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Nobody's going to buy monitors where they need fractional scaling or multiple monitors with mixed DPI if they know it's broken.

Everyone’s so excited about the wave if windows users coming to Linux. Those people already have monitors.

I switched in 2018 and was surprised I couldn’t use fractional scaling on one monitor like I’d been doing for years on windows.


Not to mention that fractional scaling is practically required in order to use the majority of higher DPI monitors on the market today. Manufacturers have settled on 4K at 27" or 32" as the new standard, which lends itself to running at around 150% scale, so to avoid fractional scaling you either need to give up on high DPI or pay at least twice as much for a niche 5K monitor which only does 60hz.

Fractional scaling is a really bad solution. The correct way to fix this is to have the dpi aware applications and toolkits. This does in fact work and I have ran xfce under xorg for years now on hi-dpi screens just by setting a custom dpi and using a hi-dpi aware theme. When the goal is to have perfect output why do people suddenly want to jump to stretching images?

The overwhelming majority of the low-DPI external displays at this point are 24-27 1080p

Most high-DPI displays are simply the same thing with exactly twice the density.

We settled on putting exactly twice as many pixels in the same panels because it facilitates integer scaling


That doesn't gel with my experience, 1080p was the de-facto resolution for 24" monitors but 27" monitors were nearly always 1440p, and switching from 27" 1440p to 27" 4K requires a fractional 150% scale to maintain the same effective area.

To maintain a clean 200% scale you need a 27" 5K panel instead, which do exist but are vastly more expensive than 4K ones and perform worse in aspects other than pixel density, so they're not very popular.


Why not give up on high DPI?

Save money on the monitor, save money on the gpu (because it's pushing fewer pixels, you don't need as much oomph), save frustration with software.


4K monitors aren't a significant expense at this point, and text rendering is a lot nicer at 150% scale. The GPU load can be a concern if you're gaming but most newer games have upscalers which decouple the render resolution from the display resolution anyway.

I used to be like this. I actually ran a 14" FHD laptop with a 24" 4k monitor, both at 100%. Using i3 and not caring about most interface chrome was great, it was enough for me to zoom the text on the 4k one. But then we got 27" 5k screens at work, and that had me move to wayland since 100% on that was ridiculously small.

Why not 200% and increase font size slightly in all 3 cases?

Because although I don't care much about the chrome, I sometimes have to use it. For example, the address bar in firefox is ridiculously small. Also, some apps, like firefox (again) have a weird adaptation of the scroll to the zoom. So if you zoom at 300%, it will scroll by a lot at a time, whereas 200% is still usable.

Also, 200% on an FHD 14" laptop means 960x540 px equivalent. That's too big to the point of rendering the laptop unusable. Also, X11 doesn't support switching DPI on the fly AFAIK, and I don't want to restart my session whenever I plug or unplug the external monitor, which happens multiple times a day when I'm at the office.


14 fhd is 157 ppi 24 4k is 184 ppi

This really isn't this far off. If we imagined the screens overlayed semi-transparently an 16 pixel letter would be over a 14 pixel one.

If one imagines an ideal font size for a given user's preference for physical height of letterform one one could imagine a idealized size of 12 on another and 14 on the other and setting it to 13 and being extremely close to ideal.

>So if you zoom at 300%, it will scroll by a lot at a time, whereas 200% is still usable.

This is because it's scrolling a fixed number of lines which occupy more space at 300% zoom notably this applies pretty much only to people running high DPI screens at 100% because if one zoomed to 300% otherwise the letter T would be the size of the last joint on your thumb and legally blind folks could read it. It doesn't apply to setting the scale factor to 200% nor the setting for Firefox's internal scale factor which is independent from the desktop supports fractional scaling in 0.05 steps and can be configured in about:config

layout.css.devPixelsPerPx


Right, and 27" 5k is 218 ppi, which isn't that much more than the 24". But don't forget that viewing distance plays a big role in this, and my 14" laptop is much closer than a 27" monitor. Bonus points for our specific model having an absolutely ridiculous viewing angle, so if it's too close the outer border are noticeably dark.

Why to have a home if you can sleep in a cardboard box?

That's a really odd thing to say.

I don't really care about this but here's an example:

I have 2 27" screens, usually connected to a windows box, but while working they're connected to a MBP.

Before the MBP they were connected to several ThinkPads where I don't remember what screen size or scaling, I don't even remember if I used X11 or Wayland. But the next ThinkPad that will be connected will probably be HiDPI and with Wayland. What will happen without buying a monitor? No one knows.


You have a year to open and comment on Wayland bugs for them to get fixed


I don't have many issues with wayland itself, the problem is that I frequently use software that doesn't support wayland or has buggy wayland support. In some instances, I can file bugs with the maintainers of that software, but sometimes (especially with older games) you are just stuck with something that wasn't designed for wayland and there's not much to do about it. Xwayland helps sometimes, but it can only do so much.

To be clear, I don't want or expect KDE to have full first-class X11 support forever. But right now, I can launch an X11 KDE session that's pretty janky and doesn't support things like HiDPI properly and etc if I need to get something running. If they remove that, then I'm unfortunately forced to move elsewhere.


Imagemagick also does it in the terminal. Chances are about as good as ffmpeg that you have it installed already


AMD distributed a decoding wheel for their laptop chip naming this year.


Last time I checked (~half a year ago) Garage didn't have a bunch of s3 features like object versioning and locking. Does RustFS have a list of s3 features they support?


IIRC Windows still uses the sRGB curve for tone mapping of SDR content in HDR, so you have to toggle it on and off all the time.

KDE Wayland went the better route and uses Gamma 2.2


Most laptops have included Windows 10 or 11 licenses, which are valid for this use


Last time i checked a Windows 10 and 11 license does not permit running Windows in a virtualized environment.

That could have changed by now.


Last time I checked I did not agree to be bombarded with ads and have all my data tracked after paying 100+ for a piece of software...


You kinda did...

> By accepting this agreement and using the software you agree that Microsoft may collect, use, and disclose the information as described in the Microsoft Privacy Statement [...]

Doesn't make it okay, just legal

https://www.microsoft.com/content/dam/microsoft/usetm/docume...


There's a couple of terms in contract law, like fairness of obligations, unconscionability, disproportionate penalty, excessive advantage, etc. that the US seems to have forgotten. In the EU and other countries such... aberrations are struck down and unenforceable. People are still scared silly, but the ones that protest are usually left alone.


Those aspects of contract law mean that if MS included "you owe us your first born child" or "if you have not uninstalled this operating system within 2 weeks of installation, you owe Microsoft an additional one million dollars" then that clause wouldn't be valid.

They don't however mean that MS choosing to put adverts all over Windows is illegal, or a breach of the contract, just because users would prefer the OS be ad-free. The EU could legislate in various ways that would mean MS had to stop doing so, but they haven't yet and there's no aspect of general contracts law currently that prevents it.


Many countries have laws against "hidden defects".

One could argue that adding ads after some time from a system putchased without ads throuh updates is a defect that has been hidden at purchase time.


One could argue that, and like I just wrote in my reply to your sibing comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087142) I would agree with you with regards to ethics, but it's not a valid argument from an actual legal perspective.

I'd love to be proven wrong about this, because I'm not blowing smoke up your ass I really do agree with you in that I wish MS could and would be sued over this, and lose, and have to stop making Windows shit like this. But I'm fairly confident that the only possibility would be for EU (or individual nations) to write new legislation addressing it.


If you bought and paid something (not a subscription) that was ad-free and then all of a sudden in a mandatory update you start to get ads, well, maybe someone already tried and failed to sue MS but personally seems pretty predatory.


From an ethical point of view I completely agree that it's predatory, I just don't believe any EU laws exist that mean anyone would have a chance of success trying to sue over that, I don't believe it to be illegal. And while I'm not all-knowing, nor am I someone who knows every single relevant law like the back of my hand, my opinion is somewhat backed up by the fact that I'm not aware of anyone with actual legal knowledge having ever suggested this behaviour of Microsoft's could be considered illegal the way you want it to be, it's only ever people who are users who think it should be considered breach of contract. (And considering how much money it would be worth if you could sue MS for this and win, if it were even a 50/50 question you'd get lawyers trying.)


A good chunk of EULAs are partially-completely unenforceable in US contract law as well.

It just doesn’t stop corporations from using them as a scare tactic.


Your fault for not letting your drink at the bar get chemically analyzed before drinking it


Doesn't necessarily make it legal either, but proving that in court would require pitting your own wallet against Microsoft's.


Umm actually, you did. You also waived off the right to name your firstborn, and if you disagree, you’ve waived off your right to anything except arbitration. Sorry, I didn’t make the rules.

(Friendly reminder that legality, once again, ≠ morality. Victimless crimes can be illegal, and Enron fucking shit up and filing bankruptcy can be legal.)


then it would be illegal to use hyper-v, since windows is then run under a hypervisor.


The FPP license does allow local vm access. But if u access it remotely then u need a SA or VDA license. If this thread is legit: https://community.spiceworks.com/t/whats-wrong-or-not-legal-...


In that case you are using a network protocol but one could argue you are still accessing the VM in the same local system the OS has been licensed for. It is a remote access from a software perspective but a local access from a user perspective.


RDP on the same system isn't remote access though.


You’re running it on the same fuckin machine you were originally licensed to run it on!

This is an ethics question, not a phrasing question.


That's an argument to reduce car usage and improve bike infrastructure


Not really because reducing car usage makes it worse. Less car congestion means higher potential and actual speed deltas. Increased likelihood of hitting a ped/bike rather than another car.


Long press on the image to get the alt-text on desktop xkcd


I've been following that webcomic for 15 years. How the crap have I never noticed that before??


You can likely put a 5800X3D or 5700X3D in the same motherboard and get a massive performance upgrade


I’m rocking an AM4 build still and very happy with the bump I got from going to a 5800X and maxing out the RAM (primarily for productivity use rather than gaming).


5700X3D is great for gaming, but for programming 5900XT will be nicer. You can run make -j32 :)


Great for when you're installing Linux from source.

I hope I'm never working on a project where -j32 on a 5900XT is noticeably faster than than -j16 on a 5700X3D.

Then again, -j1 is nice, when you need to time a break. (https://xkcd.com/303/)


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