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Comment by stefano | Hacker News Reader

Regarding the first point, I had to give up on using an external monitor because fonts look blurry and give me a headache after a while. The same monitor with Windows and Linux shows perfectly fine fonts. I tried all sort of incantations found on forums, and nothing works.

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Apple redid font smoothing with Mojave, and now it looks like garbage on non-retina displays. Most 4K displays seem to be bigger, rather than denser, so you can't do much to fix it.

I brought an Apple PowerBook G4 back in 2005, and one of the standard system configs allowed you to calibrate the subpixel rendering parameters of fonts for the built-in display, as well as any external displays. It remembers each external display by serial model so that it could load the correct calibration profile for that particular display each time it's plugged in. I must have obsessively calibrated each of my displays at least ten times.

Was this feature removed from OSX? Or did OP try it already and it didn't help much? Honest question here; I haven't touched a mac in over a decade.

I tried. It didn't help, the root issue is that Apple removed anti-aliasing, which is the only thing that can make fonts look readable on a 1080p resolution display. An old MacBook running OSX 10.6 looks perfectly fine on my external monitor.

http://osxdaily.com/2018/09/26/fix-blurry-thin-fonts-text-ma...

Fixed the issue for me.

Thanks, but I tried that some time ago. It didn't make much of a difference.

Which is why I maintain that 27" 4K is the sweet spot size and resolution wise for productivity.

I've got an LG one at home, and heading into work where I have 2 27" monitors, but only 1440p always feels like a downgrade.

Is your Mac running the external monitor in its native resolution?

I have a 4k display, and when I select the "Looks like 3840 x 2160" option, UI elements are too small. Selecting "Looks like 2560 x 1440" results in blurry fonts. So I've selected "Looks like 1920 x 1080", and thanks to Retina, fonts are crystal clear. Unfortunately, UI elements (such as the menu bar at the top of the screen) are pretty gigantic now, but I live with it.

Yup. It's a 1080p monitor running at 1080p. I tried all the other available (non native) resolutions and fonts looked blurry in all of them.

This should do the trick.

https://github.com/LumingYin/macOSLucidaGrande

Note for me, this makes the ••• dots go away when typing passwords into system prompts. Fine!

"Things break at random for reasons you can't understand and the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best."

Ah that’s what I paid €2k for a laptop for!

> paid €2k for a laptop

Really skimped and got a peasant model there, eh?

(Note that this is sarcasm directed at Apple’s pricing, not at rusk, who I assume is a very decent human being.)

Thanks, but I already tried that in the past. I didn't notice any difference. Maybe it looks decent if you have a screen with high enough resolution, but ony my 1080p screen it still looks bad.

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