[andrewmcwatters]

I agree, all the modern technical additions over the years to operating systems have entirely been 2 steps forward, 3 steps back.

It's always, "Oh, well, you can no longer run two or three monitors any more, but your primary display is higher resolution now!" Except DPI adjustments make it irrelevant and now my (i)GPU has a higher minimum load.

Or, "Oh, well, we only give you 2 ports now, but they're all <port>!" Great, but those larger bandwidth ports don't offset the fact that I can't plug in as much any more, and USB hubs are not a solution, they're a hack, wildly variable in operation, and some devices are not compatible with them.

[hedora]

Under Linux, you can still use the -dpi setting in xrandr (or in your x.conf). It sets the font bigger without blurring all the icons.

I prefer it over the replacement approach that modern desktop environments (and wayland) use. I've been exclusively using high-DPI displays for much longer than Mac OS or Windows have supported them, and the old approach was much better.

There's some argument that you need to blur everything badly (instead of setting a session-wide DPI) if the user is simultaneously using two displays with wildly different DPI's. That user is going to have a bad experience no matter what, so I've never understood that argument.