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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

TIL that in 2019 people still have DPI problems with their software.

Only Macs have really made high-DPI work properly, and especially having multiple monitors with very different DPI.

Mac makes most apps "just work", but it has issues: Any scaling besides the default makes it impossible to do 1:1 device pixel rendering from within an app.

Windows has the complete solution for non-integer pixel ratios. For instance, on this machine, my browser's window.devicePixelRatio is `1.7647058823529411`. For my 4k screen, this means apps should be rendering into 3840x2160 pixels, but scale it /as if/ it were a 2176x1224 display. (2160/devicePixelRatio = 1224.0)

This allows Windows apps to handle non-integer scaling, whereas on Mac this causes apps to get "fuzzy", since they would e.g. render into a 2176x1224 screenbuffer which is upscaled to 4k by the OS compositor.

It's 2020 now, friend.

Sorry. Time machine problems. Should be fixed now. :)

Do you not? My work laptop has very high DPI, and I hate all the scaling issues I encounter with all the corporate software I have to use. To the point that I much prefer to plug it into a 1080p monitor.

Sounds like a Windows problem. Macs have had high DPI solved since 2012.

Sounds like a legacy software problem. Old Mac software is the same.

Nope. Old Mac software doesn't suffer from scaling issues on high dpi displays.

Windows relies too much on legacy software. The built in RDP client for example fails when you remote from a high DPI machine to a windows server that doesn’t support high DPI. Microsoft’s own RDP client on Mac upscales perfectly.

Windows having DPI scaling problems is a good problem to have since it's mostly rooted in the fact that it supports much older software.

Xorg + multiple monitors = dpi scaling frustration.

Wayland implements per-monitor scaling but not much has made the transition yet.

Adobe Apps on Windows are terrible for this. All screen recording apps on Windows have problems if your internal monitor and external monitor have different scaling as well.

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