Can you please explain what use hi DPI displays have in general? I bought one and it was almost nothing but disappointment except viewing photos. For me it concludes as purely wasted computational (and electrical) power.
What does matter though is gray uniformity and the size of the color gamut. Especially for the work I do (video and photography).
My wife though swears she cannot tell the difference and doesn’t care which she uses. This boggles my mind and is actually a bit frustrating to me, but that’s my problem.
So, I’m interested in if you can tell the difference but don’t care or if it’s something else.
I’ve always used a Mac though, maybe that’s the difference? Never seen Linux/Windows in 4K.
Apple also has made their text rendering look worse on non-retina screens a few versions back which exacerbates the problem compared to Windows and Linux.
(In fact, there's a viable argument that even 1080p ought to suffice, and 768p be "good enough for most uses".)
I'm the same way with video tho, I can still watch 480p YouTube video and it doesn't bother me at all. Whereas some people I know can't stand watching 1 second of video below 1080p.
It makes reading a lot easier for me - and vastly decreases how tired I feel after a day of it.
I would never have read a book on the old iPad, I read several in hiDPI. It really changes the way you read if the fonts are (perceptually) as crisp as print.
So my tiny iPad has like twice as many pixels as my big screen.
(And before you get upset about the Gnome dev's feelings getting hurt, they've decided that this is the best theme and no one should ever use anything different.)
Also, I think most desktop Linux users that care probably use a small WM rather than either Gnome or KDE. Gnome also gets a lot of attention because GTK is easier to work with than QT.
To me the guys who casually always mention "btw yeah I'm using this tiling wm and ..." are just smugly showing off, like vegans or people who own too expensive bicycles.
It's not what person above suggests. It's about something like 5K display rendered in 200% resolution, so it's equivalent to 1440p. Then you can have slightly downscale fonts compared to "raw" 1440p since you'll still have more clarity due to higher pixels per inch.
I prefer physical size for my screen real estate as opposed to jamming more onto a single display.
Scaling between different display sizes as you move windows around doesn't work well on Windows so I also prefer my laptop display to have the same resolution.
My wife takes a different approach: Giant, cheap 4k TV with windows spread out connected to her work machine.