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Comment by angus-prune | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

Newest updates (creators) aim to fix it.

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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