If we draw UML diagrams the software will be better, oh wait before we draw the diagrams we can make a project plan and present how long each stage will take and how many resources are needed to draw those diagrams. Ok that comes out to about $44M
I tried ubuntu + i3 on a Lenovo x1 carbon. The fonts, the settings, the software, the differences, incompatibilities everyday just killed me. I went back to Mac + Magnet window manager. I could never know if I was actually seeing the actual setting I included/desired or the font was being displayed correctly. It Was a constant study of web searches and esoteric knowledge such as evident in this blog of what to do to get whatever you wanted that just worked on a Mac or even windows.
To provide some counter-anecdata, if you are in the lucky position to have screens that work at exactly 200% (4K at 24", 5K at 27"), then Ubuntu and its derivatives will Just Work out of the box. At least that was my experience around 2017-2019. Fractional scaling factors like 150% are tricky, but macOS does not properly support them either.
The only app that didn't pick up my DPI settings on Linux was Spotify, but all web-ish apps support ctrl +/-...which honestly strikes me as a big usability win over native toolkits.
I actually found my 5K screen more enjoyable under Linux than macOS, because the performance of JetBrains IDEs on Retina Macs seems to flip-flop between okay and abysmal every year.
Mixed-DPI setups are where macOS is truly superior.
macOS supports fractional scaling just fine, by rounding up and then downscaling. Sure it's not pixel-perfect to the display, but at such high ppi it's not really noticeable, and certainly much better than trying to get actual fractional resolutions working.
Apple tried true resolution independence in the early 2000s and it didn't work out. 2x and 3x scaling proved to be a much better solution.
I liked Apple's approach when the iPhone 4 and MacBook Pro 2012 came out. Adding @2x bitmaps was easy enough for developers, and the transition was quick and painless.
Since then, however, Apple's UI has (regrettably) become less about pixel-perfect bitmaps and more about black typography on white roundrects, and almost all Macs run at a scaled resolution by default, which is then typically used to display web-based apps that support fractional scaling.
I really think that Windows' approach has aged much better. Kudos to Microsoft. We could have our cake and eat it too if Apple sold Macs with slightly higher-resolution displays, and also a 5K 27" display because other manufacturers can't be bothered.
macOS does very similar thing that Gnome/Wayland is using; except in Linux land, due to misc reasons[1], it works only for Wayland apps.
Yet, there are cries from the Internets, that it is not pixel perfect and other solution (Windows/Qt/Android-like) should be used.
[1] Mostly that you can't update client side libs like you can in Mac and Windows land and be done; there will be always some legacy X11 client that will connect directly to display server and ignore your modifications. On mac and windows, apps cannot talk directly to display server, the protocol is not public.
Same opinion here. Whereas with Mac you’re setting things in one place across all of your apps, and it accounts for different scaling factors for different displays, this just seems like a huge pain to have to set things on an almost per-app basis.
