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Comment by leotaku | Hacker News Reader

What does "Retina" mean to you? I use a ThinkPad T480S with the WQHD display option and have never been able to spot individual pixels.

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Apple defines retina as 220 dpi for laptops. WQHD at 14 inch is 210 dpi, so basically retina. FHD at 14 inch, the most common resolution these days, is 157 dpi, and quite clearly not retina.

Another big difference is aspect ratio. Lenovo ships 16:9 displays. WQHD gives an effective vertical resolution of 720px at 2x. FHD at 1.5x is also an effective vertical resolution of 720px, or 864px at 1.25x. Apple on the other hand ships 16:10 displays with an effective vertical resolution of 900 px at 2x. That means a 13 inch macbook pro fits more lines of code on the screen than a 14 inch FHD or WQHD thinkpad.

LInes of code on the screen … How small do you make your font size? I mean, it must be pretty small, so that you cannot read it with one display but can read it with a so called retina display.

Not sure that's practical at all and thus whether it makes any difference.

I feel you may be looking at this through too narrow of a lens since it's not just about lines of code, though that's one part of it. I think the point is that a 13 inch Retina screen can fit more "stuff" than a 14 inch non-Retina FHD/WQHD screen.

Sorry for not making it clearer. I meant lines of code the same apparent size, whatever your preferred size is.

I will agree that the WQHD screen is nice. If you only compared the screens themselves (Retina vs WQHD) then I don't think there would be a significant difference. But the problem for me comes from resolution scaling. Fractional scaling on the distros I tried was poor. I think that this is a software issue more than a hardware issue, but Retina screens come with software that supports them well.

Another thing that didn't work well at all was when I tried to use an external monitor with the T480. I had to go back and adjust the fractional scaling settings to make it look decent, and then revert those changes when I went back to just the laptop screen.

Edit: forgot about the aspect ratio too, that's a nice feature of the Retina screens.

i've just got an upgrade and gnome on xorg on ubuntu seems to have really great retina support, such that i feel like i must be dreaming. last week, windows was better (altho important programs occasionally crashed). right now, gnome/xorg seems perfect.

just wheo i was thinking of switching to a tiling wm if i could find a mouse-friendly one

To me, "Retina" also means 2x scaling.

The advantage of having 1280x800 scaled resolution on a 2560x1600-capable screen is the incredible sharpness of text. I personally find it very noticeable, it's so much easier on my eyes.

Thin laptops with QHD displays generally cost around the same as a MacBook (and still have crappy trackpads).

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