I've been excited for a high density display since Apple announced the retina display, but I have a gut feeling that it will take a lot of time for the Linux desktop to support it properly, if ever.
Everything works very nicely once I've tweaked a few settings, specifically adding zoom in Chrome and setting appropriate font scaling in Gnome 3.
https://github.com/appsforartists/pixel_webdev
It's almost perfect. There's some descender clipping on the tab label and the subheadings in the Command Palette are tiny.
Most apps I've tried work well using the DPI flag in xserverrc. Ones that use custom ui, like HipChat, are unusable though. Linux really needs a better UI toolkit story.
I realise I should be able to read the docs, but I have found lots of different suggestions on how to do it, while you have successfully!
And for chromium I set default zoom to 125% in browser settings.
https://github.com/appsforartists/pixel_webdev/blob/master/r...
edit Also, I should add that I did spend the extra money to put a Samsung 840 SSD and an extra 8gb stick of ram in here
It's small, the resolution/screen is great, and has everything I need. I also upgraded the RAM and put in an SSD.
After upgrading to 10gb RAM and SSD, it's a really good computer for developer.
The gnome team made a proposal for supporting HiDPI displays similiarly to how it's handled in OS X: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rvtiZb_Sm9C9718IoYQgnpzk...
It's already merged into wayland and weston: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-May...
Hopefully wayland support for gnome 3.10 will be ready, so this can also be supported in Gnome.
How hard would it be to just ignore the physical properties of the display?
We have solved this problem with fonts, which have hinting and subpixel antialiasing. But we don't have software to do this for graphics. There is no image format with hinting, and no rendering library to do subpixel antialiasing. Hinting is difficult to do well, fonts are hinted by hand. It is a very time-consuming process and most graphic artists will not be good at it.
If your screen is sufficiently high-resolution, say 300+ dpi, you can get away without these tricks. But if you have a 140 dpi screen, and you want to scale everything 150%, it's necessary or everything will look blurry.
If you only allow pixel doubling, none of this is a problem. You can scale any graphic by 2x without ruining fine detail like thin lines.
140ppi isn't a massive leap over current displays that are common in laptops. 11.6" at 1366x768 is similar... density wise.
No, he is talking about desktop environments and windowing systems that run on both, and have very little to do with either. What was your remark supposed to be implying?