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Comment by skwirl | Hacker News Reader

As a user of 27" 4k monitors, the terrible 150% DPI scaling has been a dealbreaker for Linux desktop for me for years. Every so often I will go out and search to see if it's any better, and I always find people insisting that it works "perfectly" now, and then I will go and try to replicate what they did only to find out that "perfectly" means something very different to Linux desktop users who clearly have never used MacOS or even Windows with fractional DPI scaling.

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I'm typing this from a Debian system with dual 27" 4k monitors. Why do you need 150% DPI scaling at all? It works just fine for me without it. Just set your font sizes larger if they're too small.

You can't be serious. That approach has so many downsides you can't list them in a hackernews comment. For example, icons will not be scaled in your method. So any app like audacity where tons of icons are the primary visual component are completely unusable. Not to mention icons on the taskbar look garbage. And not to mention...

You get the idea

>For example, icons will not be scaled in your method. ... Not to mention icons on the taskbar look garbage

Yes, they are. It works fine. I'm using KDE fwiw. Icon scaling is one of the easily-configured features, especially on the taskbar. (The icons are all SVG, so why would you want to do anything other than native scaling?) Everything I use it for works fine. Maybe you should try it out.

This comment is a great example of the Stockholm Syndrome related to DPI scaling and desktop Linux. This is just slightly better than the "why does anyone need 4K monitors to begin with" takes.

If anyone is really bored, go try what this comment is suggesting. Run things at native resolution and change every system/application font setting to be 1.5x the default. Or instead just think about it for 30 seconds and just realize that a lot of UI is not text, and now you get 'normal' sized text with tiny images, icons, scroll bars, etc. and a lot of UI glitches such as text overflowing tiny buttons or clipping out of panels. The entire experience being suggested is hot garbage.

As a 4k monitor user, I think KDE has DPI scaling on par with MacOS.

Seconded; while the occasional legacy program might have issues, I'm happily doing 4K with scaling in KDE with Wayland.

How do you configure 150% scaling on MacOS? Doing it in Settings > Displays makes everything blurry in my experience.

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