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Comment by jcelerier | Hacker News Reader

> If the difference between a 75dpi screen and a 100dpi workstation screen was too much, today's "retina" displays really struggle to run a usable X.

I've been running X11 on retina displays since 2014 without much of an issue. The only big offenders were chrome and firefox. Nowadays everything just works.

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I'd be interested to hear what you are using.

Obviously the web browsers are a big requirement.

...but I've had trouble with the defaults for almost everything I've tried: xterm, libreoffice, browsers. Under KDE the menus are too small by default. Under non-Gnome-or-KDE window managers or desktop environments almost everything is rendered too small.

The chances are that I can't just install an application with `apt-get` and have it do something sensible by default without a lot of fiddling and customisation.

i3, I only set

    Xft.dpi: 144

in my .Xresources ; here's a screenshot with GTK3, Qt4, Qt5 and raw X11 apps : https://i.imgur.com/VfWisJ7.png

Thanks!

I really appreciate you taking the time.

if you look at the date in the calendar, it's a time I took a good 6 months ago haha

This forces fonts to scale, but what about bitmaps? They will scale if the increased text size causes the widget to grow (and also affect parent widgets in this manner). But pure icons aren't scaled - indeed, on your screenshot, there are some icons that are noticeably smaller than they should be proportional to the text.

It works if you have more or less the same pixel density across all screens. As soon as you mix very different ones, X becomes essentially unusable. Microsoft and Apple have solved that issue years ago.

It would be solvable with compositing XServer, like Xsgi.

Unfortunatelyh X.Org is based on the lowest-common denominator code, and nobody dared to make a redesign that would really split from the X.Org mission of "providing a code dump for vendors to start working"

Microsoft for certain is nowhere near solving this.

Legacy applications are somewhat blurry when moved from high-dpi to low-dpi, but anything modern works perfectly well. In my experience, X with current gnome or KDE is completely unusable in the same scenario. Either everything is huge on the low-dpi screen, or tiny on the high-dpi screen.

There is a third option: xrandr lets you choose different resolutions per-screen. Nothing ends up too large or too small, you just don't get the benefit of the high-dpi screen.

This makes it completely pointless to even have a high-dpi screen. I think it is a pretty common use-case to have a new 4K monitor together with older FHD ones, or a high-dpi laptop with a low-dpi external screen. X really shows its age in relying on everything having roughly the same pixel density.

Not completely; I do this while docked and the laptop screen is further away, when high-dpi doesn't matter as much, and go full-res when mobile.

> or a high-dpi laptop with a low-dpi external screen

Yep, that's where I am right now, which is why I wanted to mention the third option - our IT support people upgrading everyone's laptops didn't even know this could be done.

Legacy applications like Microsoft Outlook

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