Re: Debian with HiDPI / 4K displays
On Aug 09 2015, Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro> wrote:
> d) there is some concern that not all displays report DPI accurately and
> so it wasn't considered safe to trust the value from the display and so
> people started using the hard-coded values in GNOME at some point in the
> past - is that still a valid argument today though?
No, the argument (at least from the Gnome people) is that DPI (as
reported by xrandr) is a useless metric to determine the proper font
rendering size. Their main argument is that their is no API to report
different DPIs for different screens, and it doesn't factor in things
like the distance of the user from the screen, or simply a user's
preference to have bigger/smaller fonts.
Therefore, they started ignoring X11 dpi completely and added their own
Gnome DPI (which, as far as I know, still doesn't support different DPI
values for different displays).
There is a truly gigantic bugzilla issue about this, but I don't
have the exact URL anymore.
(At some point I suggested to drop the Gnome DPI and instead use a Gnome
DPI scale factor that's applied on top of the X11 DPI but there was
never a response. Most likely the issue is a lot more complicated, or
the bug has become completely useless to because of its size).
Best,
-Nikolaus
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