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nomel

My last 1080p monitor was around 20 years ago. I have trouble comprehending people still use them regularly.

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A very quick search yielded Dell selling 1080p laptops today:

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/dell-15-laptop/...

It is very, very common. Just not in the Mac world.

It's also the corporate standard for generic cubicle workstation monitors, though it's unusual to find a Mac in such a place anyway.

It’s very common for the people who got their last monitor 8 years ago.

It's still the most common resolution for people using desktop monitors today, according to: https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/w...

Also for gaming too: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

1920 x 1080 51.89%

2560 x 1440 21.20%

3840 x 2160 5.00%

OS font rendering doesn't matter for gaming.

People also use usable mice instead of touchpads, and they put the "ctrl" key where Apple thinks a useless "fn" should be. All kinds of things happen outside Apple world.

To me, it's more about what I'm used to. I have a perfectly fine several years-old monitor, so why should I throw it away?

I'm a PC user with a work MacBook. I was talking about my PC.

Then let me blow your mind:) One of my daily drivers is an ex-Chromebook at 1366x768. Granted, it's also physically smallish so the DPI isn't quite as low as a macbook would be with those pixels, but still. And that's a touch cramped but it's fine.

I'm reading on that resolution right now! MacBook Air 11" running Linux that I use as a quick hacking/reading machine in bed.

The problem is, as soon as you are not on a Mac but Linux or Windows, you are in for an awful, truly awful lot of pain. HiDPI support is a mess because even in the rare case applications are made with HiDPI in mind they are not tested on HiDPI machines.

Other way around, most Mac software is not tested how it behaves on inferior external monitors.

What kind of windows programs are these? HiDPI is more than a decade old. A desktop application, no matter what OS it is, should always be tested with different scaling factors.

Ham radio software, both open-source and commercial, is a big thing, and so is many an in-house development in many businesses.

Any particular program? GNU Radio seems perfectly fine.

Oh my sweet summer child. Even software being written TODAY isn’t being tested in HiDPI. Win32 still makes it difficult.

I’m not your child, and that’s false, it’s literally one key to change in the settings. That allows you to select the exact scaling factor, not macos’s “more text”/“less text”.

Have you ever tried to write HiDPI-aware Win32 code? I suggest enabling HiDPI in Control Panel sometimes and marveling at how many Win32 apps just don’t notice and draw as postage stamps.

Mac OS X 10.4 tried the same thing (Quartz2D scaling) and it was so damn difficult that they threw it out and went for simple 1x/2x/3x auto-scaling. Even 3x was a challenge because of pixel alignment.

Well, you were talking about testing, development of DPI-aware apps is another thing. It requires the developers to be, well, DPI-aware, but I don't think there are particular obstacles to that in winapi itself.

>Have you ever tried to write HiDPI-aware Win32 code?

I haven't. I don't think there's any reason to, I'm more of a wxwidgets fan. I don't think even Microsoft makes applications in raw WinAPI.

>I suggest enabling HiDPI in Control Panel sometimes and marveling at how many Win32 apps just don’t notice and draw as postage stamps.

The default behaviour of a DPI-unaware app in Windows is to scale everything by the scale factor. Which - yes, looks completely awful and blurry, but that's not what you describe.

I've been fine with Linux/KDE. Even the fractional scaling support is decent.

Edit: Guess it depends on the app

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