alt Hacker Newsor large high DPI monitor
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necovek • 01/18/2025
What's the issue you have with high DPI monitors? I've used 3200x1800 14" screens way back (on Fujitsu U904 when that came out: I found a review from 2014 online), 4k 24" Dell when it still required two DP cables for 60Hz, and more recently 4k 14" screens on X1 Carbon: while you need to configure scaling (I prefer 125% or 150% for UI elements, and fonts further increased by a factor of 1.4x), most programs work well with that (including non-native UI peograms like Firefox, LibreOffice or even Emacs).
For a long while there was an issue with multiple monitors which you want to configure with different settings: you couldn't.
I believe that is also fixed today with Wayland but I mostly stick to a single monitor anyway.
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For more than a decade I have used only 4k displays (in most cases with 10 bit color components) on all my desktops and laptops, all of which run Linux.
I have never encountered any problem whatsoever. Only in Windows I have encountered sometimes scaling problems.
The only programs with which I had sometimes problems in Linux with high-DPI monitors have been commercial applications written in Java, some of which were very expensive. However those problems were not Linux-specific, but Java-specific, because those Java programs behaved equally bad on Windows.
For some reason, there seems to exist a high percentage of Java programmers who are incompetent at writing GUIs and the programs written by them neither follow the platform DPI settings nor allow the user to select a suitable display font, making their programs unusable without a magnifying glass when using high-DPI monitors. Moreover, I have encountered several expensive Java applications that crash and die immediately when used with monitors configured for 10-bit color instead of 8-bit color, both on Linux and on Windows.
So in more than a decade of using only high-DPI displays, I have never had problems with native Linux GUI applications, I have seldom encountered problems with native Windows applications and I have very frequently encountered problems with Java applications, regardless of the operating system on which they were run.