The moment where the Hacker News crowd can't even figure this out anymore ... is the moment I have to stop recommending macs for anyone in my family or friends. There were a few mac sales due to my recommendations, but that has to stop now. Good luck, Apple.
Well this seems more due to the USB-C to rule them all paradigm that will actually deploy in every PC as well very soon.
People complained continually that Apple had gone USB/lightning/Thunderbolt instead of standard USB-C. Now they implement the standard and people complain that the standard is a clusterfuck...
I am sure this will be fixed in a future iteration. In exhange you never have to flip a USB or HDMI cable around three times (turns out the first direction was right after all :) ) to plug it in, because USB-C can be plugged in either way. Worldwide, this literally saves multiple seconds every year. Have a little faith :)
I'm sure it will. Until then I'll hold on zo my wallet as tightly as I can. Or try out Thinkpads or XPSses with some flavour of Linux but I don't have high hopes for their touchpads and screens / HiDPI software support. You know - the things I actually touch and see the whole time using the damn thing.
Sigh...
I've been watching old SJ presentations (1990-2003) lately and I long back to the time where general purpose personal computers, fully capable of tapping into the machine and creating with it whatever you want, was at the forefront of industry efforts. Updates twice a year. Moore's law in full force. Exiting times those were.
> Or try out Thinkpads or XPSses with some flavour of Linux but I don't have high hopes for their touchpads and screens / HiDPI software support.
Touchpads generally work perfectly out of the box, with any Linux distribution that uses libinput instead of one of the older drivers. HiDPI screens also tend to work perfectly out of the box, though you may wish to tweak them to your tastes. (For instance, I don't want to treat a 1440p screen as 2x 720p, I want to treat it as 1440p with only slightly enlarged fonts.)
I'm curious why Apple's approach of drawing things at 2x or 3x and then downscaling the whole screen hasn't caught on in the Linux world. It seems like scaling the result (a single buffer) should be extremely easy? Laptops and screens targeted at Windows 10 mostly have crappy resolutions for both running at 2x or 1x.
Linux desktop environments do use the 2x/3x scale approach for high-DPI by default. If GNOME detects a high-DPI display, it'll render everything scaled larger by an integer factor.
1440p represents the one case that integer scaling doesn't quite handle right, because you don't typically want it to scale 2x (showing the same amount of information as a 720p screen), you want it to scale roughly 1.33x (showing the same amount of information as a 1080p screen). So, on a 1440p screen, I disable the automatic high-DPI scaling (which does make the display readable, it just shows less information than I'd like), and use other mechanisms to scale by 1.3x.
Linux desktops do the hard part out of the box: scaling everything by an integer factor. But then there is no built-in way to downscale the result to a usable size, which should be relatively easy?
For example, if you need more space on a 5K iMac than the default 1440p@2x, you can have macOS render everything at 1800p@2x off-screen, then downscale it to fill the screen.
I don't think that would work well with Linux expectations for rendering, such as crisp edges for fonts; if you like Apple-style rendering of fonts and other UI elements, it may work better.
I'd rather see everything rendered for the display resolution I have, and just scaled at a non-integer factor.
