I made the switch from Windows/Linux to one of the new M1 MBPs and it's been mostly great. But one of the most surprising things has been how poorly MacOS handles high resolutions. Windows has completely nailed it at this point with easy DPI scaling, and even Linux w/ Wayland is easier to reason about. But MacOS has very few options for playing with resolution/DPI, and frankly looks like shit on 4K 27" displays. I had to disable font smoothing via the CLI just so the text wasn't a blurry mess.
Could you explain? We have three different 4K 27" screens around the house and for me the five options between Larger text and More space in Display Preferences are completely fine? I pick the size I want and the fonts are completely crisp? If you want to select resolutions, you can hold the Option key and click the Scaled radio button and you can select concrete resolutions.
May experience with Linux has been the opposite. Integer scaling works well (assuming that the toolkit of an application supports it), but once you use fractional scaling (even on GNOME on Wayland), a lot of CPU cycles are burnt for rendering, and many non-GNOME applications will be rendered at a lower DPI and scaled up and everything is blurry. I had a ThinkPad with a 1080p 14" screen and an external 4k 27" screen. Both were practically unusable. With the native resolution everything is too small, with 2x scaling everything is too big, and with 1.5-1.75 scaling, many applications are blurry. I ended up using the native resolution and scaling up the font size. At least text was not too small or to big, but a lot of widgets were tiny and barely usable.
In Windows the options themselves are fine, but there are too many legacy apps that do not support scaling and just look blurry :(. And with plugging/unplugging of an external screen, Windows was often not able to put windows back in the right places.
HiDPI scaling was one of the long list of issues that made be go back to macOS after using a ThinkPad with Windows and Linux for 7 months a year ago.
I guess the argument here is that those Windows problems could at least be solved. Blurry apps? Just right click on the app and override DPI settings. Apps not in the right place upon plugging/unplugging the cable? There are literally tens of apps that help with that, mostly free.
On my M1 Mac though, I need to pay $50 for eqMac2 so that I get to control the external display's speakers. Then I'll need to pay for Switchresx or Better Dummy just to get the resolution right on my non-4K display. And if money is not an issue, the security of these apps is definitely concerning. It all feels "hacky" to install app after app just to get the standard functionalities on macOS.
The fact that Apple removed HiDPI for non-4K displays just shows how non-free the whole ecosystem is. Definitely one more reason to wait for Asahi Linux on M1 Mac.
But the pages linked from that article are all about low-resolution screens like 24/27” 1080P or 1200P? Not sure how that relates to most 4K screens unless they are extremely large (larger than 27”).
Like I said, all my 4K 27” screens show crispy text on macOS.
I haven't used windows in a long time, but I thought there were still rough edges there, like certain programs (even certain windows menus) not scaling correctly and rendering tiny.
I'm currently using 2x 27 inch 4k displays in scaled mode (the second setting from the left) on an M1 mac and it looks great. Fonts look fine to me.
You're absolutely right about that. I've found anything above 125% causes odd behavior, like some menus refusing to word wrap and instead making me scroll left and right, as well as screwing up some programs like games.
> I had to disable font smoothing via the CLI just so the text wasn't a blurry mess.
This probably means it was trying to do subpixel rendering, but under incorrect assumptions about what the subpixel layout was. Problems of this type have recently become pretty pervasive.
