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Comment by unrealhoang | Hacker News Reader

Non-hiDPI display in 2022 is a non-starter. There’s simply not enough pixels to display text correctly with full hd.

I assure you it's enough to display text correctly in 1080p on 15" which is not considered hidpi. You may like hidpi, and that's fine. But let's keep shifting personal standards and what's practically usable straight.

It may be difficult to consider such a laptop after using one with a better screen though. I think that’s his point.

Meh, I switch between a Macbook Air M1 and a Linux desktop with 24" 1920x1200 screens and it's fine after tweaking the font hinting a bit.

FWIW I find low DPI screens uncomfortably blurry

It might be enough to show the text, but there is still no enough space on the screen. On 1440p disply for example there is so much more to run apps side by side.

How good is your eyesight? 150%? This is a 14" screen.

Ironically my need for glasses due to old age means I get magnification and can read smaller fonts on smaller screens!

I am using 100% on my 1440p 14” without problems. I guess good then.

That’s just simply facts, you can read more here: https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/

It may not be perfect and if I get my face close enough I can see the pixels, but that doesn't make it not correct. The text is displayed, I can read the letters without issues - that means they're displayed correctly.

I'm using a different hidpi display as well, and don't really care for the difference. The link does discuss real issues, but does not prove anything about "text displayed correctly".

1080p on a 14 inch laptop is the same density as 4k on my 28 inch screen. I have to try really hard to see any imperfections. Under real-world conditions suboptimal lighting & reflections are a bigger issue on a laptop screen than some sub-pixel features of text.

Lamborghini cars are faster than most jeeps. Facts, does not mean its a overall better driving experience or that jeeps 'simply' are not driveable.

I like your reasoning here but lol at your specific examples. Nobody really considers Lambos or Jeeps as being particularly drivable. Lambos try to kill you and Jeeps rattle your brain.

meh your right ! At least about about Jeeps :p

I have an old 2008 jeep rubicon. Its basically a nice red tractor with aircon and radio.

BUT I feel like OptimusPrime(Transformers) everytime i get into my jeep to go buy groceries !

Lambos are amazingly drivable at speeds over 150mph... Just anything below feels like driving a shaker or rodeo.

The blog post is good in showing that the "non-starter" because cannot "display text correctly" doesn't hold. Specifically it talks about how Macbooks by default utilize fractional scaling that messes up pixel-crisp text. Gonna bet that there's a significant overlap between those that call for ridiculously for their size high res displays yet are fine with those defaults.

I think this is a personal preference rather than a 'it just can not do it' situation.

Been programming for decades on 1080p and before 1080 on 1024. My eyesight is quite bad (-5.85) and i can see perfectly fine on 1080p. Sure 2k or 4k might be better. But thats true for 8k as well.

HDD -> SSD is an enormous difference. SSD -> NVMe, better but not so dramatic.

1080p -> 4K is an enormous difference. 4K -> 8K, better but not so dramatic.

The rate of improvement is not linear.

No one said it was. But for some people for some problems what they have is definitely good enough.

Example: hdd to ssd (huge quantitative improvement if you measure speeds). As you rightly said.

To my eyes(bad eyes) 1080p is enough, 4k might look slightly better but no way near in the same ballpark as hdd to ssd. Maybe its the fonts, workflow or fontsize i use but 4k fonts does not not x5 or x10 better than 1080p fonts. I absolutely sure there are ppl that, that is true for though. YMMV shrug

For a laptop, I see diminishing returns at 3200x1800. That's as low as I'm go. 4k is preferred and now common. I don't need more.

Ironically, almost all phones I look at have more pixels than I need. Laptops are only recently easily available with reasonable pixel density. For a while, common phones had higher resolution (not just density) than laptops.

Using 4k at 2x scale, you have exactly the same desktop space as 1080p but with 4x more pixels to render your fonts.

I have bad eyes but apparently not as bad as yours. Let's go ask a blind man if they prefer 1080p or 4K, that'll settle it.

If you don't see the difference, it doesn't mean there's none.

Not OP but if you don‘t see the difference why pay for it? It will also be more taxing for the graphic card or cpu to update 4k, I believe.

Huh !? No one said 'the difference is not there'.

I said the difference is not meaningful enough (for me and many other ppl, if i read the comments) and that stating that 1080p 'is simply a none starter' and it 'cannot' render text 'correctly' it not true. It can render it more correctly yes.

To be really annoying even 8k wont render text 100% correctly since if there is a circle like section example 'p' or 'b' no pixel based device would be able to give a 'true rendition' of the symbol since you need basically infinite precision to correctly display a circle like concept on gridbased scheme(i.e pixel based display)

Sure a 4k or 8k will approximate it better but(and this is really my point

4k or 8k wil be better(yes) but 1080p it sufficient for a good subset of ppl.

Not really sure how the blind man helps either side of this discussion ?

The whole argument is silly. People coded on 21" CRT and LCD monitors at 640×480 even, and yes ... they still live!

While higher resolutions look nicer, they provide no real value for a console. I've had 4x xterms on my desktop for 30+ years.

There is zero "extra space" with higher dpi. None.

One sad downside of things looking nicer, is the battery cost.

UHD vs HD means 4x the pixels, and a GPU rendering all those pixels. If you want a 14hr battery, and light weight, you won't be getting it with a UHD screen in 2022.

Pointing at the GPU is an excuse. That thing doesn't need to go over 1% load to make good text happen.

yup !

I'm explicitly looking for laptops with full HD display resolution, not more. I prefer the crisp pixels of low-resolution bitmap fonts.

This seems to be a tradition in the linux-laptop world. "1080p ought to be enough for anyone!"

Use a 13" 4k for a few weeks and try to go back. Actual high-dpi screens are where it's at.

What a tiring trope. I use a high resolution macbook for work and a 1366x768 13 inch laptop for personal use. Like OP, I greatly prefer the font blockiness the latter provides especially in terminals.

And yes, I've tried smooth fonts and FixedSys/Less Perfect DOS-VGA on both and prefer blocky ones every time. High res screens love to use smoothing and subpixel rendering and I very much prefer none of it.

Edit: point being if you switch to high res displays, you won't always like it more

> High res screens love to use smoothing and subpixel rendering and I very much prefer none of it.

Quite the opposite! These are hacks for low-res displays to make type look better. Sufficiently high resolution displays disable these because they are high resolution enough that your eye perceives a smooth line/edge already without having to resort to hacks to avoid stairsteps.

If we're talking about actual smoothing, anti-aliasing, then that's not a hack, that's a necessity for non-bitmap fonts until you reach extreme resolutions. If you want your eye to perceive a stairstep as a smooth line you need to start talking about 16K screens.

I'm fine with my 15.6" 1080p screen. The reasons I'm not considering this laptop is the lack of 3 physical buttons on the touchpad. It's Linux after all. Left select text, middle paste, no need of ctrl-c and ctrl-v. It's much faster and I'm using it all the time. Btw, I disable touch to click because it tends to move the pointer and generate misclicks.

I'm with you on the lack of physical buttons. That's a no go.

For me the lack of pointing stick is also a no go. My first laptop over twenty years ago was a Toshiba with a pointing stick, and I've used Thinkpads ever since.

Probably 'correctly' is not the right word here.

I often code for 12+ hours straight and the only way to keep up with such a stress on eyes is to use bigger fonts and not focus too much on text (i.e. engage in a slightly defocused vision).

Which means I never use small fonts, though I see a lot of people who code on 13-15 inch screens with super tiny fonts.

Naturally, once you have to use large fonts you end up using large screens (I'm currently on 49 inch ultra-wide Samsung 32:9 screen) and it's the best setup for coding I can imagine.

Still when coding on a laptop, I sacrifice window splits and stuff like that but not the font size. So Macbook Pro resultion is even too high for me, and I'm quite happy with FullHD laptops as well.

Frankly if you are often coding for 12 hours straight you have plenty more serious problems going on that monitor resolution and font size can fix.

If you're picturing a teenager and/or workaholic unaware of life behind the monitor, it's not the case. But thank you for the concern :)

You should take breaks.

Yes but that doesn't change the argument very much. Even if breaks mitigate strain very well, I'd still want to minimize the strain in the first place, in the vast majority of situations.

Only if you are used to hiDPI in the first place.

I have had laptops with hiDPI monitors in the past and currently have a laptop with a FHD screen. After having used both I consider a hiDPI monitor a waste of money and battery life for a 14" laptop.

as someone who regularly uses a 1080p windows laptop and an 1800p MacBook pro, it's certainly not the requirement for me it appears to be for you. It's an improvement, but so is the matte finish on my windows display

I vaguely think my cheap college laptop display around 2006 was 1080 lines tall. How can it possibly be that some manufacturers haven't moved on since then?

Cheap 2006 laptop? Would have been 768p at best, maybe even 600p. Even Apple would happily sell you an 800p macbook (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_(2006%E2%80%932012)) until 2012 and laptop GPUs of the era would struggle with a 1080p desktop.

There were a lot of higher res laptops in that time period. They weren't everywhere which is why most people don't know about them.

They weren't "cheap college laptops" though.

Here's a 2006 laptop review roundup: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/best-laptops-of-2006/

There's a 4:3 1680x1050 laptop there (a $2k machine, described as "doesn't come cheap") and the macbook pro (also starting at $2k) was 1440x900.

Some people don't care as much about DPI.

I personally got the third-cheapest 49" ultrawide.

People's eyesights vary. I need big letters anyways.

The point of HiDPI is not having really small text, is doubling the scaling so text looks smooth instead of a pixelated, blocky mess.

I thought it was a gimmick in 2015 before I got my first MBP, these days I can't go back and have my eyes bleed on 96 dpi. You don't even need full Retina, my 27" 4K screen looks gorgeous at double scaling.

>150 dpi monitors are the second best tech upgrade of this millennium after the SSD. Yet, there's still people these days that will try to convince you their 5400 rpm disk is fast enough, just because they have never experienced modern hardware.

Resolution doesn’t change physical text size. They’re independent. It makes text at the same physical size more readable. Which sounds like what you want?

> I personally got the third-cheapest 49" ultrawide.

I'm shopping for ultawide right now, care to share the link of the monitor you got?

It's fine, I'd rather have 16:10 or even better 3:2 than hidpi.

Do Linux distros support hiDPI including mixed DPI (e.g. with a hiDPI laptop screen and a low DPI external one) well ? Under macOS this works really fine, under Windows this is half garbage.

This is solved well in Wayland, with X11 this is not as straight forward. Wayland comes with some other issues though.

Its Saturday and I got some fighting words leftover from the week/s

Using solved and wayland i. the same sentence is just not right !

Source: nvidia+intel laptop owner.

Wayland+Nvidia: Having it work sometimes under some conditions are not the same as solved. X11 is not flawless either but i feel it works more times under more conditions.

Ok rant over, sorry for sounding like a d*k :)

Nvidia is the issue. Maybe another year and they'll keep improving their driver.

Open sourcing part of the driver might definitely help other projects support Nvidia's terrible software better, though I haven't seen much about laptop support for those drivers. If the closed source crap is kept in sync, at least the system will be more stable.

True !

> Non-hiDPI display in 2022 is a non-starter. There’s simply not enough pixels to display text correctly with full hd.

1080 on a 14" screen is not, in any way, going to slow your work down compared to hiDPI on a 14".

You're still going to display the same number of visual elements at 14", after all.

I suppose they wouldn't be able to boast 14 hour long life with a better screen.

Definitely agree, though.

I have a 24 1080P ultrawide, and its perfectly fine. So I think 15 with 1080p is going to be pretty good.

Have you tried a 24" screen that's higher res? You won't want to go back to 1080 after.

You are probably correct, My main monitor is a cheap Ultrawide. However even if I used a 27 4K display, 15" with 1080p is almost the same sharpness as 27 4K.

Its why I don't really see a need for higher than 1080p on mobile phones, can you even see the difference?

first world problems

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