Linux desktop and high resolution laptops

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 4:47 PM, Peter Laursen <jazcyk at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am in the process of buying a laptop for travel. it should be 13"-14".
> relatively small and lightweight - and still with *power*.
>
> I came across:
> https://www.mm-vision.dk/vision-b4385-baerbar-med-ips-panel. They have the
> option to purchase with no OS installed (hooray!) and you can choose between
> different CPUs, RAM configs and disk systems. It is also not very expensive
> specs taken into consideration, really.
>
> But monitor is 3200x1800 pixels on a 13" monitor. And that is the problem.
> This machine is designed for Win8, where the 'tiled interface' is DPI-aware
> and will scale automatically.  I plan to install a dual-boot of Win7 and
> Linux (SuSE or Fedora), and they will both be completely hopeless to use on
> this system as everything (icons, controls) will be extremely small in
> almost every interface and application.

You said in a different email that you use XFCE.  That might be your
problem.  I have two laptops with high resolution monitors and GNOME 3
scales things very well.  F21 even more than F20, which was already
quite usable.

> I dont think Linux Desktop people takes this seriously enough (or they do
> not communicate it).  It will IMO take ~12 months and most laptops sold will

HiDPI support has been touted as a feature in Fedora for the past two
releases.  For F21 it's explicitly listed as one for Workstation:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F21_release_announcement#Support_for_high_resolution_displays_.28HiDPI.29

> Are there any efforts anywhere in the Linux world considering support for
> high monitor resolutions (auto-scaling based on DPI) like Mac/Retina and
> Win8 has? What Linux desktops/window managers have it in progress?  Does
> anybody know?

GNOME and I believe KDE both are working on this continually.  Both
are already very usable.  I have no idea what XFCE is doing, nor any
of the other desktop environments.

> What say? Was it too provocative?

Maybe just misinformed.  Try GNOME or KDE?

josh