Hacker News Reader

For machines that don't need to mix scaling this is pretty much a solved problem - I've run Windows at 125%, Linux/Cinnamon at 150% and OS X at ~150% and they've all preformed just fine for coding tasks.

The only mess is if you have mixed displays - and even that is mostly still problem only on Linux.

View on HN

OSX didn't allow a 150% setting for me - I think that works only with an apple display.

I could set the resoluion to something lower like 1080p, but what I wanted a high native resolution and then scaling of the icons and fonts.

It works with non-Apple displays (I use a Dell 4K monitor with my Mac Mini), but the OS has to be able to detect that the pixel density is suitable. It’s possible that macOS can’t discern enough about your monitor.

If you option-click on the resolution options you may be able to manually override it.

Careful with that setting. Any non-integer scaling like 1.5x will force macOS to render everything in 5K (I think?) and scale it down to the target resolution - this is way more taxing on GPU, battery life etc. than 2x scaling which simply display all content twice as large (everything is delivered with 2x assets after all).

It showed up for my 4K display (a no-name Samsung) but I don't really know the conditions when the scaling options appear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com