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The new and upgraded Framework Laptop

(community.frame.work)
1680 points etbusch | 1 comments | 19 May 22 12:19 UTC | HN request time: 0.754s | source
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petilon ◴[19 May 22 14:57 UTC] No.31435505[source]▶
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.

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pkulak ◴[19 May 22 15:09 UTC] No.31435704[source]▶
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.
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1. tadfisher ◴[19 May 22 17:30 UTC] No.31437618[source]▶
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.