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Comment by HappyAndHarmles | Hacker News Reader

I have been meaning to switch to Linux, however I am yet to find something that has as good of a display quality (retina fonts) as the Mac. How is the XPS like?

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The XPS13 has a hiDPI screen. Hardware wise, the screen definitely seems on-par with MBP but on the software side, it's a little infuriating encountering applications that don't support hiDPI. Instead of those apps just looking blurry like when OS X introduced 2x resolution, they show up at native resolution (50% of normal size)

But who knows, maybe I missed a setting somewhere to correct that.

I've used high-DPI displays under Linux, and they consistently work fine.

GNOME autodetects a high-DPI display and scales well by default, and all modern applications handle this as well. (If you run old non-toolkit applications, they may not scale automatically.) I did find that Firefox doesn't seem to autodetect high-DPI displays, but if you open about:config and set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.4 (for 1440p) or 2 (for 4k), Firefox works great. (Adjust to taste.)

This is not true. Linux does not handle HiDPI just fine. Try using 2 displays with 2 different dpis. You get your choice: one screen normal, and one screen teeny tiny.

actually on wayland it does. tough there aren't many wayland distro's.

Good point! I haven't had any Wayland distros work long enough to plug in a 2nd monitor. :)

Linux is not something that handles hiDPI. X handles it, Gnome handles it, Qt handles it. Almost all of them are a bit different, and you have to take care of them separately. There are things that already work together well, e.g. X DPI detection works with Gnome 3, but if you open a Qt GUI (old Skype) then that might very well be tiny. Chrome has not worked well until recently, I don't know if they fixed it already or not.

That's all I needed to hear to know that 2016 (and probably 2017) is still not "the year of the Linux desktop" (coming from a Linux desktop guy until 2004: switched to the Mac because I value my time, I keep monitoring any new developments in my old camp but if I had held my breath I'd be dead.)

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