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Comment by kaibee | Hacker News Reader

Drop the 4K IPS for a 2560x1440 panel instead.

My aging eyesight says no. 4k or bust for me.

at 14" is the difference even distinguishable? I can barely tell the difference between 1080p and retina on screens that small

It's complicated. For me it's about how smooth the text is and how consistent the experience is. 4k with 2x (integer scaling) is a pleasant balance of crisp rendering and appropriate text size.

The lower resolutions would require non-integer scaling and so far my experience doing that in Linux environments has been very poor. I don't expect this to be a smooth experience any time in the near future. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

The difference is huge for me, especially for reading texts. The rending quality is night and day.

Between 1080 and WQHD, sure. But between WQHD and 4k?

Both are fine from a DPI standpoint, but some people prefer the size of 4k@2x to WQHD at 1x or 2x.

Yes, I can definitely tell. I have owned both WQHD and 4K laptops. At least for text, I can tell the difference at first sight, and I’m more comfortable with 4K.

What's your logic there? I would have thought that if your eyesight is poor, resolution matters much less as you can't tell the difference. You'd want to scale things 2-4 times anyway.

2x scaling at 4k is comfortable and crisply rendered fonts are a MUST. My eyes are far more fatigued at the end of the day if font rendering isn't crystal clear. Other resolutions require non-integer scaling and my experience with that has been... not great.

2x scaling in 4K is the Hi-DPI equivalent of 1080p: on 13 or 14 inch screens, elements on screen are really tiny. On this screen size, we have mainly 1280x800 (Apple) or 1366x720 (PC) resolutions, where the Hi-DPI or Retina equivalent (2x scaling) is 2K.

With GNOME, screen elements (texts, windows and widgets) are big (way bigger than macOS or Windows). In this case 1080p-like at 2x scaling should be OK with this screen size.

I am in the exact same boat, 2x scaling at 4k. I am young but I wear contacts that are not an exact perfect prescription due to the limitations of contacts.

But people will swear up and down to me that there is no way I could possibly tell the difference between screens.

You can literally see individual pixels on a 1080p screen!

I am on Macbooks, but I want to switch to something with Linux so I am waiting for the gen 9 Thinkpad X1C with 4k screen to be available at some reasonable price.

Font rendering is also clearly worse on Linux than Mac, making the fuzzy pixels even more unworkable. I dual booted a 2015 Macbook Air into several Linux distros and I could barely read the text no matter which settings were applied.

More relevant to the overall thread: Pop OS is awesome.

> Pop OS is awesome.

Yes, they are needing for to change name, however. "Pop_OS!" is very a stupid name, no low hyphen "_" charactir or exclimation in name is good. Only "Pop OS" is good.

I agree. But it is actually Pop!_OS :)

I hate you, and I wish this was Reddit so I could give you gold.

You can do 2x scaling on a 14" laptop at 4k? That's way too small for me.

...And use a panel that covers at least 100% DCI-P3 color gamut.

I bought an Acer at the tail end of last year because I need color accuracy (and couldn't get my hands on high-end HP or Dell or Lenovo in Thailand because markets).

I wouldn't say no to that if other specs matched.

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