alt Hacker News> Because of this, it was common in the Windows XP era to see ill-sized text when changing the DPI to anything other than 96, resulting in things being cut off and generally broken.
The underlying issue with this is the use of fixed-layout interfaces in Win32. If you tweak the layout dynamically to be "responsive" to how the text wraps, this becomes an absolute non-issue. It could also be done with reasonable efficiency at the time; early versions of KDE/Qt already did this out of the box on the same hardware as Win9x.
While that is a solution for this specific issue, it doesn't solve everything. It's better to both have proper layout and proper proportional fonts at the same time.