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Comment by nixpulvis | Hacker News Reader

I do (unfortunately) have the HiDPI model. I personally don't care at all about more pixels on this machine, but I understand why people want this.

HiDPI is kinda a mess in general on Linux, from my limited use cases. I run X11 with i3wm on Arch, and the application support is all over the place. `xrandr` seems unhappy with multiple monitors at different resolutions (as is my case at work, with external displays), it's a mess.

All that being said, with a combination of `xrandr --dpi` and ctrl-+/- in Firefox and my terminal, things can be made to look OKish.

TLDR: If you can get a computer without HiDPI, I personally recommend it.

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I have zero issues with HiDPI on Ubuntu + xmonad set-ups. In particular, setting xrdb's Xft.dpi to a good value (e.g. 144, an "even" multiple of 96 for X1 Carbon) seems to work well. However, I mostly use my laptop for Chrome, emacs, and terminal, so YMMV. HiDPI screen is definitely worth it for your eyes.

Do you use external monitors that have different resolutions?

No. Unfortunately, I can't say good things about differing-display support in Linux. For example, even if DPI is matched but one of the monitors is rotated (my old setup), freetype anti-aliasing settings are still global and can't account for rotation :( This matters less with HiDPI, though.

Fortunately, Dell U2718Q's are relatively cheap and well-worth the upgrade :)

I completely agree. I went from an x1c 1080p to a t480s 1440p. It’s great stand alone. But I’m frequently hooking it up to external lodpi screens, and the amount of zooming and unzooming I have to do is making me slowly go crazy. A shame the dpi situation is such a mess.

It wouldn’t be so bad if Wayland was widely supported, as it can handle mixed DPI pretty well. Unfortunately I can’t swap to wayland until browsers and Java apps (aka IntelliJ) support it.

Sad. :/ I’m about to get an X1 Carbon or T480s and trying to decide if 1440p... On the one hand, really digging the idea of hidpi fonts in terminals and web; on the other hand this Linux support madness...

I think the main thing to ponder is whether I’ll be hooking it up to external displays a lot. Is the situation basically “no issues” if not using external displays?

Also when hooking up to external is it possible to make X switch to lodpi everywhere and “pretend” that the 1440p screen is 1080p (like tell applications it’s 1080p)?

Yeah it is only an issue if using mixed DPI. I set the font scaling in Gnome 3 to 1.5, and everything handles it fine - even IntelliJ scales its fonts accordingly.

If you can match your external DPI to the laptop that would also work (but it's sort of an awkward DPI).

The hiDPI is nice for your fonts, but for working day-to-day I don't really notice it much.

Same boat here. I'm running a T450s 1440p model with Arch and i3wm. Mostly it's docked at a 27" 1440p monitor at work, so I set the DPI such that it looks nice in this use case. When I undock it, things get smaaall.

I got used to it by now, as I don't normally work on the internal monitor for longer times. Nevertheless this really bugs me out.

Have you tried setting `layout.css.devPixelsPerPx` to some multiplier like 1.5?

I find it's better to just zoom, FF seems to remember zoom levels by domain.

That's exactly the problem; I don't want to re-zoom every domain. I'd like consistent sizing everywhere, and devPixelsPerPx does that.

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