The new and upgraded Framework Laptop

Still no retina display option. Steve Jobs made the right call over a decade ago... the only scaling that looks good after 100% is 200%. Any in-between scaling will have display artifacts.

This laptop has 150% scaling. What sort of display artifacts can you expect because of this? Go to a web page with a grid, with 1-pixel horizontal grid lines. Even though all lines are set to 1-pixel, some lines will appear thicker than others.

I blame Microsoft for this mess. Windows supports in-between resolutions (with display artifacts), and hardware manufacturers therefore manufacture in-between resolutions. Framework laptop is limited to what the display manufacturers put out.

besides the fact that "retina display" is a marketing term invented by Apple, I don't really see what the big deal is. I have pretty good vision and I don't notice individual pixels on my 1080p screen. More pixels means more load on the GPU.

It also doesn't have a touchbar and has an excessive amount of ports!

Just like the new MBPs!

It is different from person to person. I notice pixels on 13-inch 1080p screens. I can't imagine using a display that is not 200% scaling. Even 300% scaling has display artifacts.

It's possible for an OS to support fractional scaling properly; just tell applications to render their windows 1.5 times larger, map the inputs properly, and turn off font anti-aliasing. The problem is that it requires every app to be updated, which hasn't happened everywhere yet. Android and iOS, for example, do it perfectly. So does ChromeOS.

1080p !?! Wow I didn’t know that there are professionals out there using such a shitty resolution. You are definitely not the target audience for high quality hardware then I guess.

Same. I have an old school 2013 MBA and a fresh MBP for work and I don’t really notice the difference.

Of course I can _see_ the difference. The MBP looks really nice. But when I sit down to code or watch a movie on the MBA, I have pretty much the same experience as I do on my work machine.

> I have pretty good vision and I don't notice individual pixels on my 1080p screen.

1080p doesn't mean much if you leave out the screen's pixel density. There's a world of difference between a smartphone with a 5' 1080p screen and a 24' monitor with a 1080p screen.

Maybe you can accept that no project is perfect, specially young projects and that the exceptional effort they put to have the laptop modular are a big benefits for the environment and having less resource consumption, which is maybe, maybe, more important than a retina display?

That's pointless gatekeeping. Having the most expensive pencil doesn't make you draw better. For most professionals in most fields, more than 1080p is a waste of energy.

For some people, High-DPI displays are the type of upgrade that you don't notice until you've been using it for a while and have to switch back to the old technology.

I was also fine with lower resolutions for years because that was the only option. After using high-DPI displays for a couple years, I can't stand working on old low-DPI monitors for long periods of time. It's similar to how we were all happy with our mechanical HDD computers for years, but after using an SSD-based machine for a few months you can never go back to slow HDD-based machines.

It's not about seeing individual pixels. It's about the text clarity and reduced fatigue after reading text all day.

>I have pretty good vision and I don't notice individual pixels on my 1080p screen.

For a 24" 1080p monitor in typical desktop configuration I get screen-door-effect. I can clearly see the black grid lines between pixels.

Also, if you can see aliasing/stair-stepping on this test then your eyes could benefit from higher resolution:

https://www.testufo.com/aliasing-visibility#foreground=fffff...

> (...) just tell applications to render their windows 1.5 times larger, map the inputs properly, and turn off font anti-aliasing.

Doesn't disabling anti-aliasing make things look worse? Unintentional and random jagged lines never look right.

That's weird to nitpick. That's a software issue not a display issue.

Wait until you see what hardware the OpenBSD developers use... are you going to claim that they aren't professionals?

https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20120425065148

https://www.undeadly.org/features/2012/r2k12/P1020598.JPG

Sadly, Linux doesn't support fractional scaling properly. This is a show stopper for me.

While I prefer my personal machines to have 1440p or 4k resolutions, I'm perfectly happy with my work PC's 1080p screen for development and email. I'm hardly watching videos or gaming on that machine, and I don't find that fonts are noticeably sharper at the size that I prefer them on a 15" laptop display.

I hear some people call themselves professionals and don't even use gold-plated HDMI cables.

I have a 4k 14" ThinkPad X1 Carbon and I happily use it at 100% scaling.

Framework laptop actual has fewer ports than MBPs (although they're configurable which is neat, with the caveat that some like expansion ports HDMI are a big drain on battery life, even when inactive)

A gentle reminder that every retina MacBook has been shipping with fractional scaling as default for years now (and it's not even 1.5). Sure, you can put it back into 2x if you want to. But you can do the same on a Framework, and then you get... wait for it... almost the same vertical resolution as a 2x 13" MB Pro (93% to be exact). If you absolutely need more space and a 2x scaling, there is a large amount of 4K 13"/14" laptops that are more than happy to fill that niche. Free market is your friend :)

So the argument that Windows is somehow responsible for the death of perfect 2x scaling is a bit exaggerated. People just want more space and anti-aliasing is mostly good enough so that no one cares.

Using an external monitor with OS X, you're often stuck with those in-between sizes if you don't either have hawkeyes or enjoy seeing super-crisp 1080p resolution taking up half of your desk, which is a waste of space.

I'm mostly not going to be looking at a 1 pixel wide line at 4k on a 27" monitor. At 32" it might be debatable. Above that you're stacking them oddly (top+bottom, one vertical, or both), or you're down to one monitor and the real estate issue becomes a more pressing issue.

I'm at 'stacking weirdly' and my old main monitor (a "4k" monitor that is actually 3840x2160) is vertical, and angled on the corner of my desk. OS X defaults it to 1080p, which is too big a font for how close I sit to it. Full resolution is way too tiny. So I use 1440 (1.5).

The smallest graphics I use are in grafana, and those happen to be on my vertical monitor. I don't see any weird moire patterns when I scroll them, so if there's an issue with line width, it's well covered by things like not using #00 or #ff for all RGB color channels, which tend to show artifacts more overtly.

But then again, it's not just the hardware it's also the software, and Linux has struggled to keep up with Windows and OS X on some issues related to graphics. The saga of good fonts in X took an unseemly amount of time to sort out.

I use a bitmap font such as Unifont If I want the text to look sharper on a 1080p screen. it is useful for programming, not so much documents.

As for hard drives vs SSDs, I can hardly notice the difference in read/write speeds day-to-day. I merely use an SSD because it is more durable in the situation that I drop my laptop.

I am not a professional, I am just a student.

Edit: If I was an artist or something I might care about resolution or color accuracy.

I run one monitor at 1.5:1, but it also offers me 1.2766:1, (2160->1692) which is a truly bizarre configuration. It's right at the edge of what I can read comfortably. I don't think it looks particularly fuzzy, I mostly don't use it because I don't like the idea of using such a funky resolution. It feels like it will be problematic, in ways 1.5 won't.

And distance to it

No it's not 150% scaling. You can run native resolution just fine. With Linux it's actually better than higher resolutions, as the dot pitch is similar to a 27" 4k external monitor, so you can scale natively on both and have windows look approximately the same size. My other laptop is 4k, and it's a nightmare getting scaling to work because it has such a higher DPI than my external monitor. If Linux had better scaling support for HiDPI I'd prefer a 4k laptop but it doesn't, so native resolution is the way to go.

anti-aliasing matters a lot less when you have a high resolution display.

That's a good point. But distance also plays a factor. Perhaps we should be measuring in pixels per degree at the viewing distance.

The environmental benefit of a laptop with modular components is debatable at best and negligible at worst. At the scale of the Framework laptop's production it's meaningless.

As for the display, for a laptop supposedly intended to last years, every human interface component should be the best available option. The ergonomics are important for a long lived device. It shouldn't become problematic just because the owner aged. Otherwise the laptop ends up the same as any other where the owner tosses it after it becomes uncomfortable to use. All the benefits of modularity are lost if it ends up in a landfill.

> anti-aliasing matters a lot less when you have a high resolution display.

The original claim is that turning off anti-aliasing would make things look better, and not that it looks bad but not that bad.

Even in high res displays, isn't it true that anti-aliasing makes things look better?

> every retina MacBook has been shipping with fractional scaling as default for years now

I have a MacBook and I don't see the kind of display artifacts that I mentioned (grid lines set to same pixel width appearing to have different widths) on a MacBook. Why is that? I have also tried the same test on nearly every Windows laptop at BestBuy, and every Windows laptop that does not have scaling set to either 100% or 200% has this artifact. Even 300% scaling has this artifact. What is Apple's magic that Microsoft has not been able to replicate?

could I suggest trying to figure this out yourself? it sounds like you have the interest and incentive - i'm sure other people would love to know. a blog post about why fractional scaling artifacts exist on Windows but not MacOS would probably be popular (i'd definitely be interested in reading it at least).

Even Android maps "1dp" to a non-integer number of pixels on most displays.

It looks "perfect" because of a combination of anti-aliasing and high density. But zoom in on a repeating pattern of 1dp lines, and you will see that some are aliased and some are not if your display's density is not an integer multiple of 160dpi (mdpi).

But Android can do this everywhere because everything draws to a Skia canvas under the hood (well, HWComposer/SurfaceFlinger, but basically Skia). Desktop operating systems don't have the same luxury. MacOS and Gnome render at 2x and downscale the entire frame, which produces decent results on high-density displays but look blurry otherwise. I have no idea what Windows does but it sounds like it's a mess.

I use a setup with multiple screens, some of them Retina, some of them not (the lack of high resolution external displays is a pity...).

The difference in resolution is immediately obvious, but once I start working I forget that the displays have a different resolution.

Things like aspect ratio are much more important, and I think that 3:2 is the best aspect ratio for work. 16:9 and even 16:10 has always felt a bit cramped in the vertical, 3:2 feels perfect.

When I use a machine with a spinning rust drive, my brain keeps interrupting me: "Why is this computer clicking?"

Yeah, Steve Jobs mistake was assuming that 3rd party manufacturers would offer high res displays. 10 years later, and the only high res display on the market that's suitable as a 2x display is Apple's own 5k studio display, which comes with a super high price and a crappy webcam...

If you want something that uses less space on the desk, there used to be some 24" 4k displays which were acceptable, even though the DPI is slightly too low on them for 2x.

So while the 2x scaling worked out great for laptops and iMacs, there's unfortunately only very limited options for external displays...

Fractional scaling works pretty seamlessly for me using Pop OS on a Framework.

Is it possible GP was talking about sub-pixel font anti-aliasing, which would look wrong when scaled?

Anti-aliasing at the wrong resolution looks worse than not anti-aliasing at all. As such, if you tell your applications to render things larger than 1x scaling, anti-aliasing starts to hurt more than it helps.

I've been on an LG Ultrafine 5k for a year and I consider anything less to be borderline unusable.

> I have pretty good vision

My vision is terrible. Maybe the relationship works the other way around?

Very wild guess: Display PostScript. Or, I suppose, more accurately, its descendant Quartz 2D.

Yes and no. Speaking generally about anti-aliasing, and the method it's done varies a lot in it's trade offs.

Generally anti-aliasing is a trade off between pixelation, blurriness, and performance. The better the anti-aliasing and the higher the pixel count the slower the performance - this can be an issue and some GUI applications like some IDE's at high DPI's. Faster antialiasing methods will look worse.

In an ideal world a high enough pixel density would mean the apparent pixelation is so low that anti-aliasing isn't necessary. Generally anti-aliasing means more blurry - although the amount of blur might not be an issue for you, it depends. The higher the DPI the less pixels that need to be "guessed" which gives you better precision, which is especially useful for vector graphics like text that have theoretically infinite precision.

It really depends on how you define "better". Generally for text specifically I think most people prefer sharpness. This, combined with the much higher DPI display's we have nowadays I think we're at the point where for many people including myself, text looks better without antialiasing. Personally I think it's easier to read.

tl;dr - it depends on how you define "better". At very high DPI's I think we're at a point where many people prefer the sharpness provided by the lack of AA compared to the artifacts that are now relatively tiny thanks to the high DPI. Also in some applications like Intellij I also have had performance issues with AA at high DPI's.

These images are from 2012... That was 10 years ago. lol

That's actually what the term "retina" means (in Apple marketing lingo). It's the required pixel density, at different viewing distances, where you no longer see the pixels. Retina PPI for Macbooks is different compared to iPhones.

Finish your studies and then you will get the chance to use better hardware :)

Color accuracy is super important to me whenever I need to design something on the frontend side of things. High resolution is important too because I'm working with my screens. That means that I stare many hours per day in the display. Life is too short for shitty hardware and most professionals in our industry or their companies can definitely afford it.

Why use HDMI when there is USB-C or Thunderbolt? As far as I know 4k@60hz is max on HDMI. You are optimising the wrong thing here.

You find the screen real estate sufficient? I hate developing on a small screen (especially for the web).

Good tooling improves the artists workflow and results in most cases.

Yeah, this is my biggest gripe about System76 right now. They _used_ to have HiDPI options, but they all seem to have disappeared. :(

Sure, but the threshold between "Retina" vs Non-"Retina" is somewhat arbitrarily decided by Apple, and it's also a registered trademark that only Apple owns.

It's like arguing whether or not macbooks are "ultrabooks". Choosing to discuss using these terms is ultimately just allowing these companies to arbitrarily control discussions. I think we should try to resist corporate capture of language when possible.

Consider the context of the parent comment. If I can barely notice individual pixels on my 1080p monitor with good vision at a normal viewing distance, then surely the difference between a 4K screen and a 2K screen can't be that noticeable, even to a professional artist (who probably has more ideal viewing conditions, a more trained eye, and lower viewing distance).

Looking at apple's website, their MacBook Air (which I assume is their main model?) has a "retina" resolution of 2560x1600 with a 13.3' display, whereas the framework has a resolution of 2256x1504 with a 13.5' display. So they are about the same, except that one is marketed as "Retina" and one is not.

I definitely see it on macOS. Set your display scaling to a fractional amount, then drag a window around slowly. You should see the border lines subtly get fuzzier/sharper/change width.

The HDMI drain surprised me, so I looked up more information, and you seem to be correct:

https://www.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/tekihq/expansion...

https://community.frame.work/t/battery-life/861/24

So you have to set the scaling to a non-default amount, to get that to happen. Of course I would expect display artifacts in that case, because you're forcing it to happen.

> A gentle reminder that every retina MacBook has been shipping with fractional scaling as default for years now (and it's not even 1.5).

You're saying MacOS deliberately uses fractional scaling by default on the 14 inch and 16 inch MBP models, the iMac, Studio Display, and the Pro Display XDR, even though all of them have a PPI that's deliberately meant for integer scaling? If that's true (which I really doubt), it would be extremely counterproductive, to say the least.

The M1 Air and the 13 inch MBP are the only Macs that don't have a suitable PPI for integer scaling.

> Looking at apple's website, their MacBook Air (which I assume is their main model?) has a "retina" resolution of 2560x1600 with a 13.3' display, whereas the framework has a resolution of 2256x1504 with a 13.5' display. So they are about the same, except that one is marketed as "Retina" and one is not.

From your claim, the MacBook Air has simultaneously a smaller display and a significanly higher pixel count: over 20% more pixels than Framework's display in a smaller area.

You might try to argue that the difference is not meaningful or important to you personaly, but they are far from "being the same".

> I have a MacBook and I don't see the kind of display artifacts that I mentioned (grid lines set to same pixel width appearing to have different widths) on a MacBook. Why is that?

You just claimed that this is only possible with 200% scaling. Was that wrong?

The default scaling is fractional on recent MacBooks.

That is odd, I wonder if its polling for connection?