's words, but I happen to entirely agree with askafriend when he described the manual tinkering required to get HiDPI functioning well as "things that I don't want to deal with. It's all just bullshit, and I don't have time to deal with bullshit like that. I really just don't want to even think about stuff like that. Not even a tiny bit, not even for a second."

There are indeed a lot of Linux enthusiasts here, myself included, but being a Linux enthusiast doesn't mean we all want to act as systems integrator all the time.

This was a pointless squabble to begin with. I just reacted to "askafriend"'s way of arguing against my non-argumentative semi-helpful anecdote... because I think it's really tedious that mere mentions of Linux configurations can turn into a flame war... it also struck me as a little odd to be so ferociously reluctant to engage in any kind of computer configuration, "for even a second", on a forum about hacking.

I happen to see a lot of value in the availability of a free and open operating system, so I take offense when people rail against it in this sweeping way. Yeah, it's not polished perfect like Apple's products (let's imagine that they don't have any tedious bullshit problems), but it's free software and a community effort.

So when people say it's "insane for any normal human being" to use it... eh, that pushes my buttons.

If you install Postgres, you have to mess around with some configuration files. Some people might consider that tedious, painful, horrible bullshit. I just see it as a necessary reality, and I don't whine condescendingly at people who offer advice or anecdotes.

Well if the tradeoff is to use a lesser OS or desktop environment compared to for example Fluxbox then it could be worth it ?

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