By 4k monitor do you mean a high DPI monitor? Not much has changed in regards to resolution support, that should always have been fine, but a lot has changed in regards to high DPI support with Wayland now having "real" (direct) fractional scaling which makes it even better at approaching the problem than macOS which has "fake" (render and scale) fractional scaling. KDE Plasma and QT apps (the default desktop environment for Fedora Asahi) should support this already, I don't remember if Gnome has gotten around to defaulting to the newer protocol yet or if it was still experimental.
On Linux, I plugged in the 4k and everything is tiny tiny tiny. I tried to make it a little bigger, and some stuff grows, other stuff doesn't, and some stuff just broke. Then in the end I was sort of stuck in this weird frankenstein of settings that looked like crap on any monitor. Like I said, this was over 3 years ago and the Linux install was very old at that point (I think it was a Linux Mint based on 18.04 at the latest, possibly even 16.04 still).
Mac has a slider that changes the scaling of everything, smoothly and all at once.
See but that's exactly the thing, on Mac you can just pick a scaling and every scaling option looks flawless across the board.
Integer scaling is silly for me: it's either huge or tiny.
Yes, KDE does it better and with Wayland you can also do fractional scaling. But the original point stands: it sucks on (most) linux and works flawlessly on Mac.
It's not that Gnome can't, it's that it's not recommended. Gnome actually handles e.g. 150% scaling the exact same way as macOS does: render at a higher resolution then downscale. The reason it's not recommended over integer scales is that's inefficient, not that it doesn't work. The same recommendation exists on macOS. The difference in quality of life is macOS is generally better about assuming a given display should be high DPI the first time you use that display (and doesn't even show you the tiny options at all by default in such cases). So long as you select the same scale things should seem identical between Gnome and macOS though.
Windows/Android also use the superior direct render approach. The reason you always heard about Windows having horrible scaling was due to legacy Windows apps not having an understanding of how to use scaling, the actual scaling approach itself is very good (and most all apps still getting updates should be good by now).
> See but that's exactly the thing, on Mac you can just pick a scaling and every scaling option looks flawless across the board.
Not really, if you have a discerning eye.
Any non-integer resolution on macOS is rendered at twice that resolution, and then raster-scaled down and anti-aliased. So, if you have MacBook with a 2560×1400 display and you select any other resolution besides that and 1280×800 (exactly half), the desktop render will be raster scaled.
To be fair, it works better than Wayland's previous behaviour because of the 2× rendering factor, but you can absolutely still see scaling artifacts if you look for them, and I certainly do. Ringing around text in a dark-mode editor is especially obvious.
The only OS that has gotten HiDPI right is Windows.
“Better” still has some asterisks, for example though KDE is by far the best of the major DEs in terms of fractional scaling support under Wayland, it still has some oddities like Aurora window decoration themes not drawing properly with fractional scaling, limiting the user to one of a tiny handful of C++ window decorations (the overwhelming majority are Aurora). GTK apps under KDE can act a bit funny too, with e.g. your cursor drawing at 2x when hovering over a GTK window.
I deal with these things daily using a Thinkpad with a display that requires 1.5x scaling to be usable. Can’t wait for these issues to be solved and for the asterisks to disappear.
> GTK apps under KDE can act a bit funny too, with e.g. your cursor drawing at 2x when hovering over a GTK window.
Yea, GTK4 to my knowledge until now doesn't support fractional scaling, but the new™ ngl and vulkan renderers should be able to do fractional scaling. If it's actually hooked up to do so is another question.
