“No scaling” is a state of mind. It’s a fiction we hold onto from our purely bitmapped, pixel art past. If your OS doesn’t adapt to high DPI monitors cleanly, change your OS.
People who say "Scaling" are a different breed. Some like it because for them smoother fonts are more readable. To others, scaling presents ability map physical dimensions to screen.
Saying this, I agree that OS and software has to support alternative scalings, and ability to make things larger or smaller. I wish we could just pinch zoom apps on Windows and Linux.
But everyone will take more DPI if you offer it.
Nobody is actually for or against scaling itself. It only becomes a question of scaling or not if you artificially lock in a screen beforehand, and that screen is in a certain DPI range. If you used a same-size 8k screen you'd have basically nobody calling for "no scaling", instead you'd have arguments like 2x vs. 3x vs. 4x.
Working with a larger screen without scaling makes this problem go away. I personally have 2 x 4K monitors at 32" and find it quite ideal.
Windows 10 has no problems rendering on ANY DPI, certain apps and frameworks ignore it though which is not a problem of OS.
The way macOS does it is perfect 99 percent of the time—and it guarantees no weirdness when app developers have differing ideas about how their app should react to scaling. Apple got this one right and everyone else should just copy them.
The problem is that at screen sizes less than 30" it's basically impossible to read text at 4k. Even at 31" it's a bit small.
> If your OS doesn’t adapt to high DPI monitors cleanly, change your OS.
Genuinely curious what modern OS's don't have high DPI support? AFAIK Windows, OSX, and all the modern linux distros (and their DE's) support it.
Either way, it's usually not the OS, it's usually random programs that don't want to scale well.
Apple was selling these in store until not long ago. Should cover that use case (4 HD screens) fine, but the pixel density is terrible for using at scaled 4K.
I have a laptop with a 12" 4k screen. I can read it just fine. I do scale it 200%, but that just means I would be able to read text just fine at 24" 4k with no scaling.
It's all preference and how well the OS handles it. I think everyone can agree that the are still issues to work through on the OS side w.r.t. display scaling.
Edit: I misunderstood your last comment. Maybe it isn't the OS's fault when programs don't scale well... but the OS should have an override that lies to the program to force scaling. Hacky though that may be, it would work well, at least for an even 200% scale factor.