alt Hacker NewsI don't care about what we call the metric, I argue that a relative metric, where the reference point is device dependent is simply bad design.
I challenge you, tell a non-technical user to set two monitors (e.g. laptop and external) to display text/windows at the same size. I will guarantee you that it will take them significant amount of time moving those relative sliders around. If we had an absolute metric it would be trivial. Similarly, for people who regularly plug into different monitors, they would simply set a desired DPI and everywhere they plug into things would look the same instead of having to open the scale menu every time.
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I see where you are coming from and it makes sense.
I will also say though that in the most common cases where people request mixed scale factor support from us (laptop vs. docked screen, screen vs. TV) there are also other form factor differences such as viewing distance that doesn't make folks want to match DPI, and "I want things bigger/smaller there" is difficult to respond to with "calculate what that means to you in terms of DPI".
For the case "I have two 27" monitors side-by-side and only one of them is 4K and I want things to be the same size on them" I feel like the UI offering a "Match scale" action/suggestion and then still offering a single scale slider when it sees that scenario might be a nice approach.
> tell a non-technical user to set two monitors (e.g. laptop and external) to display text/windows at the same size
Tell me, do you not ever use Macs?
This is not even a solved problem on macOS: there is no solution because the problem doesn't happen in the first place. The OS knows the size and the capabilities of the devices and you tell it with a slider what size of text you find comfortable. The end.
It works out the resolutions and the scaling factors. If the users needs to set that individually per device, if they can even see it, then the UI has failed: it's exposing unnecessary implementation details to users who do not need to know and should not have to care.
_Every_ user of macOS can solve this challenge because the problem is never visible. It's a question of stupidly simple arithmetic that I could do with a pocket calculator in less than a minute, so it should just happen and never show up to the user.