KDE Makes More Progress On HiDPI Support

[curaga]

Dear god that wallpaper. It haunts us! Kill it kill kill it!

[nanonyme]

Dear god that wallpaper. It haunts us! Kill it kill kill it!

I don't get what's so bad about it

[rdnetto]

Its stuff like this why I really don't understand the desire for HiDPI. The ONLY people who really benefit from it are gamers (and that's if they spent at least $275 on a GPU) and graphic designers. Otherwise, it makes many interfaces look either blurry, pixelated, or tiny. It makes precise mouse movements very difficult, it eats up a lot of system resources, its a nightmare for programmers (as this article has shown), and the displays for it are pretty expensive. I just don't see how all of that is appealing for some slightly smoother or cleaner looking text and images (if their res is high enough). I have a 1080p 32" display at home. Some people would cringe at that pixel density, but with anti aliasing, a moving image, and sitting back a few feet, the experience is fine. By having a vertical task bar and vertical tab bar, websites render nicely at 100% scale, and my desktop experience is comfortable.

Actually, it's pretty bad for gamers - given a choice between 1080p with the quality turned to 11 or 4k with the settings turned to medium, most will choose 1080p. The people who benefit from it most are those who work with text, since the display is much clearer and more amenable to vertical tiling.

4K, with software that properly supports it, is great - you get clearer text and can fit more information in without pixellation. The problem is that said software isn't in common use yet. Even after Plasma 5 hits mainstream, most apps won't be using Qt5 for quite a while. My guess is it won't be fully usable until Wayland is nearing mainstream use.

[scottishduck]

Its stuff like this why I really don't understand the desire for HiDPI. The ONLY people who really benefit from it are gamers (and that's if they spent at least $275 on a GPU) and graphic designers. Otherwise, it makes many interfaces look either blurry, pixelated, or tiny. It makes precise mouse movements very difficult, it eats up a lot of system resources, its a nightmare for programmers (as this article has shown), and the displays for it are pretty expensive. I just don't see how all of that is appealing for some slightly smoother or cleaner looking text and images (if their res is high enough). I have a 1080p 32" display at home. Some people would cringe at that pixel density, but with anti aliasing, a moving image, and sitting back a few feet, the experience is fine. By having a vertical task bar and vertical tab bar, websites render nicely at 100% scale, and my desktop experience is comfortable.

You only need to look at a rMBP or 5k iMac once to understand why HiDPI is desirable.

[doom_Oo7]

You only need to look at a rMBP or 5k iMac once to understand why HiDPI is desirable.

I agree. I code all day and now that I have a hidpi screen I'd never ever look back.

[chrisb]

You only need to look at a rMBP or 5k iMac once to understand why HiDPI is desirable.

And that's just Apple's relatively low-resolution screens. The PC manufacturers are really upping their game: Lenovo-Yoga 3 has 3800x1800 screen with 67% more pixels than the 2560x1600 rMBP in the same form factor.

[MichaelSerious]

Its stuff like this why I really don't understand the desire for HiDPI. The ONLY people who really benefit from it are gamers (and that's if they spent at least $275 on a GPU) and graphic designers. Otherwise, it makes many interfaces look either blurry, pixelated, or tiny. It makes precise mouse movements very difficult, it eats up a lot of system resources, its a nightmare for programmers (as this article has shown), and the displays for it are pretty expensive. I just don't see how all of that is appealing for some slightly smoother or cleaner looking text and images (if their res is high enough). I have a 1080p 32" display at home. Some people would cringe at that pixel density, but with anti aliasing, a moving image, and sitting back a few feet, the experience is fine. By having a vertical task bar and vertical tab bar, websites render nicely at 100% scale, and my desktop experience is comfortable.

I have a 1440p 27", a 1080p 27" and a 2160p 28" and I can say from using all three the 2160p at 2x scaling is by far the easiest on the eyes. I didn't think it would be that big a difference at first but it really is. The other monitors are a major eye strain now to me.

[schmidtbag]

@MichaelSerious
I've heard of that happening to people before, but many such people also, for whatever reason, have a harder time reading lower-res text on computer monitors compared to (for example) printed text. This definitely doesn't apply to everyone, but it applies to enough people that apparently its a real thing. I personally find it hard to believe but personally, I think it largely depends on how much exposure people get to printed text or varying fonts (like in games). A lot of people get headaches from looking at computer monitors too - I never do. It all depends on how your brain processes the view I guess.

@doom_Oo7
Out of curiosity - why does HiDPI help at all with coding? If its simply because you get to see more text at the same time, I personally think vertically-aligned monitors are MUCH more useful. Programming isn't very wide (usually) but it is very tall. If it's because you like being able to see the code while running your software at the same time, a dual monitor setup is more practical, in my opinion anyway.

@scottishduck
I've used a 26" 3840x2160 Mac, and I really didn't see the hype. I can understand why Mac specifically is decent with HiDPI, because it's window management is extremely "sloppy", which needs a lot of screen real estate. But when using this mac, I thought everything was so annoyingly tiny and I had to increase the mouse sensitivity all the way. Mac already has great text anti-aliasing, so for me personally, HiDPI just seemed pointless.

@rdnetto
Like I said, you need to spend a lot of money on a GPU (or 2, or 3) if you want to play on HiDPI (while caring about graphics details). Depending on the game, screen size, and viewing distance, 1080p with anti aliasing is more than good enough. Games where seeing far in the distance matters are definitely better with HiDPI.

@zanny
I guess the more important thing is to differentiate the pixel density (so the screen resolution and size) and the viewing distance. So for example if you have a 24" screen at 720p and you're sitting 2ft away from it, you could see the individual pixels and it will look kind of ugly. If you sit 3ft away, text might not seem smooth but it wouldn't be an eyesore for some people. If you sit 6ft away, it'd probably look fine (depending on what you're doing anyway).
Jump up to 1080p, sitting at 2-3ft away would probably look ok; maybe some noticeable jagged edges, but a decent experience overall.
Jump up to 1440p and you could probably sit at any [realistic] short distance and think the image looks smooth. But sit 5ft away and you're not likely to see much of a difference compared to 1080p at 5ft away.
The problem is once you start sitting farther away, you're now shinking the size of everything that isn't properly scaled, which makes text harder to read than when it was pixelated.

People should pick the pixel density that suits their needs. A 24" 4k monitor isn't "needed" by anyone - you can have a good experience with half the resolution. But if you have a 52" screen, 4k is almost a necessity. I'm not saying HiDPI overall is bad, I'm just saying that if the pixel density is so high that some things become unusable/illegible, then it's too high.


Like I said before - I understand that HiDPI on properly supported software makes text look cleaner. But unless you have difficulty reading it, I really don't see the downsides of HiDPI worth it. I've used a HiDPI Mac, and I've used one of the newer Surface Pros, and even though the image looked nice, I found the usability of both to be very annoying in some cases.

[M@yeulC]

Just make an option to renter all Qt4 applications at the highest DPI available, and then scale them down using KWin according to the ratio with actual monitor's DPi. This should procude a good visual effect, especially if the scaling algorithm is good. But of course, it would require more video ram and power.

[zanny]

Just make an option to renter all Qt4 applications at the highest DPI available, and then scale them down using KWin according to the ratio with actual monitor's DPi. This should procude a good visual effect, especially if the scaling algorithm is good. But of course, it would require more video ram and power.

Or you can port the software to qt5. Having compositor based solutions just means that on everything else in high DPI they will still look bad. I'm not of the opinion that an intermediary hack is needed here, as long as most software is on qt5 by the time people are really starting to regularly use high DPI displays. And a large portion already is, and I'd expect a majority will be by years end.