Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

> and then it takes a bit of demonstrating that yes, the graphics runs with the best available resolution the hardware can offer, the wireless network is functional, suspend and resume does work, and so forth.

But then from the Gist the author linked wrt getting X working with HiDPI:

> I'm using X in full resolution of 2560x1440 with wsfb (backed by efifb(4)). I configured my X session for HiDPI (retina), so I had to calculate and set DisplaySize in xorg.conf to get the correct DPI. With my configuration below, most but not all fonts display correctly. A few widgets still have tiny fonts.

And later in that same Gist:

> I'm using Window Maker (since about 1997). It doesn't fully support HiDPI but it is possible to make it useable by tweaking the fonts. Some widgets are still tiny but window titles, menus etc. work fine.

So to fill in what comes after the ellipses for the typical respondent of news of a laptop running OpenBSD: "Really? But... wouldn't that require special trips to the internet to copy/paste configuration settings that still only partially solve the problem of a laptop running an OS that wasn't designed to run on a laptop?" And the answer seems to be: yes.

One more bullet point from that Gist:

> In /etc/sysctl.conf I have to disable suspend when the lid is closed: machdep.lidsuspend=0

But the blog author says suspend/resume does indeed work. Is the blog author manually suspending/resuming, or did he get it to trigger correctly when the lid is open/closed?

>So to fill in what comes after the ellipses for the typical respondent of news of a laptop running OpenBSD: "Really? But... wouldn't that require special trips to the internet to copy/paste configuration settings that still only partially solve the problem of a laptop running an OS that wasn't designed to run on a laptop?" And the answer seems to be: yes

These problems seem related to the choice of WindowMaker, not OpenBSD. Choosing a different window manager or desktop environment won't have the same issues.

And ACPI events vary wildly, unless the two people are using the exact same model I wouldn't be surprised if their suspend/resume success is different.

I noticed this with my new XPS laptop last year. After moving to GNOME, things started Just Working. A lot of what we consider basic functionality is implemented differently by each DE, and running in userspace, or is completely absent (like power management or automatic/easy wireless networking).

In my experience HiDPI is pretty well supported in Linux these days but mixed DPI over multiple monitors is still somewhat hit-and-miss. I've resorted to running my XPS 15's built-in screen at 1080P when I have my 1080P external monitors connected. Shame as I did pay extra for the 4K option!

Independent scaling per monitor is supposedly supported in Wayland and just around the corner in KDE so I live in hope. I hear it's mostly working in the very latest versions of Gnome now at least, although I couldn't get it to work.

(I appreciate that this is a thread about BSD - I'm just pointing out that the situation in Linux isn't much better)

I generally agree and also have an XPS but one extremely annoying thing is switching the screen scaling. I usually am using external monitors but if I want to use the built-in screen I have to change a few settings and restart half my applications.

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