System76 Rolls Out Its New HiDPI Daemon

[sramkrishna]

> I guess the best way would be to integrate this into the compositor.

No, the best way forward is to move to wayland when it can handle all of this. The reason S76 is doing this is that most of their customers are still on X. Wayland is not feature complete yet, and thus the X experience needs to still be good. This is a good thing because it allows people to stay on X and enjoy some of the same features of Wayland until it is time to switch. For instance, when Nvidia finally supports wayland, that might be the time that switching to wayland would be more feasible.

[squash]

Like a lot of "new" fancy features, the most important part is being able to disable it. I didn't get a 4k screen so I could have a prettier 720p experience (looking at you, Retina), I got it so I could have 4x as much data on the screen as a 1080p display.

[isantop]

Like a lot of "new" fancy features, the most important part is being able to disable it. I didn't get a 4k screen so I could have a prettier 720p experience (looking at you, Retina), I got it so I could have 4x as much data on the screen as a 1080p display.

This is more intended as a solution for combining a HiDPI laptop with a LoDPI external display. In X, when you do this you have a pretty terrible experience as items on the external display will be double-sized by default. The way this works (at least for Nvidia systems) is that it renders to a buffer that is double the external monitor's size, then scales that buffer by 50% to match the display's actual resolution. So the window manager thinks that both monitors are 2X scaled, but everything is normal-sized on both. And you get the advantage of crystal-clear 4k on your laptop.

4K desktop monitors are generally actually LoDPI for having massive amounts of screen real estate. At 27 inches, 2x HiDPI scaling doesn't really make sense until you get to 5k resolution (which becomes a pixel-doubled 2560x1440 monitor). On your 15 inch laptop, 4k is probably too tiny to really be effective with use for most people, as text will be hilariously small and hard to read.1

Also, this can easily be toggled on and off with a notification.