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Comment by jiofih | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, if you have a 4K display, text in Windows looks much better than MacOS (which requires scaling). Unfortunately that only applies to the OS interface, it still looks like a monkey’s ass in the browser.

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Subjective. I have a 4K screen and a 5K one, macOS text rendering blows Windows' out of the water. Linux is second (with some custom FreeType patch I forget the name about)

That's possibly my biggest grief with Edgmium. Chromium's (SDL-based?) text renderer is terrible on Windows compared to DirectWrite (the Window 8+ text rendering engine that replaced the crumbling GDI+ in the Windows OS interface and UWP apps but not ancient Win32 tech debt).

(I suppose it's also my biggest hope for Edgmium if they can somehow magic together a switch to DirectWrite on Windows, maybe that'd better the font rendering across Electron apps too.)

Chromium actually does use DirectWrite on Windows. It's been active since Chrome 38.

https://blog.chromium.org/2014/07/chrome-37-beta-directwrite...

Not for me. Got a 4K thinkpad and text does look quite bad. On Windows UI, on Chrome, everywhere.

macOS doesn’t “require” scaling, it’s an optional feature if your display PPI is low enough that straight 2x rendering makes things look “too big”.

Nit: Scaling is actually the default in cocoa. You have to make a request to explicitly not have it try to auto-scale your application.

It does require scaling at 4K, no misunderstanding there. The system is unable to scale the UI itself like Windows does and is unusable at either base resolution or 2x - unless you find (and want) an odd 20in 4K monitor.

> is unusable at either base resolution or 2x - unless you find (and want) an odd 20in 4K monitor.

Or, - and stay with me here, I know it's a big concept to get your head around - if the person's preferences for display resolution are different to yours.

On my new XPS 13 4k, text is wonderful everywhere.

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