1080p screen is a no-go. come on yall, it's 2021
That being said - if you're coming from the macbooks retina it's definitely a downgrade. My guess however is that this device won't have a screen that is that good either way though.
If you're stuck on Windows I can't imagine using anything lower than 4k at that size. On the other hand, I'm using a 17.x inch laptop currently, only about a foot and a half from my face, at only 1080p, and it's fine. (Before you blame my vision - I'm actually nearsighted. My vision is near-perfect at this distance.)
I certainly wouldn't accept this DPI from a current laptop, of course; the font rendering certainly could be a lot better and more density would be nice for easier photo editing and so on, but I think a lot of people have forgotten just how good 1080p can be if it's handled well in software. A whole generation spent most of their time on crappy CRTs. Compared to that almost any HD screen is an enormous improvement.
Considering what I've recently learned about the fractional scaling mess, I would only buy laptops with a 1440p or 4K display because they don't need fractional scaling.
I really wish there were more 24 inch 4K or 27 inch 5K monitors on the market and not the 27 inch 4K mess we're getting. I'm not sure what monitor manufacturers are thinking.
See my reply here.
15.6″ 1920×1080 (1080p): 141ppi. Generally comfortable at 1–1.25×, most will use at 1×.
15.6″ 2560×1440 (1440p): 188ppi. Generally comfortable at 1.33–1.75×, most will use at 1.5×. Definitely uncomfortable at both 1× and 2×. If you don’t like fractional scaling, you don’t want 1440p.
15.6″ 3840×2160 (4K): 282ppi. Generally comfortable at 2–2.5×, most will use at 2×.
These figures I’m suggesting are aiming for about 110–140dpi. I have a 15.6″ 2560×1440 screen, and 1.5× scaling mostly works very well, basically perfectly under Windows which I never use and with only minor issues under Linux/Sway with high-DPI XWayland patches once I’ve manually intervened to fix a few variously broken things.
Sure, people, resort to scaling just the fonts but everything looks out of place if you do that. The fonts are big but the UI elements are still small.
Personally, I chose to compromise as well by scaling just the fonts on SwayWM because fractional scaling introduces slightly noticeable degradation of font quality which is unacceptable to me.
But yeah, in that case, 4K display on a laptop looks like a safe bet so I would only go for that in the future. Thanks.
(13.3″ works better: 100% for 1366×768, 120–150% for 1080p so no integer there, 160–200% for 1440p, 240–300% for 4K.)
Fractional scaling in Sway doesn’t degrade quality in any way in Wayland windows: it leaves the scaling to the app to execute, and I haven’t come across a single app getting it wrong. Text will be rendered perfectly. Pixel-precise stuff can be a tad funny, e.g. a 1px border on an element in Firefox will be rendered as one or two device pixels in most contexts.
But then there’s anything still using X11: without the high-DPI patches, XWayland renders at 1× and scales it up so that it’ll look bad for any scale higher than one, whether fractional or integral. With the patches, you get to decide what to do.
On my 1440p 15.6″ display, I have scale 1.5 and xwayland scale 3, which normally works very well, but I do have to drop it to 1 occasionally for some things due to apps that don’t do scaling and the fact that the patches are still imperfect and you can actually soft-lock apps when they try to open certain windows (mostly popups, including menus) until you drop the scale.
Funny you say that considering Firefox goes haywire if you use it on Sway with fractional scaling.
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/6432 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/6426 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/6147
Other Qt apps like Qterminal are also not able to show tooltips normally if you enable scaling. Some Qt apps which I absolutely adore like Spectacle and Gwenview don't work at all though this might be a different issue.
> But then there’s anything still using X11: without the high-DPI patches, XWayland renders at 1× and scales it up so that it’ll look bad for any scale higher than one, whether fractional or integral. With the patches, you get to decide what to do.
The unofficial XWayland HiDPI patches? Yeah, I'm not gonna use them if they're official. It's a pain to compile and build complex packages like these. The AUR is fine for small and casual packages with a few dependencies but nothing complex, I feel.
Tooltips are working in all the Wayland Qt apps that I have (marble-qt, zeal-git, musescore, telegram-desktop).
If you have an AUR helper, replacing {sway,wlroots,xorg-xwayland} with {sway,wlroots,xorg-xwayland}-hidpi-git is really easy and not at all slow, though at least sway and wlroots do interdepend so that if you upgrade one you should rebuild the other or things may break (happened to me a couple of months back, there was a .so version bump). I decided that I’d rather have not-quite-perfect scaling and any package management concerns, rather than having XWayland content always look terrible. And remember that’s true of any scaling factor other than one.
I hope the fix lands on my desktop soon because I'm still facing those issues if I enable scaling. Even when I don't enable scaling and just use the Zoom option in Firefox, it starts behaving strangely for dropdown menus in Firefox settings. The menus aren't where they should be and sometimes flicker.
> (Incidentally, remember Firefox uses X11 unless you manually turn on its experimental Wayland support via MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1)
Yeah, I've exported this as a user environment variable and confirmed with xeyes that Firefox runs natively in Wayland.
> Tooltips are working in all the Wayland Qt apps that I have (marble-qt, zeal-git, musescore, telegram-desktop).
Please let me know if it works for you on Qterminal.
I'd also love to have Spectacle working on Sway. It starts natively in Wayland but fails to screenshot anything and tells me to open a bug report.
Gwenview looks broken on Sway/Wayland. The colors are all messed up.
> If you have an AUR helper, replacing {sway,wlroots,xorg-xwayland} with {sway,wlroots,xorg-xwayland}-hidpi-git is really easy and not at all slow, though at least sway and wlroots do interdepend so that if you upgrade one you should rebuild the other or things may break (happened to me a couple of months back, there was a .so version bump). I decided that I’d rather have not-quite-perfect scaling and any package management concerns, rather than having XWayland content always look terrible. And remember that’s true of any scaling factor other than one.
I'm not really using any XWayland programs at the moment except rofi so I don't think installing those packages from the AUR is worth it for me. I'd be happy to use them if they were available as official precompiled binaries.
Any ideas why these patches aren't merged to master? Some disagreements among devs?
(Either that, or it's something weird with my sway/monitor configuration, but I don't have anything unusual).
The major benefit of high-DPI displays isn't for gaming or graphics, it's for text. Once you're used to decent resolution and scaling, reading on anything else looks like a blurry mess.
I can tell the difference between a 1440p/4k and a 1080p screen, but it doesn't bother me to the point where I won't buy machines which don't have it, it's just a nice bonus.
I don't know if you're confusing it with high dynamic range? This isn't about colour.
4K is a little overkill for 14", but I wouldn't consider a laptop below 3K. Definitionally not dumb.
I can easily get 10 hours of battery life with light use, sometimes more (my system idles at around 5W unless I crank up the brightness to excessive levels).
4k (UHD) on a 14" display is excessive, in my opinion. I don't know what the power consumption is like, but at the scaling that I prefer, the layout ends up looking identical to my wqhd setup, only crisper. That would seem like a waste of power. Shame all the recent T-series Thinkpads have gone down this route.
There’s really no magic way to make fonts as readable with 8px as with 12px.
Having said that, most people probably set the text magnification on a 4K screen to be the same as a 1080p screen, so any real estate gains tend to be a wash.
Since getting presbyopia several years ago, I had single vision glasses prescribed for using a computer. So when I am using a computer, as long as the screens are around 21" to 27" away from my eyes, everything is sharp. It sucks having an extra pair of glasses (and remembering to swap them when not using a computer), but I would go nuts if I didn't have them.
If someone's buying a laptop with a 4K display for real estate, he's probably misinformed. You buy a 4K display on a laptop for the pristine ~293 PPI vs a mediocre ~146 PPI on a 1080p display which would look even worse considering it would need fractional scaling while the 4K display would work with integer scaling.
That depends on the OS though, right? I don't know about Linux or Mac, but I'm pretty sure that if you scale on Windows, you're still running at the native resolution, but the UI elements get scaled. Nothing should look weird. At least that has been my experience on Windows... outside of apps that don't follow Microsoft's scaling guidelines.
I like Apple's approach in this case. Enforce the usage of HiDPI displays by default with at least ~200 PPI which needs integer scaling. Instead of trying to work around the issue, they simply bypass it, which is what I'll do in the future.
1080p is about the resolution of the screen, not the size of anything rendered on the screen.
So just the stuff I'm more or less currently on, plus articles to read "soon", plus mandatory work related tabs (Jira, etc.) and it quickly explodes to 10GB+ of RAM.
TLDR: Don't use with systems languages. Rust takes ages to compile and I have almost switched to learning go just because of it. Of course, I am expecting way too much out of a laptop (systems programming? really?) but I didn't expect it to be so terribly slow.
$ cargo vendor
$ tokei vendor/ crates/ -t Rust -s code --exclude winapi
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language Files Lines Code Comments Blanks
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rust 1248 615700 493777 83201 38722
$ cloc .
193 text files.
170 unique files.
114 files ignored.
github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.88 T=1.88 s (73.3 files/s, 25634.5 lines/s)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rust 85 3984 9128 28104
Markdown 19 923 0 3637
Python 2 194 313 830
TOML 13 42 11 342
YAML 3 30 60 313
Bourne Shell 8 22 9 130
zsh 1 16 14 67
Bourne Again Shell 2 11 22 28
Ruby 1 4 0 19
Dockerfile 4 4 0 12
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 138 5230 9557 33482
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You are losing sight of the forest through the trees here. This isn't an abstract argument about what is or isn't part of a program. This is a concrete measurement heuristic that has precisely defined inputs.
Either way, I can't really see the difference between 1080p and 4K, so it wouldn't matter for me.
To understand why, just print an identical piece of text on 600, 300, 150 and 75 dpi on your printer and look at the printouts side by side. There is a significant downgrade in quality between each step, and anything below 300 dpi looks quite bad.
15.6" at 1080p is ~141 ppi[1] which is in the "not good" range. Your OS attempts to salvage the situation by applying font hinting (i.e. distorting your fonts to fit the pixel grid) and antialiasing (subpixel on linux, grayscale on the latest versions of windows & macos) - both of which are imperfect workarounds for the lack of resolution.
The MacBook Pro is ~217 ppi (1800p at 15.6"), which is better but still not perfect.
A 4K 15.6" screen works out at ~282 ppi, which is starting to be good enough to finally turn off font hinting and view fonts as intended by their designer rather than squished by subpar display technology.
Imperfect, certainly, but they are pretty good workarounds that usually generate perfectly readable text. In my experience, when text looks bad at 1080p, it is more often because hinting has been done badly, heavily distorting the letter forms, rather than the inherent limitations of the resolution.
To be clear, I certainly prefer reading text at higher DPIs, but at should be seen as one particular tradeoff to be weighed against the heavier battery and graphics demands of higher pixel count screens.
I think my 27" 4k display is perfect. My dad has slightly worse eyes and prefers his 32" 4k display, which I find noticably grainier but perfectly serviceable.
Putting a trio of portrait 24" 1080ps gives you 42" of almost 4k (3240x1920 as opposed to 3240x2160).
I don't see whats extreme about this at all, its a better use of area than my trio of 24" 1080ps (in landscape) that I use now.
As opposed to 3840 × 2160, no?
If you have a 48" 4k, then you're running it at 100%/96 dpi, just as if you had a 24" 1080p or a 27" 1440p. Same density, just more pixels.
If I was ultrarich, a 48" 8k would be the best of both worlds. It would also murder game performance, but oh well.
I have UI scaling disabled on my 27" 4k display and it looks fine to me.
So why would I need higher res than that? I thought that but I was proven so wrong.
Through some weird work circumstances I got a chance to use the (ludicrously expensive) 6K 32" Apple XDR Pro Display. To my eyes, this looked exactly the same as the LG 27" 5K displays I had been using — and they do indeed have almost the same pixel density.
BUT THEN!!!!!!! I had to switch to Linux for some other work reasons, and ended up with the (old as hell) Dell UP3218K 31.5" 8K display.
For programming work, it is so much better and crisper than the LG 27" UltraFine 5K and the Apple 32" XDR Pro Display.
I cannot SEE the pixels on any of them, but the text looks DRAMATICALLY better on the 8K one. I can comfortably use smaller font sizes, and the regular same-sized text is so much crisper and more comfortable to read on the 8K.
I feel like this 8K display is one of the best computer things I ever got — it's like the display version of going from HDD to SSD — and not getting one years ago is the biggest computing mistake in my 25+ year career.
And I also say this as somebody who just this year got his first prescription for eyeglasses (my vision is deteriorating in middle age, but isn't so bad yet; I wear the glasses like half the time, and the dramatic difference with the high res screen applies with or without glasses).
NOTE: I don't notice any differences at all when viewing photos or videos — it is strictly about viewing text, for doing things like programming or reading email or web pages.
FURTHER NOTE: Although I strongly disagree with your comment here, I upvoted it anyway because I think it is a commonly-held opinion which I myself believed a variant of until my recent lived experience with the weird Dell proof-of-concept monitor, and I don't think it deserved the light-gray dimming. And also because I remember you recommending the metal band Annihilator several years ago on this website, the discography of which I then obtained and enjoyed. :)