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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is, as soon as you are not on a Mac but Linux or Windows, you are in for an awful, truly awful lot of pain. HiDPI support is a mess because even in the rare case applications are made with HiDPI in mind they are not tested on HiDPI machines.

Other way around, most Mac software is not tested how it behaves on inferior external monitors.

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What kind of windows programs are these? HiDPI is more than a decade old. A desktop application, no matter what OS it is, should always be tested with different scaling factors.

Ham radio software, both open-source and commercial, is a big thing, and so is many an in-house development in many businesses.

Any particular program? GNU Radio seems perfectly fine.

Oh my sweet summer child. Even software being written TODAY isn’t being tested in HiDPI. Win32 still makes it difficult.

I’m not your child, and that’s false, it’s literally one key to change in the settings. That allows you to select the exact scaling factor, not macos’s “more text”/“less text”.

Have you ever tried to write HiDPI-aware Win32 code? I suggest enabling HiDPI in Control Panel sometimes and marveling at how many Win32 apps just don’t notice and draw as postage stamps.

Mac OS X 10.4 tried the same thing (Quartz2D scaling) and it was so damn difficult that they threw it out and went for simple 1x/2x/3x auto-scaling. Even 3x was a challenge because of pixel alignment.

Well, you were talking about testing, development of DPI-aware apps is another thing. It requires the developers to be, well, DPI-aware, but I don't think there are particular obstacles to that in winapi itself.

>Have you ever tried to write HiDPI-aware Win32 code?

I haven't. I don't think there's any reason to, I'm more of a wxwidgets fan. I don't think even Microsoft makes applications in raw WinAPI.

>I suggest enabling HiDPI in Control Panel sometimes and marveling at how many Win32 apps just don’t notice and draw as postage stamps.

The default behaviour of a DPI-unaware app in Windows is to scale everything by the scale factor. Which - yes, looks completely awful and blurry, but that's not what you describe.

I've been fine with Linux/KDE. Even the fractional scaling support is decent.

Edit: Guess it depends on the app

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