[vladev]

I can't wait to see all the broken applications/unreadable small fonts on my Linux.

I've been excited for a high density display since Apple announced the retina display, but I have a gut feeling that it will take a lot of time for the Linux desktop to support it properly, if ever.

[surrealize]

Linux has always handled font scaling better than windows in my experience. Windows has a tradition/culture/tendency toward building user interfaces by positioning UI elements in absolute pixel coordinates. But linux UI toolkits put much more of an emphasis on automatic/scalable layout.

[quanticle]

Font scaling works just fine on Linux. The problem is icons. Many Linux programs don't have icons for high resolution displays, so while menus and toolbars look fine, icons are unclickably small.

[dman]

Both dwm and xfce have worked just fine on my chromebook pixel. This is on debian 7. The only two applications that have given me issues are ones that do their own custom rendering - Chromium and Sublime text. Both of them have some UI text that cannot be resized and does not appear to respect system dpi settings.

[seabee]

It seems ironic that Chromium should give you issues on a Chromebook. Does (non-free) Chrome work?

[dman]

On ChromeOS chrome works just fine. On debian webpages are rendered perfectly because I can change font settings for those, but the tab titles are drawn with text that is too small. There is no setting exposed currently from what I can tell to control the font of the tab titles.

[leejoramo]

Have you tried Sublime Text 3 beta? I know that it is suppose to support support Retina under Mac OS X.

[nobodyshere]

He's talking about linux machine. Sublime Text 2 seems to support retina displays just fine with mac os.

[bashtoni]

I'm typing this in Debain Linux on a Chromebook Pixel, which has a 239 dpi display, significantly higher than this Asus monitor.

Everything works very nicely once I've tweaked a few settings, specifically adding zoom in Chrome and setting appropriate font scaling in Gnome 3.

[bsimpson]

Here's my Pixel running Sublime on Openbox:

https://github.com/appsforartists/pixel_webdev

It's almost perfect. There's some descender clipping on the tab label and the subheadings in the Command Palette are tiny.

Most apps I've tried work well using the DPI flag in xserverrc. Ones that use custom ui, like HipChat, are unusable though. Linux really needs a better UI toolkit story.

[dman]

The better UI toolkit is called Qt.

[mike_esspe]

My screen is 166dpi (1920x1080, 13"), I run Ubuntu and have minor problem only with Intellij. They use their own font scaling, and it interferes with button placement on some windows.

[CJefferson]

Could you describe how to adjust the dpi? I would like to try changing it on my current laptop, to get a feel for if my apps will work in future.

I realise I should be able to read the docs, but I have found lots of different suggestions on how to do it, while you have successfully!

[sp332]

There are a few ways to change the "text scaling factor" http://askubuntu.com/questions/60044/how-do-i-change-the-fon... but that doesn't change the real DPI that X uses. If your hardware supports XRANDR, it should automatically configure your device. If it gets a wrong value or you just want to override it: http://wiki.debian.org/XStrikeForce/HowToRandR12#III.3._Chan...

[mike_esspe]

Unity tweak tool -> Fonts -> text scaling factor.

And for chromium I set default zoom to 125% in browser settings.

[bsimpson]

I'm using the dpi flag in X. Not sure if it would do the right thing on multiple monitors, but it works great on my Pixel:

https://github.com/appsforartists/pixel_webdev/blob/master/r...

[PlaneSploit]

What kind of display is that?

[mike_esspe]

IPS

https://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/ASUS_ZENBOOK_UX32V...

[GilbertErik]

Are you happy with it? I've had my eye on Zenbooks for a while. I was about to pull the trigger on one, but have decided to either wait for Haswell, or consider getting a (silly) taichi 31 when they come out.

[unmei]

I have one, I love it. Running Linux Mint 15 with Cinnamon. One thing to watch for is that some kernel versions don't work well with the function keys or bumblebee (for optimus support). I'm running 3.9.4 now and it works quite well.

edit Also, I should add that I did spend the extra money to put a Samsung 840 SSD and an extra 8gb stick of ram in here

[kelvie]

I'll vouch for the awesomeness of this exact laptop as well. I run linux in a VM inside it, though.

It's small, the resolution/screen is great, and has everything I need. I also upgraded the RAM and put in an SSD.

[mike_esspe]

Yes. The screen is the best ever notebook screen i had.

After upgrading to 10gb RAM and SSD, it's a really good computer for developer.

[Elv13]

Most Linux DE work just fine with higher DPI settings. KDE apps look as awesome as OSX apps.

[legulere]

You only have to wait for the next wayland/weston version.

The gnome team made a proposal for supporting HiDPI displays similiarly to how it's handled in OS X: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rvtiZb_Sm9C9718IoYQgnpzk...

It's already merged into wayland and weston: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-May...

Hopefully wayland support for gnome 3.10 will be ready, so this can also be supported in Gnome.

[rbanffy]

I'd love if the high-level APIs dealt with physical dimensions rather than pixel counts, scaled or not...

How hard would it be to just ignore the physical properties of the display?

[oofabz]

Arbitrary scaling makes images blurry, even vector graphics. It's a difficult problem to solve because computer graphics are highly aliased - they have many details only one pixel wide.

We have solved this problem with fonts, which have hinting and subpixel antialiasing. But we don't have software to do this for graphics. There is no image format with hinting, and no rendering library to do subpixel antialiasing. Hinting is difficult to do well, fonts are hinted by hand. It is a very time-consuming process and most graphic artists will not be good at it.

If your screen is sufficiently high-resolution, say 300+ dpi, you can get away without these tricks. But if you have a 140 dpi screen, and you want to scale everything 150%, it's necessary or everything will look blurry.

If you only allow pixel doubling, none of this is a problem. You can scale any graphic by 2x without ruining fine detail like thin lines.

[xixora1]

It should be pretty well supported.

140ppi isn't a massive leap over current displays that are common in laptops. 11.6" at 1366x768 is similar... density wise.

[jlgreco]

Going to add to what others are saying, this has not been a problem for me with my chromebook pixel. I set my default scaling in chromium to 125%, and have urxvt rendering a nice freetype font that I adjust the size to on the fly depending on the task (I have opted to let Xft believe that the display is 96ppi. I tried both ways and prefer it that way.)

[anonymous]

Hopefully compositors will be able to auto-scale windows in the future. Either by some automagic divination that the program is stuck in the '80s, or with a simple rightclick->holy fuck this shit makes me squint fix it pls.

[krenoten]

You're talking about Linux, not a BSD. There are many desktop users who are capable of developing support, and I'd be surprised if nobody is already working on similar things for retina.

[papsosouid]

>You're talking about Linux, not a BSD.

No, he is talking about desktop environments and windowing systems that run on both, and have very little to do with either. What was your remark supposed to be implying?