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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Linux isn't really there yet. On my 3200x1800 XPS13 running Fedora, it took quite a bit of tweaking to get a usable desktop. My DE, Cinnamon, eventually looked okay once I tweaked the scaling (worked about as well as GNOME), but I still have to deal with a plethora of apps that are microscopic.

I don't use KDE, but I've been told Qt apps are supposed to scale better on HiDPI.

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Linux isn't really there yet. On my 3200x1800 XPS13 running Fedora, it took quite a bit of tweaking to get a usable desktop. My DE, Cinnamon,
...

I don't use KDE, ...

Or should we say that Cinnamon on Fedora doesn't work for you, on your hardware instead of dismissing something that many of us prefer to any other operating system, paid or free?

Edit: I'm a bit fed up with people writing like they can decide what is good or not.

I have used Windows since 1995, Linux since at least 2003, Mac (full time for both work and personal) for almost 3 years around 2010. FTR I was enthusiastic about getting a Mac, paid more for software than I'd ever done before, got my employer to pay for extra screen, keyboard, mouse and I think even an extra trackpad. For me it was a huge disappointment and I suffered through the last year after finally admitting it didn't work for me.

I have my opinions. I don't say you cannot prefer something else, but I will not accept other peoples authority to decide which OS is best for me and everyone else.

Edit2: as usual I don't mind the downvotes but I ask you to please tell me what I did to deserve them.

Your defensiveness about your preferred OS blinds you to the point I'm trying to make. There's a reason that there's an entire page on the ArchWiki dedicated to tweaking for HiDPI: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI

The fact is, it's not uniformly supported yet across Linux distros. Qt apps should theoretically be DPI-aware, but that's no guarantee either. See the various bugs filed against VLC, for instance: https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/17823

If your goal is to prove that it can be done, then I'm sure you'd be perfectly happy with KDE or KaOS in order to prevent someone from downloading an app that might not be HiDPI compliant.

But for the average person, it might be more trouble than it's worth. Or they might not like KDE. In which case, my recommendation that it might be better to stick with 1080P for now still stands.

The problem IMO is you just say Linux isn't there yet.

You state it like a fact. You say it with no reservation about this being a very high resolution display etc.

In my opinion it wouldn't be less serious if I said Mac and Windows aren't really there yet because their package managers really doesn't compare to apt. Note: I don't say this. (At least not anymore : )

The quality of a package manager is of much less importance to a desktop system user than the (un)readability display, I would think.

That is a very dangerous statement tbh. In general it is much more important for any system to have its foundations robust.

A package management system is a convenience, not a requirement for desktop users. Chromebooks have one of the most robust and well built foundations I've ever seen, and the platform lacks any semblance of low level package management.

For HiDPI screens? Linux really truly isn't there yet. I say this as someone who has used almost entirely linux desktops and laptops for years, and not exclusively for a long time before that, and who finds nearly everything about a linux desktop better than the alternatives (yes, really).

But my HiDPI laptop brings me frequent pain that I wasn't anticipating and it's not clear there's even a path forward to solving those problems in a consistent way. It's a whack-a-mole problem.

I got it working really well for me.

Please share your list of annoyances, I want to help :)

Off the top of my head ...

Many applications use toolkits that are unable / unwilling to scale. Arduino IDE is a good example - lots of bugs filed about it, some fixes ostensibly out there, but I've spent hours with no success -- the UI is unreadably tiny on my 3yo 3200x1800 laptop.

You can tweak your desktop (I use KDE) and many (but not all) other applications to scale up, but as soon as you plug in a monitor with different characteristics (I frequently plug into a 22" 1600x1200 LCD) things are going to look horrendous on at least one of your screens.

If you fix those two, I'll come up with some more. :)

> Many applications use toolkits that are unable / unwilling to scale.

Isn't that true on every platform?

Well, except Mac OS. There are ways to "forget" about scaling and render in pixel terms, but chances are your app already looks like shit if this applies to you. The native UI toolkit renders to points which are scaled pixels.

Then there's image/graphic density; I can live with that.

The only thing that can be a problem on OS X, and I do mean ONLY thing that I've run into, is some games don't scale at all. So you'll open a game that draws into its window (I recently experienced this with Shenzhen I/O) and everything in the window is rendered like you had one to one pixel scaling. It works perfectly, everything is really tiny.

If you put it in full screen the monitor gets adjusted and it's not an issue.

At the same time other games don't have the problem. For example I've been playing Stardew Valley and it works perfectly fine in windowed mode looking exactly the way you'd want it to.

But normal applications based on UIKit and not a GL surface or something else like that? It's perfect.

> Isn't that true on every platform?

I'm assuming so.

I've been using KDE as primary environment on laptop & desktop since the late 1990's. At dayjob I have to suck it up and use Win7 - typically as a VM (local or remote) running over RDP or VNC - but occasionally native boot. It really breaks badly with high DPI, but it's quite an old OS. I rarely touch MS Windows 8(.1) but when I did, on this hardware, it was struggling to maintain sanity with scaling. I've avoided playing with MS Windows 10, and OSX -- of course, OSX tends to run on its own hardware, so has a bit of an advantage there. I do have a MBP somewhere, and could try cranking it up on the high-DPI 32" monitor ... but a) I'm happy to defer to the expertise of people who have done this and are more familiar with the platform, and b) it won't help me (as I'm not going to move platforms).

First one - IntelliJ (which Android IDE is based off) supports scaling nowadays.

Try running

  xrandr --dpi 200

(try it with lower values like 144 if that's too large)

and restart Android IDE.

Second monitor: you need to render the second screen at High DPI and then downscale. Example script (with two monitors):

  xrandr --output eDP-1 --off
  xrandr --output DP-2-1 --left-of eDP-1
  xrandr --output DP-2-1 --right-of DP-2-2
  xrandr --output DP-2-2 --scale 1.5x1.5 --pos 0x0
  xrandr --output DP-2-1 --scale 1.5x1.5 --pos 2880x0

Hi, and thanks for the hints. These were discussed over at arduino.cc a while back, and I had some small measure of success with them, but it was very messy to get this working with the apps that needed them (only). And, ultimately, it broke savagely with problem #2 -- when I move between displays with drastically different DPI's. I don't think that second problem is totally intractable ... but I do think it's a long way of being fixed (on any platform).

EDIT: Oh, and yes, the 'scaling support' feature was added into the version that I was trialling of arduino IDE a while back (I forget the #'s). It was meant to have been resolved, but I noted on the various forums that lots of people (including myself) couldn't get it to play nice. Investigations were on-going whether it was a KDE, xorg/wayland, nvidia, phase of the moon, or some other related problem.

Did you try it? What issues are remaining? Links to the bug tracker reports? Legitimately curious.

Apologies: I reread your posts again and now I see that I interpreted your post out of context, you were specifically talking about high resolutions.

Very few people are going to be using KDE apps exclusively. For a start, it doesn't have a modern web browser, and a huge amount of stuff relies on one these days.

KDE Neon that I use currently comes with Firefox as tha default browser out of the box.

For me at least that is the only modern browser I want.

> Linux isn't really there yet.

To be fair, neither is Windows. I've had nothing but trouble with scaling my 4k laptop display under Windows 10. Some apps pick up the scaling info and work correctly, others don't. Some apps scale their fonts correctly, but leave their (presumably pixel map) UI elements microscopic. Things get even screwier when I use it in extended desktop mode with my (larger) 1080p monitor. If the scaling is on, the monitor is unusable. If the scaling is off, the display is unusable.

Seems like the only company that got this transition right so far is Apple.

> Linux isn't really there yet.

It really isn't, quite. I'm using a brand new Dell XPS 13 with the way-too-many-pixels option, and there are a lot of things that have to be tweaked, particularly if you're not running a mainstream desktop environment. Even with tweaks in place, there're places where proportions are off and/or UI elements are way too tiny.

I expect that things will improve within the working lifetime of this laptop, but it's definitely a problem at the moment.

I'd happily donate money to some kind of Linux Dealing With Too Many Pixels Initiative, if someone were going to put together an effort at putting developer time into all the miscellaneous issues and getting fixes into distros / applications / desktops / etc.

Have you had any problems with your new XPS' keyboard? Mine lags and sometimes doesn't register keypresses on around the D key.

Just a guess from someone who doesn't have an XPS but has experienced similar symptoms. Maybe there's some kind of debris or perhaps liquid in between the switch contacts for those keys. In my case, two plastic sheets comprised the contact surfaces and getting them separated and cleaning them with a damp cloth and drying them did the trick.

I have an XPS13 1080p 9350. The keyboard actually works fine but it is the only weakness of the laptop in my opinion. I don't have any keys that cause problems but the quality of the arrow keys on that laptop is really bad - one reason why I switched to vim keybindings by taking advantage of the TAB key. In terms of keytravel Lenovo laptops and Macbooks <2016 are much better.

> In terms of keytravel Lenovo laptops and Macbooks <2016 are much better.

This is such a sad statement about the quality of today's laptop keyboards. Of the laptops I can remember using the keyboard on the Thinkpad 701C "butterfly" was superior to that on the T20 and T42 in terms of key shape and stroke, and the T42 is superior to the X60. The keyboards on the (work-issued) Macbook Air 2012 and Macbook Pro 2013 are garbage by comparison.

In my more conspiracy-minded moments, I conclude that the overall trend towards garbage keyboards even on high-end machines is long-game industry collusion to force us all, eventually, into pure-touchscreen interfaces.

I glimpse the future every time I use my smartphone, and it is stupid.

Not to speak of, but I have friends with earlier models who I think did experience some weirdness. ISTR something about a BIOS update fixing it?

I'm optimistic that it will get better as more developers buy newer laptops with QHD+ resolutions. ElementaryOS even had a pledge fund to get the founder a 3200x1800 res laptop just so he could actually dogfood his OS on a hi-res laptop and improve HiDPI support. Unless, of course, the average Linux developer remains a graybeard with a Thinkpad. Then we might be waiting for awhile. :)

The other major hump to get over at the moment is that many of the distros are spending resources to switch to Wayland, and I imagine we'll need to let that transition stabilize first before we get the bulk of resources diverted to HiDPI support.

The Wayland transition will, itself, probably leave people with my preferences (tiling WM, a stack of other small customizations that depend on X) high and dry for a while, but I guess one can hope that it'll be a solid foundation for future development.

I'm just not transitioning until my preferred WM (stumpwm or another Common Lisp tiling WM) transitions. I'm a bit skeptical that Wayland provides any significant benefits for my use cases.

> Unless, of course, the average Linux developer remains a graybeard with a Thinkpad.

The latest generation Thinkpads have high res screens :)

> many of the distros are spending resources to switch to Wayland

High DPI support is vastly improved in Wayland, so that's a good thing!

> particularly if you're not running a mainstream desktop environment

This is a bit unfair. "Linux isn't there yet, if you use an unpopular DE".

I have an xps13 with the default windowing manager that Dell installed and it is really inconsistent in sizing (some things are weirdly large while others hard to read from being too small)

> Linux isn't really there yet. On my 3200x1800 XPS13 running Fedora, it took quite a bit of tweaking to get a usable desktop.

That's odd. I've got an Asus ZenBook (UX305FA) running Fedora 25 with Gnome. I'm using my BenQ BL2710PT at its regular 2560 x 1440 resolution and it looks great. Other than adjusting the brightness a little I didn't have to do any tweaks.

Same for me. Works extremely well nowadays.

Only application that doesn't scale is yEd, but it's 3rd party closed sourve and it doesn't scale on OS X or Windows either.

27" at 2560x1440 is not high DPI and doesn't require UI upscaling. On e.g. a MacBook Retina you would not be able to read anything without upscaling because the pixel density is so high. It's the main reason I still use OS X on my MBP.

Thanks for the clarification.

For reference, a Retina 5K iMac is 27" and its native resolution is 5120x2880, exactly 4x as many pixels.

"Linux" meaning all desktop environments -- including Cinnamon, which is very nice in some ways, but developed by a small team and therefore sort of inherently "caveat emptor" -- will never be "really there yet" because backwards compatibility means that someone will always be able to write an app that screws up. But IMO if the laptop is sold by KDE, it's reasonable for them to sell a HiDPI screen assuming that you can use the computer fully with KDE specifically, because why should KDE have to hold their hardware back to wait for the five-person team behind the Lorem Ipsum toolkit? Of course the definition of "fully" may be subject to review, and one of the problems is that Linux reviewers are too nice: if KDE's VLC replacement works on HiDPI but won't play common formats, the laptop should lose big points for video playback; unfortunately, reviewers let this kind of thing slide too much, and the community suffers for it.

Exactly the opposite experience for me.

Fedora 25, 200dpi screen, no issues whatsoever (works and looks way better than Windows!).

What issues are you having? Maybe they're easily solved.

One assumes the GUI configuration would be great on something coming from the GUI developers - regardless of DPI.

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