[Discuss] 4K (or 5K) resolution for Linux desktop

[Rich Braun]

Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> noted:
> For those with exquisite
> (20/10) visual acuity, the bottleneck on legibility is the ability of
> the system to faithfully produce the characters ...
> Such a person can benefit from very
> high resolution even on small devices.
>
> For those with blurry visual accuity (20/50), ... such a
> person needs is *big*.

And another factor in this is aging of the eye's lens. At 43, my eyes started
to lose their ability to refocus near vs. far, and it wasn't really gradual:
there were two or three rather abrupt events and at this point the lenses are
single-focus. Medicine has not advanced to give us bionic eyes with autofocus
zoom lenses, so we have to fiddle around with eyewear and the
constantly-changing display technology of our times.

My point in launching this discussion is that somehow the entire world of
Linux technology missed the boat and gave Apple/Samsung a huge lead that's now
showing up in lower prices for Apple desktops and Samsung mobile devices
(admittedly based on a form of Linux--but not in any useful way for users of
big monitors because Samsung makes no general-purpose desktop machine that I
know of).

What I'm hoping for is some vendor to sit down with NVIDIA or one of its
rivals and say look, it's time for a commodity-priced Linux 4K+ graphics
solution that just plain works, without all the agony that any of us who were
around in the '90s can recall when the earliest gaming-level display adapters
came out (with proprietary drivers tied to Microsoft, for the most part).

My fixed-focus eyes, without glasses, work at about a 12" to 14" distance.  If
I want any decent amount of screen real estate, I have to sit farther back
than that and use "computer glasses" to take in the whole view.  My current
solution of 2 or 3 24" monitors, with 1920x1080 resolution (rotated portrait
mode) is getting *really* old and not comfortable on the eyes. I want the
future sooner rather than later. Hence my desire to just go to a turnkey
system integrator and offer the challenge: give me such a system with all the
X11 issues properly resolved and I'll pay an Apple-sized pricetag for it.

But for now I think I'm likely to go the Apple route for 2 or 3 years until
Linux catches up. Unfortunately their largest screen size is just 27" so I
will be leaning into the monitor at that 12" distance.

-rich