Then half your apps will look blurry because they don’t support scaling, this includes quite a few built in utilities.
Windows 10 has solved all of these, you need to find and use some old 3rd party apps to have this issue
Solved would mean I'm not hacking a scaling factor into the perforce config file to get its window to match the rest of the UI. Solved would mean that Windows handled it for everything drawing windows.
For a couple of examples: The nVidia Control Panel ignores the scaling on the 4k display and renders tiny text as if the display was set to 4k. GPU-Z looks like a blurry mess.
Most apps are 3rd party apps!
Win10 scaling is..... very hit or miss. Various programs are of course all over the place, but some system utilities don't even render correctly. Window size and control placement is mostly correct everywhere, but text? Images? Tooltips? Ooooh boy are those a mess. Maybe like 20% of apps I've ever touched don't render something correctly. That's A LOT of problems.
And that's before I start talking about running two screens at different densities. Then it's borderline hilarious how broken things are.
It's an inconsistent mess. Great for people who think inconsistent messes are beneficial for them, not great for other people.
Not that stuff in the taskbar is at all stable normally, of course. About half of the time I'm trying some new application out, it'll disappear from the taskbar as I mouse over it, apparently because that portion crashed or something and for some reason windows doesn't detect that until it's moused over. Or sometimes they'll double or triple up for no apparent reason, and mousing over will clear out the duplicates. I can't imagine what leads dozens of applications to have those same kinds of problems, so I'm forced to assume it's at least partly because of Windows.
This is a failure brought by the overreliance on data and telemetry to show what is "most used," without regard for what is most important.
The problem is that everyone is a member of a different 1%. "Oh, only one percent of users have that monitor setup" "Oh, only one percent of users run that app" "Oh, only one percent of users change that setting in any given month" "Oh, that app only crashes once per hundred uses"
If you do 100 things with your computer every month, and every one of them has a 1/100 chance of crapping out, you're looking at a 64% chance of something crapping out on you over the course of the month
Good point (1 - 0.99 ^ 100 ~= 0.63397), and this also relates to the idea that the higher the number of dimensions (in this case features used by a given user), the more volume there is away from the middle. Our spatial intuitions for distributions in two or three dimensions do not prepare us to handle distributions in 100 dimensions.
I ended up having to buy a new monitor to work around the issue, since I couldn't handle having apps explode on me any more
The only apps that don't really have issues are Microsoft's apps. VNC and RDP mostly function correctly so that's the direct response to this main post but to say that it's "mostly solved" is not accurate, in my opinion. Searching Google for Windows HiDPI issues and filtering to the last year still yields support docs from Dell and other monitor manufacturers (from this year) that describe these issues.
I used to write a lot of WPF apps and the resolution independence was a real thing. I guess I just got lucky in that car never used any legacy apps.