Screen sizes. Was Re: Accelerator boards - no future? Bad business?

[Tor Arntsen]

On 25 April 2016 at 23:46, Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Apr 2016, ben wrote:
>> PS: I hate OS's for upgrading the screen resolution to get more crappy
>> dancing toasters.  BRING BACK 640x480.  I can READ the SCREEN.
>
> Amen to that.  I have macular degeneration in my retinae.  It's not really
> having any effect, yet.  However, I'm starting to note that my fonts sizes
> are creeping up.  I *dream* of an LCD that's greater than 21" but uses a
> much lower native resolution.  I'd take 640x480, 800x600, 1024x786, or
> 1280x1024 (at most).
>
> Incidentally, have you seen any new 4k screens?  I got one early on and boy
> what a mistake that was.  I didn't even keep it for a week.  You can jack up
> your terminal fonts to 14 or 18 and it's still tiny and nearly unreadable.
> In applications that you can't adjust easily, it's a nightmare.  You can't
> read *anything*.  Playing some games in 4k was cool, it looked marginally
> better than 1920x1080, but not much.  The only thing that was better or more
> detailed (in my case, folks, in my case) was photo-editing.

I ran into that with a 2560x1440 screen. But it turns out that the
solution is *not* to increase font size. OS'es which can handle those
screens (and 4K as well), including various Linux distros and Windows,
do this by changing the GUI to 'high dpi' (or various versions of that
term). Everything adjusts to the high resolution, including terminal
windows (although not the humble 'xterm'. GTK-based ones, and other of
that kind, do though). So my screen became perfectly readable again.
Crisp, clear, and large.