In 2024, with GNOME 45, Wayland, and 1.25 fractional scaling, regular DPI displays still look better than HiDPI displays. This is a photo of Discord on two laptops side by side.
The blurry one is the HiDPI display from Framework 13. The sharp one is a regular DPI display from Dell XPS 13. Both laptops.
The difference is even more stark in person.
Even the screenshots from the Framework are blurrier than the screen shots from the Dell.
Text and vector graphics should scale quite well. There are some cases where fractional scaling doesn’t work out, for example on borders that are 1 pixel wide @1x. Do you render them 2 pixels wide @1.5x, or 1 pixel? I have a Windows system for work and 1.5x scaling in Firefox renders buttons uneven, so the borders are thicker on some sides and thinner on others.
Fractional scaling isn’t the best solution, but even with most desktop displays transitioning from 2560x1440 to 3840x2160 we get fractional scaling. Sucks that 5120x2880 isn’t more mainstream for ~27" displays.
I’ve been waiting for so long for a OLED/mini LED 27" 5K display with >=120Hz… Would be an almost instant buy from me… I don’t care if I need a new GPU, I can scale my game to 1440p and it will look just like it does now: fine!
I fear that at these resolutions we will discover that UI frameworks are not really scalable in terms of performance