The high-dpi support really is a big deal. No other OS (Windows or Linux) comes close to handling it as seamlessly. I run Gnome in Ubuntu and have got it to a "serviceable" state by being able to set pixel density on a per-app basis by editing launcher files (depending on which display it's running on), but that's not something an average user would be able to figure out (or should have to).
Apple has done a great job with their window manager and support for varying DPI between displays. It's just a shame their OS is otherwise such a walled garden, and their hardware is a bad joke ($6k for an 8 core desktop with a years old GPU and no storage, come on.) It really boiled down to a "pick your poison" scenario for me and I sided with the OS (and hardware) that lets me tinker to my heart's content.
Mac text rendering is blurrier than Windows text rendering (and I have learned of no way of changing that despite my having used a Mac for 10 years).
Worse, if for some reason you want to change the size of the elements on the display, the only way I know how to do that on a Mac (namely, to use System Preferences :: Displays to change the "resolution" to some value other than "default for display") makes the text much blurrier. I don't have a Retina display on my Mac, but someone who does claims that even on Retina, he prefers Windows because of the blurriness of the Mac
In contrast, if you can be somewhat picky about which apps you use, text on Windows is just as sharp no matter how big or small you configure the elements on the screen relative to the default size.
(In most Mac apps, it is easy to adjust the size of the text in the main pane, but all the other text and all the other non-textual elements, e.g., icons, stay at the default size.)
>Apple has done a great job with their window manager and support for varying DPI between displays.
That might be true, but the Mac does a poor job accommodating sub-par or non-standard human visual systems (and I would guess that people who cannot easily control how far their eyes are from the screen -- e.g., people living in a small van -- would find a Mac frustrating as well relative to Windows).
Mac font rendering is also more accurate to the font than Windows. Since MacOS doesn’t hammer glyphs to the pixel grid, font scaling is far more consistent. Windows’ font rendering is part of the reason why their HiDPI support is so janky.
I always thought that Microsoft's commitment to keeping old binaries running on new versions of Windows is the reason their HiDPI support is suboptimal and that if you use only apps that use the latest text-rendering API, the experience is great.
How would making the pixel grid finer exacerbate the problems with a strategy of hammering glyphs to the pixel grid?
Could you tell me a bit more about your experience of Linux with a high res display? Are you using the built-in screen of a laptop? Would you mind sharing the model, or do you have any recommendations/advice regarding laptops with high resolution displays that can work well with Linux? Basically, is there any hope of emulating the experience of a macbook Retina screen under modern Linux? Do you know if there are any groups / momentum in the linux development community working on this?
This was the game-changer for me. When I first saw 2012 MBP Retina I was sold. Build quality is overall so much better than its class, although Thinkpads are solid stuff as well (good enough for the ISS, anyway). The rest of your comment I align with also.
> The high-dpi support really is a big deal.
I honestly don't understand this. I owned a Retina MacBook Pro (2015) for a while and my current (Lenovo) laptop has a 4k screen, but I don't think I've ever actually cared about the increased pixel density. The only thing it's ever done for me is increase heat production, decrease battery life, and decrease compatibility (there's Mac software that isn't Retina compatible too, and it looks at least as bad as on Windows).
I use 24 inch monitors at 1080p all day and I can see the pixels if I look, but images still look plenty good and text is super readable. I switch between this pixel density and my Pixel 3 XL and while I can definitely notice the difference in density if I look, my productivity isn't affected whatsoever by having a less dense screen. Is everyone else putting their face 2 inches from the screen every 5 minutes just for the sense of satisfaction they get from not seeing the pixels?
> Apple has done a great job with their window manager
I think that's a pretty massive stretch. I haven't used a Mac as my primary machine for a few years now, but I've been watching the window management get worse and worse over the years. It used to be you could have a grid of Spaces and proper intuitive window management, but now Maximize is hidden behind the Fullscreen button. Virtually everyone I've watched use a recent version of macOS either has everything fullscreen, uses one window at a time with 4" of spacing around it because it's a pain to properly size the windows, or has 7 different apps installed to fill in missing features that have been around in Linux for as long as I can remember and in Windows since Windows 7.
I find text visually less fatiguing at high-DPI even though I have no problem reading it on my 24" 1080p secondary monitor. I don't think it's a matter of productivity as much as comfort (though maybe comfort indirectly affects productivity).
I agree with everything you said about the more recent releases of MacOS. Maybe I was being too generous in my previous comment - it really does seem optimized for very small laptop displays, so that's probably why they have recently placed so much emphasis on fullscreening everything (and also why they got rid of the Expose grid - horizontal swipe works better on a laptop trackpad).
You don't understand because you are the kind of person who buys a laptop with a 4k screen and thinks that's an asset, who thinks 1080p monitors and that aspect ratio are acceptable, etc.
In other words, you've never had a large high-dpi monitor setup with multiple screens large enough to appreciate it. And you haven't ever been an advanced enough Mac user to learn keyboard commands and the various ways to manage windows.
I recently bought at 49” ultrawide monitor. Both my MacBooks can drive the native resolution in Windows but not MacOS. Apple refuses to fix their broken driver or even acknowledge it is a problem.
Workaround is to provide two inputs to the monitor and run it in picture by picture mode. This is ok but when waking from sleep MacOS gets confused about what monitors windows were on and the arrangement of the panels. This has always been a problem and why I got away from dual/multi panels in the first place. MacOS support for that has always been abysmal.
It’s one of the first examples of Apple gear not “Just working (tm)”. I suppose it’s my fault for not buying a monitor with an Apple logo on it.
I find myself wondering why I deal with the headaches in MacOS. I switched because it was easy. Now Apple is making it hard. At this point fighting with Linux actually appears to be easier than using MacOS.
That's how I felt when I used a Mac for work. Linux doesn't work just the way I want right out of the box, but neither did the Mac, and at least Linux gives me the tools to change and fix the things I didn't like.
Granted, my monitors are 1080p and 720p (ugh), so I haven't had to wrangle with high DPI issues, which does not sound fun.
That was suggested in some of the forum threads I read. It doesn’t solve the problem though. It just scales the image up and provides the same quality I have now. There were also some suggested profile hacks which I think is what SwitchResX does.
You can also option-click on the scaled options in display manager and get more options but none of those are reasonable either.
The whole reason I use Macs is because I don’t have to constantly hack and fiddle with them. At that point I may as well install a Linux or BSD.
The software quality from Apple was never great but it is really falling off a cliff recently. It’s getting to a point I wonder why I pay the premium.
True. I recently picked up Albert [1] on my Ubuntu machine because I was missing spotlight search. So far it works well - it would have been nice if something like it was included by default.
I don't understand the people for whom Spotlight works. I tend to open Spotlight, and start typing in the name of a file I'm looking for. Consistently, reproducibly, for many different files, it'll fill in the name of the file at a certain point, but then, if I keep typing that very name, it'll switch to a different match.
That is, if the name is `abcdefgh` and I type `abc`, then it'll complete it; but if momentum carries me and I type `abcd`, then it'll drop the desired file entirely off the list of suggestions, and give me a different, non-matching one.
Huh, interesting, because that exact problem is one of my key complaints with windows search, while I've never noticed it with spotlight -- and I've been using spotlight daily since Tiger.
Well, that's not quite true, for a few years after spotlight was released it would get slow after a while, so I mainly stuck with Quicksilver. Eventually spotlight got faster, but I never had that particular problem with it, even though I very regularly have that particular problem on Windows.
I am forced to use Windows most of the time. The fact that its desktop search is soooo bad is a daily bummer and makes me look forward to opening my MBP.
It seems like part of Microsoft's goal here was to direct traffic to Edge and Bing at the expense of actual usability. See also: the "help system". Luckily there's a lot of third-party stuff to replace the search feature.
FWIW, Windows laptops (that you can then install Linux on) have had hidpi screens for more than 15 years (!!), and Ubuntu's fractional scaling works really well right out of the box now.
"have had" and "works reliably" are very different things.
Every Windows and Linux machine I've used has had issues with individual apps, and most of the time I've plugged them into things that cross multiple scaling factors simultaneously, they've have had rather significant issues (when it isn't just "issues with everything except device-native"). I haven't had an issue with that at all in a few years now on my Mac, and I plug it into literally 10x more screens and configurations.
Just to add to the anecdata, my MBP would kernel panic ~25% of the time it was plugged into a 4k displayport 1.1 monitor. I'm glad your system is stable, though!
Exactly. I would love to use Linux, but switching back to the traditional-resolution laptop screens after working on the high-res MacbookPro screens is not something I ever want to do. It would be fantastic if Linux came to support it well.
