[jsheard]

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.

[rabf]

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?

[michaelmrose]

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

[jsheard]

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.

[toast0]

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.

[jsheard]

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.