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

[slitt at troubleshooters.com (Steve Litt)]

On Wed, 6 Jan 2016 12:53:51 -0500
Robert Krawitz <rlk at alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, 6 Jan 2016 11:56:27 -0500, Rich Pieri wrote:

> > Which brings me back to the point I made about screen size: you
> > have to upscale everything on a UHD screen in order to make
> > everything appear to be the same size as it would appear on a 1080p
> > screen with the same dimensions. Which is to say, the 4 times
> > greater resolution of UHD is wasted if you need to make everything
> > 4 times larger in order to achieve consistency.  
> 
> But (at least for me) it doesn't need to be the same size if the
> resolution is higher.

It's a question of bottleneck analysis. For those with exquisite
(20/10) visual acuity, the bottleneck on legibility is the ability of
the system to faithfully produce the characters at tiny sizes, without
pixellation or other degradation. Such a person can benefit from very
high resolution even on small devices.

For those with blurry visual accuity (20/50), the bottleneck is
their own vision, so that characters must be large for the person to
deduce their outlines. To such a person, resolution is moot: Any
reasonable resolution will be better than their eyesight. What such a
person needs is *big*.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
January 2016 featured book: Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting
http://www.troubleshooters.com/28