Ask Slashdot: Good Linux Desktop Environment For Hi-Def/Retina Displays? 234
Volanin writes "I have been using Linux for the last 15 years both at home and at work (mostly GNOME and now Unity). Recently, I gave in to temptation and bought myself a Macbook retina 15". As you can read around, Linux still has no good support for this hardware, so I am running it inside a virtual machine. Running in scaled 1440x900 makes the Linux fonts look absolutely terrible, and running in true 2880x1800 makes them beautiful, but every UI element becomes so tiny, it's unworkable. Is there a desktop environment that handles resolution independence better? Linux has had support for SVG for a long time, but GNOME/Unity seems adamant in defining small icon sizes and UI elements without the possibility to resize them."
KDE (Score:5, Informative)
Use KDE, and the retina display will look beautiful.
Re:KDE (Score:5, Funny)
Bolour with a K? Silly bunt.
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OSX isn't the Linux kernel. It's the OSX kernel - which is based on one of the BSDs, not Linux. But it's not the kernel that's important, it's the software that comes.with it - and OSX is very different to, say, Ubuntu.
Re:KDE (Score:5, Informative)
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Yeah? Is there a list of what works with it?
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Yeah? Is there a list of what works with it?
Might be easier to list what doesn't, but here are the 16075 packages that work with MacPorts out of the box: http://www.macports.org/ports.php?by=all [macports.org]
Seriously, MacOS X is a certified UNIX, so this stuff is easy.
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Hmmm... That makes getting a Mac look a bit more attractive!
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I have a mac. I run linux on it. Couldn't stand using OSX, I found it quite terrible for me, but I needed something with serious processing capability so got myself a dual-socket mac pro. I've also got a macbook, also running windows, purchased because it was the only laptop I could find anywhere with a decently high-resolution screen. I dislike Apple's software, and believe the company business method is quite oppressive towards their customers and potentially even a threat to free technology in general, b
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Wow, welcome to 2008.
More like, welcome to 2003.
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16075 packages that work, or 16075 packages that are available? Seriously, the last time I used a Mac with Fink, so much was broken that it just wasn't funny. From the complaints I've seen, this is still true, although probably not quite as horrid as back then.
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Ha ha. No, the browser handled it with out a hiccup (Chrome/Fedora 17). Thanks!
Well... (Score:2)
Considering Safari on my iPad opened the link fine I assume no one here will have a problem with that link on pretty much any browser/device.
XNU (Score:3)
Actually, the OS-X kernel - XNU [wikipedia.org] is successor to NEXTSTEP's kernel. Mach 2.5 got replaced by Mach 3.0, the BSD parts of it were replaced by FreeBSD userland, and the driver kit by a C++ API called I/O kit (Wonder why they didn't use Objective C here too?)
But I agree w/ the GP, though not for the reasons he states. OS-X is a far better system and has nothing that Linux doesn't, unless one considers Quartz to be a disadvantage compared to running X11. So what the OP is doing - running Linux in a VM - is t
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since osx is the linux kernal
Oh no you di-in't!
Re:KDE (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, all the icons are in svg, and all the UI elements scale. So you'll get all the beauty at a very high resolution -- and those icons are little works of art.
Re:KDE (Score:5, Informative)
Not really: GTK desktops like, say XFCE don't do that. Also traditional WM weren't designed for that, and the themes were typically made by l33t hackers who were somehow convinced that minimising the number of pixels in the bitmaps they used to draw their windows was cool.
Re:KDE (Score:5, Interesting)
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Is the Droid font package Free?
Re:KDE (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, they were made for Android and are under the Apache license.
...because of SVG. (Score:5, Informative)
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"Does "alpha" and "beta" mean anything other than greek letters to you?"
But KDE base software was *not* beta at all. While certainly quite a lot has changed since, i.e. kdelibs is basically what it was.
When you deal with a whole distribution, how would you say "Hey, the basic internals are good enough, but now all the applications running on top of this foundations will have to be reviewed". Hint: this has happened before, just look out Qt versioning to understand.
After the fact it is obvious KDE guys fai
KDE made their position well known. (Score:3)
Not really... (Score:2)
...but I blame GMail for that.
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The suggestion is to run KDE on Linux -- not OS X, so that link is irrelevant to this discussion.
KDE (Score:4, Interesting)
I've never tried it in really high resolutions, but everything I've found online says KDE supports resolution independence.
And it's just so much better and usable in so many ways than those other environments you've been using.
Re:KDE (Score:5, Interesting)
Have to throw in my support here. Been using KDE since 1.x, I've tried other desktops but can't seem to use one of those without missing my KDE, and so much so that programs compiled to bring up GTK widgets (browsers) actively piss me off. The QT version of the file browser and so many other things are just more versatile and elegant.
Tiling WM (Score:5, Funny)
xmonad (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm currently using xmonad as a desktop environment (almost exclusively), as it plays quite nicely on VHRDs (very high resolution displays). At most, you'll have to tweak the borderWidth elements.
Optionally, if you're looking for a bit more eye candy, try twm and its derivatives. Most the the UI elements scale dynamically. (too flashy for my tastes however)
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I'm also a full xmonad convert. I don't know how I ever got along without it, really.
Now you have me wondering how different life would be on a VHRD? Maybe it's time for a better monitor...
Tiling window manager (Score:3, Insightful)
Use a tiling window manager and do most of your stuff in console. i3 is my current personal favourite.
Enlightenment (Score:3, Interesting)
You can choose the magnification ratio in the initial configuration wizzard. This affects everything, not just the fonts. It's the real deal.
Vmware Fusion (Score:5, Insightful)
HiDPI on Linux is a work-in-progress .. and even when it *does* work, battery life goes down the crapper. Also, thunderbolt hot-plug hasn't been figured out, but it will work as long as your Ethernet dongle is plugged in ahead of power-on. Wifi requires bw-fwcutter, etc.
.. so the entire thing has to be reverse-engineered from scratch.
.. buy rMBPs for the developers actually working on the drivers.
.. solves all the above issues and really isn't that big of a performance hit. Probably not the "purist" answer you were after but it's the easiest way to get it done in the meantime.
It's the same as Linux on any other bleeding-edge hardware (and from a very Linux-unfriendly company)
Want it done faster?
Like all things Linux, they'll get it figured out eventually. Until then, the best way about it is just run VMware Fusion and run Linux inside of that
Change the DPI setting (Score:5, Informative)
The DPI setting will scale your fonts and other items to look good on your screen.
Usually, I am reducing the DPI on high-definition screens so I can get smaller fonts and icons, but the opposite should also work.
Re:Change the DPI setting (Score:4, Insightful)
Your comment shows a lack of understanding as to what DPI is supposed to be used for since DPI shouldn't control scaling.
DPI stands for dots per inch, and you should configure that setting to match the actual number of dots per inch of your display. Then the SW environment should support some sort of sliding scale to let you change the size of any UI elements.
Sadly most desktop platforms don't do this correctly and bind the DPI to the size of UI elements. I will admit that resolution independence isn't easy, Microsoft didn't really start down that path until Windows 7, and Apple didn't start to get close until Mountain Lion.
Having used a retina display Mac it irritates me that they don't just have a slider to set UI scale, but instead you can select from several pre-set resolutions. I suspect this is because many applications still try to plot stuff pixel by pixel and so can't scale arbitrarily. It's not easy for most SW to be truly resolution independent and it seems most developers seem to skip handling that sanely on all platforms.
man xrandr (grandr for gnome) (Score:4, Interesting)
--dpi dpi
This also sets the reported physical size values of the screen,
it uses the specified DPI value to compute an appropriate physi
cal size using whatever pixel size will be set.
Or maybe :
--scale xxy
Changes the dimensions of the output picture. Values superior to
1 will lead to a compressed screen (screen dimension bigger than
the dimension of the output mode), and values below 1 leads to a
zoom in on the output. This option is actually a shortcut ver
sion of the --transform option.
I'm sitting here with a 2560x1440 display (Score:2)
and Unity looks great.
Doesn't GNOME already support SVG? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't GNOME already support SVG? (Score:5, Informative)
It's actually working. The situation is messy, but workable. (As usal for Linux)
-- X.org people found out that automatic DPI detection is mostly useless because there too many monitors out there who report incorrect information. X supports a DPI override switch which would be a nice place to manually adjust this but...
-- The GNOME people decided to ignore what X reports and hard coded a 96 DPI definition.
-- On top of their hard coded DPI, GNOME has a "text scaling factor" property (default 1.0). Increasing it causes compliant applications to render fonts and other UI elements in larger formats. The main motivation for this was to improve accessibility for visually impaired people, but it also serves for people with high DPI screens. This value can be changed via the accessibility options or by installing the gnome-tweak-tool (or editing gconf).
Only GTK/Gnome applications will honor this and even then, compliance isn't perfect as some still use bitmaps for icons. But it's good.
So, for people with high DPI screens:
- Force the X DPI setting to a proper value. This will help with some applications (including most Qt/KDE ones, I think).
- Change the GNOME text-scaling-factor to something that matches the value above. Ie, if you set your X DPI to 200, then set your text-scaling-factor to 2.08 (200/96).
- For Firefox or Chromium, you'll need to manually adjust the zoom level.
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mod parent up as 'informative', it is correct in all particulars. I've been running GNOME on high-res displays for years, it can handle it fine.
Any PC laptops announced with similar screens? (Score:2)
I'd really, REALLY like to get my hands on a powerful Linux laptop with such a high resolution screen... if I could afford it I might even settle for the virtual machine solution on the Mac, but a full-up Linux laptop with such a screen would be ideal.
During certain kinds of software development, it isn't uncommon to accumulate a dozen or more terminals and application windows displaying relevant content. Given good eyesight, there simply is no substitute for a high PPI screen when doing such work. Ditto f
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fluxbox with a dozen terminals (Score:5, Funny)
Gnome? Which version? (Score:2)
Fans of Gnome Shell, please don't mod me down without at least first answering the question for me as I genuinely want to know the answer.
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Neither. Both GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 can handle high DPI pretty well, I just think the questioner failed in finding out how to do it.
Xmonad (Score:2)
DPI (Score:3)
Check that X11 has worked out the correct DPI of the display, not all displays pass this information through correctly and i'm not sure if virtual machines do...
You can see the current dpi by using xdpyinfo.
X11 itself is pretty good at resolution independence, but individual apps using bitmapped graphics all over the place are not.
Re:No one cares (Score:5, Insightful)
No one cares about Linux and Retina support because Retina is Apple and no one uses Linux that cares about Retina/Apple.
A hypothesis which is proven false by virtue of the question it is a response to.
Jackass.
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especially because "retina" is just assinine Apple marketing jingo. almost every LCD panel produced is purely off-the-shelf and available to any customer who wants it. in particular, there are lots of devices that have pixel densities as high or higher than the particular models Apple selected from the catalog...
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Care to identify one laptop that is off-the-shelf and runs at 2560-by-1600 on a 13.3" display? Other than a MacBook Pro.
I'll wait.
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Why do you think everything Linux has to be low-end shit? Some folks want higher res. and OP took one of a couple of routes to it. Sorry his choice of hardware struck such a nerve. At what price point do you say money isn't wasted or do you just not like high end hardware?
Macbook Pro Retina $1699, not $3k (Score:5, Interesting)
I think a much fairer statement would be "no one who develops Linux software gives a rats ass about Apple proprietary shit."
Fairer still would be to say "Apple Haters would self-mutilate if it put Apple in a bad light".
immediately run out and spend $3000 to validate my $3000 purchase.
You may not be aware, but Slashdot is just chock full of technical users who can use the web.
When they do so they would find the MacBook Pro Retina to be $1699, not your absurdly inflated figure.
They also, being technical users, would be asking themselves "could not a developer wanting to test resolution independence simply buy a high DPI desktop monitor and test that way also?"
Why yes. Yes they could. Too bad that you, a non-technical Apple Hater Troll, will be unable to even comprehend that question or think of similar cases before you post in the future and beclown yourself yet again.
You are kind of like the court jester who comes in and spills grape juice on your shirt on purpose. Every. Single. Day. Did you not notice the people stopped laughing long ago? And that the looks you get know are all ones of pity and horror?
Re:Macbook Pro Retina $1699, not $3k (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, right, Apple released a 13" model. I forgot about that. Too bad to spec that 13" model up so that it's comparable to a $1000 Windows Ultrabook, you'll be paying $2500.
Bullshit. The 13.3" Asus ZenBook UX31A-DH51 is $1050 on Newegg and has half the RAM, a slower i5 processor as the 13" MacBook Pro.
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Amusing, I'm actually typing this on a macbook 15" retina running windows 8 through boot camp. (The display is awesome.)
And yes, you can adjust the DPI scaling in OSX on the fly if you're using the retina display.
You really couldn't be much more full of shit... I suggest you stick to ad-hominum arguments.
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Only for the 13" model, which by all reports has the Intel HD4000 struggling to keep up
What reports? The integrated GPU in my Core 2 Duo handles my 3520x1200 frame buffer reasonably well on Linux. I find it hard to believe that 5 generations later Intel hasn't improved at all.
Re:No one cares (Score:5, Informative)
Well, Linus Torvalds uses a Macbook Air...
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Well, Linus Torvalds uses a Macbook Air...
With OSX replaced by Linux.
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There were several major projects started about a month after Retina laptops came out. Retina for Firefox. Retina for OpenOffice (Libre Office had support day 1). Retina Ubuntu... So now you are just dead wrong. Everyone in the Linux community knows that Apple hardware is a pretty good guide to features they are going to need to support down the road for Linux. Moreover a huge percentage of Linux developers use Apple hardware.
As for the rest about "wasted money" and "shiny" I'll leave that to whomeve
Re:No one cares (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because apple is the only company that does high-dpi displays.
(Actually, that's unfortunately pretty true right now, but I hope to start seeing better displays out of the hardware makers soon.)
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I'm hoping they get their ass in gear and release their supposed higher-res 15" model soon.
So at this point (Score:2)
Re:No one cares (Score:5, Insightful)
On consumer, desktop equipment, yes. Consumer mobile equipment is starting to see ludicrous DPI even in middle of the road devices, and commercial medical displays have offered very high DPI for some time.
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On consumer, desktop equipment, yes.
The average consumer desktop comes with a 1080p display with a DPI usually in the sub 125 PPI range (17" or higher).
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I think you misuderstood what he said. If you kept reading you would read,"Consumer mobile equipment is starting to see ludicrous DPI even in middle of the road devices".
Mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Samsung S3, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, Kindle Fire HD, and so on all are providing very high DPI displays. It is a real shame that HDTVs have made 1080p displays so cheap that it is now the standard for most desktops.
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Yes, I read that. So what? I only chose to respond to the incorrect part.
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Consumer mobile equipment is starting to see ludicrous DPI even in middle of the road devices
Doesn't do anyone any good when you can't do real work on a phone. I'm still running a 2048x1536 CRT at home, and will be for the forseeable future.
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No but Apple and Apple users like to make a big stink about it.
It's probably less effective on Macs then on a Linux box running KDE apps (apparently).
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Medical monitors are high-dpi displays. But Apple is the only company aiming them at mainstream users.
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The same thing has happened with eink where one Russian company bought the full run of LGs flexible screen and it's going to be a year or so (if ever) before oynx are selling the one they had announced and a couple of years before Kindle o
Re:No one cares (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not just about high dpi displays either. You can have a high resolution on a large screen while still wanting very large fonts and UI elements. It helps you see it better when your eyesight is not very good, if you have partial blindness, etc. So you can help both those with degenerative vision and those with amazing mutant vision at the same time.
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"The ASUS Zenbook Prime is 1920 x 1080 with a 13.3" screen, which is close, if not better, than the Mac books."
It's really not. The 13" MBP display is 2560x1600 pixels.
Stop being an idiot, you're making yourself look bad here, not Apple.
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Asus has recently released some nice products with high DPI displays. The ASUS Zenbook Prime is 1920 x 1080 with a 13.3" screen, which is close, if not better, than the Mac books.
That's only 165 PPI. The 13" Pro is 227 PPI and the 15" is 220 PPI. Unless you use a different version of math than the rest of the world, 165 PPI is not better than either of the other numbers.
Re:No one cares (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey troll, like Apple or not they're addressing a glaring problem by bringing out the retina display. Our screen resolution has stagnated and even regressed due to HDTV and the buzz word compliance of 1080i. I can only hope throwing down the gauntlet as they have will push other hardware makers to bring out their own 4K displays.
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you mean 1080p. Computers haven't had interlaced displays since forever ago.
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ATSC HDTV (all digital broadcast TV in the USA) can by 720i or 1080i (among others). In fact 1080p is not a supported resolution.
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What's your point? Computer monitors do 1080p, not 1080i and you were saying the industry was standardizing on HD buzzword compliance. Blu-Ray goes up to 1080p and works on HD TV's. Why are you bringing ATSC broadcast standards into this?
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That or they're creating the problem by purchasing every high resolution computer display available on the wholesale market for their own devices, making them prohibitively expensive for other manufacturers.
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Re:No one cares (Score:4, Interesting)
What glaring problem? The problem they're addressing is screen DPI, which is basically a non-problem, and not screen size, which is something I'd love to see get larger and is what you really mean when you say "resolution has stagnated."
Right now I'm stuck with a 1920x1200 monitor, and I'm glad to have that because no one makes them any more. If I were to "upgrade," I'd have to replace it with a 1920x1080 monitor. What I'd like to have is an even larger monitor, like the really nice but still way too expensive 2560x1600 monitors. (Still over $1000.)
What Apple did instead was up the pixel density, which is nice, I guess, but not really useful. Those high-DPI displays are great for a cell phone or other devices you hold in your hand, but not really great for a laptop.
Really, I'd rather see a higher push for the larger sized monitors so I get more useable room out of the display rather than see the DPI pushed up. All "retinal" gives you is the same UI, just with four times the pixels. It may look "shiny" but it sure isn't any more useful.
Re:No one cares (Score:5, Informative)
It's simply not true that 'no one makes them any more'.
Dell makes a few very nice 1920 x 1200 monitors. NewEgg lists more than 20 models.
They're not as common as 1080p screens, and they're not as cheap, but 'they still make them'.
And while 2560 x 1600 screens are still over a grand, you can get a 2560 x 1440 pretty cheap. $399 at Microcenter.
You can buy 2560x1440 for cheap (Score:3)
I just picked up a "WQHD" (Widescreen Quad-"HD" for values of HD meaning 1280x720, so a total of 2560x1440) 27" IPS LCD monitor online for $300 US. It's very bare-bones (DVI input only, no webcam or USB hub or anything, etc.) but considering a 1920x1080 monitor at 27" is hard to come by for $200, it's an excellent price for the much less common resolution.
They make them in Korea and ship them out under a handful of brand names. A search on "wqhd monitor" will find you several places you can buy them from. M
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the really nice but still way too expensive 2560x1600 monitors. (Still over $1000.)
If you don't have a business case to justify $1000 for a monitor that you'll probably use for 5+ years, then you don't really need it.
I'm eyeing the Eizo 22" [amazon.com] - about $850 and has a bit higher DPI, along with the high resolution. The 2560x1600 screens are in the 30" range - the DPI isn't very good. That's fine for people with vision loss, but two screens at 1900x1200 are going to be better for most uses.
This kind of screen i
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Hey troll, like Apple or not they're addressing a glaring problem
LOL... how about a non-glaring screen instead?
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Apple is just like Microsoft. They get to decide what the users will get and the users have to accept it. If Apple decides you need a screen with glare then just bow and say thank you.
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I don't know. Screen resolutions have been getting very large. Ie, I've got 1920x1200 at work and a few years ago I would have considered that something only available for several thousand dollars at least. What Apple is really doing is providing higher DPI; high resolution but on very tiny screens. They're sort of solving the problem of people wanting to see more things on a laptop but without having larger laptops.
The drawback is that I think most people really can't make use of that high DPI. So at
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Meh, Apple took the cheap/easy way out. They solved a software problem with Hardware. The effective resolution is the same as it was previously, They just double the amount of pixels used.
...and use the extra pixels to show stuff at higher resolution except for some applications [apple.com].
"Low resolution" is a hardware problem - you want higher-res, you need smaller pixels and more of them, and the only software that would affect that would be the software in the machines used in the design and manufacturing process for the displays.
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Can someone from a graphics background please explain in layman's terms the following w.r.t. HiDPI, resolution independence etc.
In a normal display, say 1280x800 DPI=PPI = The number of dots on the screen at say a pixel depth of 96?
So in a normal laptop there are 1280x800 pixels.
The OP is claiming a standard cheap screen at 1280x800 is using tricks to render (2x2)=4 times the number of dots?
is that 4 pixels per dot or 4 dots per pixel? :)
On a high-end genuine 2560x1600 screen it switches to 1280x800 for co
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KDE is too cluttered and bloaty. I've never used a retina display but since you can use Compiz/Emerald sans any pixmaps this should be moot.
So? Unclutter and un-bloat it. Whats the problem?
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I did this recently. After avoiding KDE because it didn't look nice, I tried it again after the Gnome devs "pulled an Apple" and said that we shouldn't be able to theme or add extensions to our desktop. It takes a bit more setup to make it exactly as you like, ... but you can make it *exactly* as you like. You also only need to do it once. It'd well worth the minimal effort it requires.
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Car analogy, huh?
Bentley... Expensive, Heavy, Thirsty, Status symbol.
I think you're entirely correct.
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you know you're both wrong and trolling, so why did you press the "submit" button at all?
Linux does fine with high density displays. actually, the place it does worse is on extremely low-density displays. I have some 42" 1366x768 displays that take some painful tweaking to setup, since environments like KDE try to be smart about the ruler-size of fonts, not noticing that these screens really do have pixels big enough to throw a rubber chicken through...