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Comment by bcheung | Hacker News Reader

Even if the OS supports it, many apps still write their own UI primitives and won't scale with the OS scaling, or when they do, it's not uniform so the text is either obnoxiously huge, or the UI affordances are way too small.

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.

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The fact that some apps get it wrong isn't a great justification for making all the other well-behaved apps look worse. Just add an option to scale specific apps in the window manager (faking the screen resolution, DPI, etc.) and let everything else run at full resolution.

That's a Windows problem. Macs have had high-dpi screens that work perfectly for seven years now.

The only thing macOS does is downscaling by a factor of 2 the oversized rendering resolution (virtual display on X server). For certain dpi it works fine, for certain it would blur everything (i.e. the screen I use atm is 24" 4K with 185 ppi).

Windows 10 has no problems rendering on ANY DPI, certain apps and frameworks ignore it though which is not a problem of OS.

Downscaling the screen at "retina" resolutions works way better than your intuitions assume. I thought it would be terrible and ugly, but I was wrong. And I'm normally super picky about things being pixel-perfect.

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.

Unfortunately with really large monitors, you have to turn your head a lot.

If you have a high-res, large monitor, you want to arrange your windows like a grid. You don't want to actually use Google Chrome at full 4k with no scaling across the entire screen.

Still have to move your head. My 24 is big enough to require a modest amount of movement.

I mostly grid at 42" (moom is awesome)... still have to move my head. The mac/ubuntu top menu is a bit annoying on a really big display. Still prefer it to a couple smaller screens.

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