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Comment by deno | Hacker News Reader

You're either using 200% scaling or browser zoom because I had to scale your image by 50% on a 4K display for it to look 100% sized. This is apples-oranges.

And if you're looking at those other screenshots on a 4K display then you need to also zoom to 50% and get your eyes close the the display, otherwise you're just seeing the results of an image scaling algorithm, which will indeed look terrible.

Here is Fedora/KDE/Flatpak/Firefox with default settings at 4K resolution and 100% browser zoom for comparison:

https://i.imgur.com/s3ynhuj.png

Also with my preferred browser zoom: https://i.imgur.com/9PXDbxY.png

For the above images you'll need to zoom 50% on a 4K display, because PNG image files do not carry pixel density metadata. If you have 1080p display then you have to keep 100% zoom and sit far away instead.

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no I'm not using any zoom or extra scaling. It's the native scaling of mbp retina display. Screenshot is ~2 times bigger than what I actually see.

edit: your second screenshot looks very sharp and nice on my display.

Retina display is at least 200% or more scaling, right? You're comparing hires text rendering to lowres. Screenshot is 2x bigger because browser doesn't know about pixel density and scales it 2x by default. It does the same to those low res screenshots so they look normal sized on 4K but they're blurry because they're being image scaled.

See: https://johankj.github.io/devicePixelRatio/

If you see more than 1 at 100% zoom you have resolution scaling. Try browser zooming to 50% or 200%.

Yes retina display is 2x. But saying a display is 4k doesn't tell anything about its pixel density or scaling.

I look at the original commenters screenshot at 50% browser scaling but it's still blurry. I guess there is an element of image compression there.

On the other hand; from my own experience (I own linux, macos and windows pcs) on the same display Macos text rendering is much more sharper and pleasant to look at.

> Yes retina display is 2x. But saying a display is 4k doesn't tell anything about its pixel density or scaling.

I mean with fractional scaling where 1 < devicePixelRation < 2 you're doing it wrong and everything will look bad anyway, so I just assumed integer scaling. And 4K @100% is unusable anyway.

But more to the point you can't easily display those screenshots with different fractional scaling without pixel grid misalignment.

> On the other hand; from my own experience (I own linux, macos and windows pcs) on the same display Macos text rendering is much more sharper and pleasant to look at.

On hires displays (devicePixelRatio >= 2) you're probably just comparing default fonts. And on lowres display (devicePixelRatio = 1) OSX is much much worse than Windows's Cleartype, it's not even a contest.

Linux was always able to be as good as Windows on lowres displays, just was held back by patents, so the Freetype defaults used to suck, and you had to configure it yourself for the full effect.

Idk if it's any better nowadays, 4K display are so cheap and ubiquitous that I really don't get why anyone would buy anything else, except I guess gamers. But with all those AI scaling technologies (FSR 2.0 etc.) hopefully 1440p is on the way out.

> And 4K @100% is unusable anyway.

That depends on the physical display size and viewing distance.

No, not really. 4K@100% is 4x working space as 1080p. There's no way to put that much information in your field of view all at once. If you scale it up (or get really close) where anything is legible it goes out of your field of view and you can only look at (roughly) 1/3 sized region of the screen at a time. That's not usable as a single display. You're basically emulating multi-monitor 1080p at this point.

If you need more working space there's always 5K. That's 1440p@2x. You can even DIY one for pretty cheap. I know there's at least one 3:2 4K display on the market as well, though I wish there was a 24" version.

> That's not usable as a single display. You're basically emulating multi-monitor 1080p at this point.

That's a distinction that doesn't have to exist. If you don't insist on maximizing all windows, a single large monitor gives you more flexibility that multiple monitors with the same total screen area. E.g. for many applications 1080p is too wide to be effectively be used by a single window but too narrow to have two windows side by side. Dividing a 4K or screen by 3 is much better and also allows you to freely choose the window sizes. Some basic tiling support in your WM (either automatic or via shortcuts) is recommended ofc.

I use a 38" 3840x1600 monitor (= about 110 DPI) at 100% scaling and it works just fine for me at normal sitting distance. That's the same horizontal resolution as 4K and I don't think the missing 560 pixel rows would make much difference to how I would use it.

I use a 23.7" 4K (2160p) @ 200% and I think it's barely enough pixel density (180ppi), so I can't relate to this at all.

Apple's "retina 4K" LG Ultrafine 4K Display is actually 4096x2304 at this size, which is much higher density at 218.58 PPI.

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