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I have a nice laptop, with a 3k display. I plug it to a normal screen, with a 1080p display. What happens? Well, it works but it looks like ass. Wanna fix it? Sure, just google around for 2 hours until you find a complicated xrandr command that you have to run every time on startup (but the OS will break every time you unplug the screen). Also, high DPI support is still garbage, which means that half the apps will have their text looking too small anyway.

So no, I don't consider it an "edge case" if everyone in the office with a Linux laptop has the same problem

1 comments

It still is an edge case when the case is rare and people with high dpi Linux laptops (or monitors in general) combining them with regular dpi monitors is rare. Hell, high dpi monitors by themselves are still rare.

Pretty much any MacBook connected to an external monitor falls in this "edge case". Or any modern MacBook-class laptop. They might not be the majority, but they are still a group of people counted in millions.

It's only an edge case on Linux because anyone trying to use such a laptop on Linux is met with pretty much unacceptable breakage and has to move away to Windows or macOS.

It's as rare as high dpi laptops, which are less and less rare nowadays. If you have a laptop, you're gonna plug it to an external screen at some point, and regular dpi screens are very not rare. This shortcoming is indefensible and should've been fixed years ago

The intersection of people that care about high dpi laptop screens, but not about high dpi external screens is very, very small. Also, if you are in that group, why wouldn't you just turn down the resolution on the laptop or even turn it off (since you connected a low dpi external monitor, you don't seem to care about the additional sharpness of high dpi, right?)?

High dpi is important as is low dpi (for a while still at least), mixed dpi is an edge case even if you disagree.