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> You lost me right here on line 1.

I'm on Windows and can confirm 1. is an issue. Windows lets users scale UIs to be readable at high DPI on small screens. Doesn't work on all UIs (e.g. QGIS). So maybe not all OS's, but two important ones.

> You could say the same for any arbitrary DPI; 96dpi isn't "Required", we got by fine with 72dpi. It's all about ergonomics as far as I'm concerned.

I think the point the parent is making is that human vision has limited resolution. I.e. for a given screen size & distance from the screen, you cannot notice any difference in DPI past a point. The parent is suggesting that 1080p & 27" with a typical viewing distance is already higher resolution than the eye can resolve. Looking at my 1080p 27" screen from a metre away with 20/20 vision I am inclined to agree!

>I think the point the parent is making is that human vision has limited resolution. I.e. for a given screen size & distance from the screen, you cannot notice any difference in DPI past a point. The parent is suggesting that 1080p & 27" with a typical viewing distance is already higher resolution than the eye can resolve. Looking at my 1080p 27" screen from a metre away with 20/20 vision I am inclined to agree!

Are you sure you have 20/20 vision? I can absolutely resolve individual pixels with zero effort whatsoever on 1080p 27-inch displays.

Back when I had a 27-inch 1080p display at work, my MacBook's 13-inch Retina Display effectively became my main monitor. The 27-inch monitor was relegated to displaying documentation and secondary content, because I found its low resolution totally eye straining

Edit: I might have found it so eye straining because MacOS does not support sub pixel rendering. That means a lot of people will need a 4K or Retina monitor to have a comfortable viewing experience on the Mac.

MacOS does support subpixel rendering, has at least since the early to mid 2000s. One or two versions back though they turned it off by default since it isn't necessary on HiDPI "Retina" displays and they only ship HiDPI displays now.

You can still turn it on although it requires the command line.

Subpixel rendering dramatically slows down rendering text. When you have a high res screen, and want everything to be 120fps, even text rendering starts to be a bottleneck.

That combined with the fairly massive software complexity of subpixel rendering is probably why mac dropped it.

Been a while since my eyesight tested, but I think so! I can see pixels if I focus but not when reading text at any speed. I have also checked and my display is only 24" (could've sworn it was more!) so maybe that's why. I retract my comment :)

> I think the point the parent is making is that human vision has limited resolution.

If you can't see the difference between 4k and 1080p on a 24" monitor, then you probably need reading glasses. On a 27" monitor it's even worse. It's not so much that you can "see" the pixels, sub pixel rendering and anti-aliasing go a long way to making the actual blocky pixels go away, the difference is crisp letters versus blurry ones.

On Windows blurry letters depend on the font: some fonts have blurry letters, others have crisp letters.

Yes, I can see the difference, but I (personally) don't notice that difference while reading. I do notice a big difference when using older monitors with lower DPI compared with 1080p on a normal-sized desk monitor, however.

> then you probably need reading glasses

Maybe, just maybe, one could talk about how crisp text appears on 4k _without_ being rude.

As a glasses-wearer, this does not seem rude to me.

> I'm on Windows and can confirm 1. is an issue. Windows lets users scale UIs to be readable at high DPI on small screens. Doesn't work on all UIs (e.g. QGIS). So maybe not all OS's, but two important ones.

Haven't seen any scaling issues on Windows in years. Last time was Inkscape but they fixed that.

I see these issues all the time, with enterprise desktop apps. The scaling is only really a problem because it is enabled by default when you plug in certain displays. If the user made a conscious choice (which they would easily remember if they had trouble), it would be fine.

For many, many years there were at the very most 120 dpi monitors, with almost all being 96, and I imagine a lot of enterprise applications have those two values (maybe 72 as well) hard-coded and don't behave properly with anything else.

I know my company's ones do.

I'm currently working from home, accessing my Windows 10 desktop machine in the office via Microsoft's own Remote Desktop over a VPN connection. This works fine on my old 1920x1280 17" laptop, but connecting from my new 4k 15" laptop runs into quite a few edge cases, and plugging an external non-4k monitor has led to at least two unworkable situations.

I've now reverted to RDP-ing from my old laptop, and using the newer one for video calls, scrum boards, Spotify and other stuff that doesn't require a VPN connection or access to my dev machine. It mostly works OK in that configuration.

I've seen other weird things happen when using other Terminal Services clients, though.

> Also, I don't have any trouble with plugging my highDPI MacBook into a crappy 1080p display at work.

Low DPI monitors are pretty much unusable since MacOS dropped subpixel rendering - with fonts being a blurry mess. You can only really use MacOS with high DPI monitors now for all day working. It’s a huge problem for everyone I know who wants to plug their MacBook into a normal DPI display. Not that the subpixel/hinting was ever that good - Linux has always had much better font rendering in my opinion across a wider range of displays.

> Low DPI monitors are pretty much unusable since MacOS dropped subpixel rendering

Nonsense, fonts look fine on non-Retina monitors; they were fine on my old 24" 1920x1200 monitor and are fine on my new 27" 2560x1440 one. Can I see a difference if I drag window from the external monitor to the built-in Retina display? Yes, but text is not blurry at all on the external monitor.

If it matters, "Use font smoothing when available" is checked in System Preferences (which only appears to have an effect on the Retina display, not the monitor).

That's been my experience, too. I prefer high-DPI monitors, but back when I was going into the office (remember going into the office?) and connecting my MacBook to a 1920x1200 monitor, text was perfectly readable. I suppose if I had two low-DPI Macs, one running Catalina and one running, I don't know, High Sierra, I might be able to tell the difference at smaller font sizes,

As an aside, I wonder whether the article's explanation of how font hinting works -- I confess for all these years I didn't know the point of "hinting" was to make sure that fonts lined up with a rasterized grid! -- explains why I always found fonts to look a little worse on Windows than MacOS. Not less legible -- arguably hinted fonts are less "fuzzy" than non-hinted fonts on lower-resolution screens, which (I presume) is what people who prefer hinted fonts prefer about them -- but just a little off at smaller sizes. The answer is because they literally are off at smaller sizes.

These things are fairly subjective. But it’s hard to argue that Catalina has good font rendering on regular DPI screens. I dealt with it when I had to, but it was very poor. There are also tons of bugs around it. Like the chroma issue - Apple doesn’t support EDID correctly so fonts look even more terrible on some screens. A google search will confirm these problems.

This is an interesting position. I have always thought that font and font rendering were always an especially pernicious issue with Linux and a relative joy on MacOS?

I think that is a historical artifact. Ubuntu had a set of patches for freetype called infinality, developed around mid 2010, which dramatically improved font rendering. Since then, most of those improvements have been adopted and improved in upstream. [1] Any relatively modern Linux desktop should have very good font rendering.

[1]: https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/subpixel-hinting.htm...

Except for the hidpi inconsistency across apps and window managers

As with most things Apple, it is a joy as long as you restrict yourself to only plugging the device into official Apple peripherals, preferably ones that are available to buy right now. It’s when you start hooking your Mac up to old hardware or random commodity hardware that the problems surface.

I recently started using Linux some on the same 4K monitor I usually have my Mac connected to. I was shocked at how much sharper and easier to read the text was on Linux.

It's pretty straight forward re-enabling sub pixel rendering.

I actually agree that most modern Linux DEs has better rendering. Especially since you can configure how much hinting and aliasing you want.

I have been using a 4k monitor and 2 1080p monitors on linux for a while now. The current state of things is that hidpi works correctly on everything I have run including proprietary apps. I'm also surprised when my wine programs scale properly as well.

What does not work perfect is mixing hidpi and lowdpi screens. On wayland with wayland compatible apps it works fine but on X11 or with xwayland apps like electron it will not scale properly when you move the window to the other screen, it will scale to one screen and be wrong when moved over. Overall I don't find this to be too much of an issue and when chrome gets proper wayland support the problem will be 99% solved.

I can confirm this anecdata. Single and dual 27" 4k is fine, but mixing with a 27" 1440p is messy (tried with GNOME and KDE on Manjaro during early Corona home office).

> I have been using a 4k monitor and 2 1080p monitors on linux for a while now. The current state of things is that hidpi works correctly on everything I have run including proprietary apps.

It's good to hear things aren't as bad as some have suggested.

I think it was bad since when I look through the issue trackers a lot of hidipi bugs were closed less than one year ago but I have not really noticed much other than what I noted about multi monitors.

Agree that I've never had DPI scaling issues with macOS. But Windows? All the damn time! They still haven't got that figured out.

> If there are apps on MacOS that can't handle high dpi mode, I haven't run into them as a developer (or doing photo editing, video editing, plus whatever other hobbies I do). Also, I don't have any trouble with plugging my highDPI MacBook into a crappy 1080p display at work.

PyCharm had high CPU consumption issues with a Macbook connected to a 4k display running in a scaled resolution. Native 4k was fine, using the default resolution was fine but "more space" made it use tons of CPU since it had to rescale text and UI elements on the CPU.

I think all the jetbrains tools did. I remember a few years ago there was some big switch over (high Sierra maybe?) and the jet brains tool fonts were janky for a while - something to do with the bundled jvm and font rendering. I think it's sorted now, but there was an 'issue' there for a while. Maybe it's still an issue in some configurations?

Still an issue - the scale factor is 2.0 or 1.0 by default depending on whether the display is HiDPI/Retina or not.

There is an option to change the scale manually (-Dsun.java2d.uiScale=<floating point value> in the JVM rags), but I don’t know if it helps or not.

1 is definitely an issue for me.

It's why I actively avoid monitors with small pixels. My trusty old Dell U3011 and the two rotated 1600x1200's flanking it suit me just fine.

I've no inclination to change my OS, either, just for the sake of fonts.

Kudos to those commenters still on CRT displays. One complaint I have with LCD's is reset lag time, which can make it tricky to catch early BIOS messages.

> BIOS messages

I think the problem is right there. You’re living in the past so you get the past’s problem.

I haven’t seen a BIOS message in a decade.

I’m sure those U3011 are beautiful and hard to let go (I used to have a U27) but it’s also hard to look at a low-dpi screen once you’ve seen the light

Well, my machine is about a decade old. (Many upgrades along the way, though, and holds its own just fine)

BTW what's wrong with BIOS or UEFI messages? I much prefer them to cosmetic boot graphics.

Modern computers boot so fast that you can't really see those.

Sure. The fastest I've seen lately is that ARMv7-A board submitted the other day which boots in 0.37 seconds, or with networking, 2.2 seconds. That's time to user land, and to achieve it took highly specialized firmware and a stripped down kernel compiled with unusual options. I've yet to see a PC come anywhere close to that, and personally I won't consider the boot problem solved until a cold one completes quicker than I can turn on a lightbulb.

In fact historically, some of the higher-end hardware yielding the best performance during operation (an axis along which I optimize) actually added time to the boot sequence. The storage subsystem on my workstation is backed by a mix of four Intel enterprise-grade SSD's in RAID-0 (raw speed) and 8 big spinning platters in RAID-6 (capacity), plugged into an Areca 1882ix RAID card w/ 4GB dedicated BBU cache. Unfortunately that card adds a non-bypassable 30 seconds to the boot sequence, no matter what system you plug it into. But once there, it screams. It's only just the last couple years PCI-NVMe drives have come out that can match (or finally beat) the performance metrics I've been hitting for ages.

So I actually kind of feel like I've been living in the future, and the rest of the world just caught up ;-).

If there are apps on MacOS that can't handle high dpi mode, I haven't run into them as a developer (or doing photo editing, video editing, plus whatever other hobbies I do).

Same. I haven’t run into any apps that don’t support high dpi mode. Even terminal apps look great on my Retina 4k iMac screen.

Before getting this machine nearly a year ago, I couldn't natively view high dpi graphics for web projects I’d work on, which was a problem since there are billions of high dpi devices out there.

Added bonus: wide gamut is a thing and there's increasing support for this in browsers, including new color spaces: https://lea.verou.me/2020/04/lch-colors-in-css-what-why-and-...

> If there are apps on MacOS that can't handle high dpi mode, I haven't run into them as a developer (or doing photo editing, video editing, plus whatever other hobbies I do).

The version of pgAdmin not based on electron had pixelated fonts on a 5k iMac. I haven't checked recently.

> If there are apps on MacOS that can't handle high dpi mode, I haven't run into them

Audacity has extremely low framerates and chugging when interacting with the waveform on retina screens. Even running in low DPI mode doesn't fix it. Only runs nice on non-retina displays.

Thank you for posting critical feedback. People have a tendency to defend their choices, suppressing these kinds of comments, even when valid.

Agreed. I have a retina mbp that I use as the 3rd screen plugged into a 4K monitor over usbc and a 1920x1200 over dp. Everything works fine. Windows stay in the right place when plugging/unplugging, etc... My eyes also thank me every time I look at the 4K text on my main monitor. I’m debating buying another one and dumping the 1920 monitor.

My MBP doesnt scale properly on my ultra wide 3840x1080. The whole OS makes things too big.

Hmm, may be you haven't but I have.

There are platforms aside from MacOS, and developers need to use them. It's great that you can, but that's not everyone.

> There are platforms aside from MacOS

The post I quoted was: "No matter what operating system you're on". I quoted that particular bit for a reason.

The ergonomics of better screen resolution don't change just because your OS isn't good at dealing with high resolution.

When you pick an operating system (if you have the choice), there are a lot of factors, it's good to know what's important to you and choose appropriately.

That was a direct reply to the “No matter what operating system you're on” quote. The fact that there are some operating systems that have issues doesn’t make it true that all do.

> If there are apps on MacOS that can't handle high dpi mode, I haven't run into them

It's almost as if there's more operating systems than MacOS...