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Comment by telchar | Hacker News Reader

I recently traded away a 4K monitor for a 1080p that was better in other respects because Windows 7's handling of high resolution is still, seemingly, no better than it ever has been in recent versions of Windows. I have yet to find a way to get sufficiently large text for readability without breaking all sorts of GUIs, including built-in Windows apps. Typically I find these problems show up when a level or two deep in a menu or config window.

For me the resolution of the hardware doesn't matter a bit until the OS can handle it properly. I don't know what you're using but I would guess that it's not Windows 7.

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Do you mean Windows 7? Thats an OS which has been out of mainstream support for two years now. I wouldn't hold your breath for much to change.

I haven't used Windows 10 on a high DPI external monitor, but it certainly works well on the Surface Pro 3/4's high DPI screens.

Windows 10 has been spectacular on my 4k monitor; some of the software isn't (old games), but the windows experience itself seems to be nice.

Have you figured out how to stop Desktop icons from moving all over the place?

Unfortunately, I've never noticed that, because I hide my desktop icons. ;)

Newest updates (creators) aim to fix it.

Yes, Windows 7. I have heard that newer version are no better in this regard but can't speak for them directly as I am still on 7.

I use Windows 10 on a 1440p display and it works fine. Windows actually has better scaling options than a Mac, which just resorts to bilinear scaling and totally disables the option on low DPI displays where the blurring would be too obvious.

Windows 10 does just as bad a job as Windows 7 at handling high-dpi displays. Especially with multiple displays, and especially where it comes to application support (not sure how much of this is on the application side, but my impression from Retina UI-designing colleagues is that Apple made it really easy for applications to migrate/support both high- and standard- DPI displays).

I've heard the Creators Update has some improvements to display handling, so we'll see how that goes.

"just as bad a job as Windows 7 " is not true, its much better in this respect but sill not perfect. The Creators update improves it even more as now MMC panels render fonts correctly.

As someone that develops Windows desktop software, I can understand why application support is so terrible. It's not easy, especially when you have a multi-monitor system where one screen is 4k and another is a 1080. Dealing with dynamic DPI changes as the application is dragged from one monitor to the other is something I still haven't fixed.

This. I only bothered with fixing for single DPI value, even that was hard enough

This is on Microsoft, no question. Apple handled the transition much better with the hard coded 2x scaling factor. Windows is more flexible with dpi in theory, but a PITA to code against in practice.

Could you elaborate on what 10 does better than 7 on this?

A couple of great resources on the improvements in the latest Windows 10 release are this blog post: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/10/24/high-dpi-s... and this Channel 9 video: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Windows/Windows-Developer-D...

That's fair. I'll admit I haven't spent much time using Win7 with 4K+ displays. I just assumed it was bad based on how bad Win10 has been.

Agree, Windows is optimized for multiple smaller monitors; 3x24" works great for me. Not sure I'd be able to use a 32" single monitor setup as well.

(Being able to snap windows to half of the screen was one of the biggest UI quality of life improvements I can remember in a long time. MacOS is lagging on this one, as they are optimizing the experience for one screen.)

You can do split screen in macOS, too: Keep the window’s expand button pressed until a split screen appears, drag the window to the right or left side, select a window that should fill the other half of the screen.

Yeah, they added this a couple versions ago (i use MacOS primarily so I use this feature a lot), but the keyboard shortcuts on windows make it really snappy to use.

As far as I know, the Mac version of the feature requires two windows to be selected to share the screen, which is less flexible than the Windows implementation where I can temporarily pop a window into half-screen mode to peek at another window that's beneath it.

Magnet is a little menubar utility app for the Mac that does this.

Didn't know about that one. How does it compare to spectacle?

I'm not sure if spectacle has a menubar icon, but I mostly use that as opposed to keyboard shortcuts. Downside, I guess, is that Magnet isn't free but often seems to be "on sale" for 99 cents.

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