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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention that mixed DPI screens work!

I'm using Ubuntu 20.04 on an XPS13 and can finally have different scaling factors between the internal HiDPI screen and external normal DPI screen without awful issues.

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Holy sh... I've been battling this for YEARS now on X11. I'll try Wayland and see if it's better

If that doesn't why not get all high dpi hardware

For me I have a 60fps 4k monitor and a 1080p monitor. I want a higher refresh rate monitor for gaming but I do not want to drop down to 1440p on my main monitor so I am waiting for 4k high refresh rate monitors to become affordable. Wayland makes it possible to wait that out and doesn't break anything I do.

Sometimes you plug into monitors that you don't own.

Some monitors also have unusual dpi where they are HiPDI but don't suit 2x UI scaling. A very popular LG USB-C 4K monitor is in that camp.

My external monitor is 3440x1440. Equivalent HiDPI monitors didn't exist. Perhaps maybe they do now, but the pricing would be prohibitive.

My 3840x2160 external monitor has a pixel density of approx. 275 ppi. IIRC it cost approx. $300, not exactly prohibitive.

That's not an equivalent monitor though. Equivalent monitor would have 6880x2880 resolution to achieve same workspace in HiDPI configuration.

This sounds like an interesting screen. Which is it, if I may ask?

That sounds like a rather standard 27" 4K display of which there are several on the market.

That would have way less PPI. I have 24" 4K display that already has less than 200 ppi. Thats why I am interested which 4k display would reach close to 300, if that wasn't just a typo.

3840×2160 at 275ppi would be a 16″ display.

√(3840²+2160²)÷275 ≅ 16

Indeed. Now the question is: where do you get a 16" 4k display for $300? As I like displays with high resolution, I find it very disappointing that 4k displays with 150 ppi and less are plentiful, but it is difficult to find anything with 200 ppi or more. Even at 24" you just barely get 200 ppi and you are lucky if you get such a display.

I run a 15" 4K laptop, next to a 42" 4K monitor.

For the external monitor to have the same dpi as the laptop, it would need to be a 16K resolution monitor.

Ironically this is a toolkit issue, rather than a display server issue.

Yeah. Using a laptop with a monitor on X11 was a pain -- one of the two would always be off.

I _am_ disappointed in that fractional scaling is not first-class :(

That's huge! It just might get me to try out Wayland again.

The only downside is anything running in xwayland (Essentially just apps on old versions of electron and wine) will pick the scale of one of your monitors and not switch when dragged across the border.

Is this a huge deal?

I have screens with different DPI attached to my linux machine running X/nvidia. A bit of futzing around with xrandr had it sorted.

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