Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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Yes. My 2012 retina MacBook was getting long in the tooth last year, so I got an X1 Carbon with all the bells and whistles. Remarkably, the on board LTE just plain never worked. (It would randomly die after a few uses requiring a hard reboot.) The screen bezel delaminated and has to be replaced. Developed three dead pixels after a few months of use. Recently started rebooting randomly with a full battery. My dad had similar problems with an X1 Carbon which he bought on my recommendation.

And Windows 10 is still bad. So many apps are not DPI aware. Windows Store apps are better in this regard, but often are stripped down and bereft of features. (Out of the box it was unusable. I installed LTSC which made things better. But I haven’t had to reinstall my OS, except to sell a machine, since I first moved to Mac from Linux in 2007.)

My wife, by contrast, bit the bullet and got a 2018 MacBook Pro to replace her 2012 retina. It took her a bit to adjust to the new keyboard, but she’s a much happier camper than I am.

>So many apps are not DPI aware.

I tried to use Windows on my laptop to run some ETL software, not because I was trying to get off of macOS but because that particular tool only exists on Windows for right now, and running it on a 4K display or a HiDPI display makes it completely unusable. The fonts for the icons and everything else are so unbelievably tiny and using the scaling features just makes everything bigger. If Windows had a good way of dealing with apps that aren't HiDPI aware, it wouldn't be an issue but even the tools that they do have aren't consistent in how they fix the issue. Scaling the UI by 200% isn't a good fix.

You can change the scaling strategy in the app's compatibility settings

> So many apps are not DPI aware.

I tried switching to a Windows laptop at work a couple years ago, and bounced off of it (returning to an ancient MacBook) basically entirely because of this. That, in combination with the laptop's 4K monitor, conspired to make it impossible for me to read text in some applications I used without a magnifying glass.

I suspect that Windows might be totally fine with so many apps not being DPI aware if laptop manufacturers weren't also doing things like creating 15" 4K monitors.

> So many apps are not DPI aware.

This is something that Microsoft were highlighting to Win32 and WinForms developers long before HiDPI screens became commonplace. Unfortunately, it's only recently that the API support has been fleshed out. Compare Windows 10 (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/hidpi/high-dp...) with Windows XP to Windows 8.1 support (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dn469266(v=vs.71)).

Just my personal anecdote, I run Mint 19.2 x64 on my X1 Carbon and love it, no issues beyond some initial fiddling to get my hotkeys set up the way I like.

Me too - I run KDE on Ubuntu on a Carbon X1 6th gen - it's great. The only annoying bug are horizontal lines in the terminal from the high DPI scaling.

I believe they just fixed this bug.

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