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Comment by glogla | Hacker News Reader

How is Linux support on those? And how is Linux support on 4k/HiDPI in general?

I'm thinking of replacing aging Macbook Pro and those look pretty good.

Linux support for HiDPI is not great. GTK3 apps are scaled appropriately, but GTK2 apps are not, and there are still quite a few of those, like GIMP. Such apps are displayed ridiculously tiny on a 4k display with unreadably small text.

I've heard that if you use Wayland, these older apps get pixel scaled up, but most Linux distros have spotty support for Wayland, so getting it running can be labor intensive.

Unfortunately fractional scaling in wayland is broken to the point where even X works better: For videos in 1.5x scale, the player renders it at 2x and wayland scales it down to 1.5x, costing performance and causing artifacts. In X the video player just renders directly.

HiDPI on Linux is certainly not as good as MacOS (from what I've heard) or Windows but it can be decent. If you are on Wayland than display scaling both integer and fractional works pretty well. Scaling older X11/Xwayland applications can be a bit of a pain so sometimes those windows look blurry.

4K itself without any scaling works perfectly fine so I typically try to get laptops and monitors with a DPI between 100 and 140 so that I don't have to worry about scaling. Higher resolutions on smaller screens i.e laptops also use more power anyway.

Thanks for sharing. I run my 4k monitor at home at 1:1 so I don't use (and don't need) scaling, but nice to hear someone else had some experience with it. I always worry about the lag on desktop features with Linux, but I've generally not had problems in recent years with Fedora, for example.

I currently use a 4K monitor and a 2K monitor side by side for my work with 1.5x scaling on the 4K monitor, so things are the same size on both. Gnome only allowed integer scaling by default, but IIRC I enabled fractional scaling with a dconf setting that I found through googling. I don't have any issues with this setup, although obviously things look more clear on the 4K monitor, so some people might not like the disparity.

On my 2013 Google Chromebook Pixel (running real Linux) I set Xft.dpi: 240 in my .Xresources file, matching the screen resolution. Seems to work well. I’m not sure what “scaling” is. Is that it? I wouldn’t want to use a 140 dpi screen, unless it were a big one mounted 6 feet or so away.

ThinkPads overall tend to have great Linux support. Being AMD-only tends to improve that. The wireless networking drivers and sometimes features like brightness adjustment and Fn-based functionality are where there tends to be issues on early release but they are usually addressed quickly as adoption increases and more kernel devs look into reported issues.

I'd love to buy some of these and do full-on reviews but the funding isn't there yet. AMDNow! currently makes me exactly zero dollars.

I use fedora gnome desktop and although it could be better, I'm happy with the scaling.

The native apps like the terminal and Firefox scale perfectly. When in-between screens one screen may show the window very zoomed in, but when totally on one screen it will show correctly.

Apps which still use x11 (Chrome, Steam, vscode, anything electron) show at the scale factor of the primary monitor. They're perfectly fine if you only use one monitor. When I have multiple monitors I make sure the x11 windows are on my externals (as they're the same scaling factor and one of them is my primary).

I’ve had a 4K 15” Dell for a couple of years, and the Linux support for 4K has been very sucky with Ubuntu.

There are lots of corner cases, and every now and then you run into a program that just won’t scale and the text is teensy weensy, and there is no usable workaround.

I wished I had chosen the 1080p matt screen (or maybe 1440p 15” if that were an option on the XPS).

Apart from that I have been pretty impressed with the Dell with Linux drivers - for example still getting necessary firmware updates via Ubuntu.

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