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Comment by nvarsj | Hacker News Reader

Is this really high DPI though? I think it has to do with font sharpness. What I've noticed is that Windows and Mac OS X both have poor font smoothing at normal DPIs - blurry fonts are the norm. When I swap to a modern Linux desktop however, the fonts look very good at regular DPI. The difference is apparent.

You can also prove the sharpness effect to yourself by using bitmap fonts - they will look great on regular DPI monitors on any OS.

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I work on a weekly base on Linux, Windows and MacOS; mostly Linux. HiDPI does make a huge difference for me, and I'd say even more so on Linux, where without HiDPI I suffer Firefox font rendering a lot (Chromium is a bit better).

Sure some smoothing algorithm might work better for you and ease the problem; same with bitmap fonts. But try printing some text at 96dpi and at 300dpi and compare it side by side. 96dpi is not enough for comfort, and for years we've been pretending it is since there was no viable alternative. There is now. Hurray!

I'm all for higher DPI screens, but you need to take into account that typical reading distance for screens is larger than for text on paper. It is not really DPI that counts but dots per angular distance as seen from the eye.

> I work on a weekly base on Linux, Windows and MacOS; mostly Linux. HiDPI does make a huge difference for me...

How good is Linux support for HiDPI these days? I've been delaying making the upgrade for a few years, waiting for better native support. Also, any idea if you can mix HiDPI screens with regular ones?

Recent Gnome works very well with all-HiDPI; I had to leave XFCE when I switched to HiDPI because it hadn't good support.

Recent is key here; I have been using Gnome in HiDPI mode for a couple of years but I had to do some tweaks to have it working well; now it seems to work more or less out of the box. Same holds for Qt based applications.

Mixed DPI screens kind of works, but there are hitches; I definitely suggest going all in.

For me, "blurry" ie. antialiased is much better, so long as it results in better defined letter forms, as it does on MacOS or when using freetype with hinting set to low or turned off. HiDPI simply means there's no tradeoff.

I think nvarsj didn't mean no AA but that Linux uses a different AA algorithm.

The use and magnitude of font hinting is largely what makes the difference. Windows used aggressive hinting until Windows 8, and it's also the default in many Linux distributions.

You need to calibrate cleartype in Windows 10 to fix this.

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