You lost me right here on line 1.

If there are apps on MacOS that can't handle high dpi mode, I haven't run into them as a developer (or doing photo editing, video editing, plus whatever other hobbies I do). Also, I don't have any trouble with plugging my highDPI MacBook into a crappy 1080p display at work.

> 3. Configuring my preferred linux environment to work with 4k is either impossible or just super time consuming.

Things like this are exactly why I left Linux for MacOS. I absolutely get why you might want to stick with Linux, but this is a Linux + HighDPI issue (maybe a Windows + highDPI issue also), not a general case.

> I genuinely think 4k provides no real benefit to me as a developer unless the screen is 27" or higher, because increased pixel density just isn't required.

You could say the same for any arbitrary DPI; 96dpi isn't "Required", we got by fine with 72dpi. It's all about ergonomics as far as I'm concerned.

I'm on Windows and can confirm 1. is an issue. Windows lets users scale UIs to be readable at high DPI on small screens. Doesn't work on all UIs (e.g. QGIS). So maybe not all OS's, but two important ones.

> You could say the same for any arbitrary DPI; 96dpi isn't "Required", we got by fine with 72dpi. It's all about ergonomics as far as I'm concerned.

I think the point the parent is making is that human vision has limited resolution. I.e. for a given screen size & distance from the screen, you cannot notice any difference in DPI past a point. The parent is suggesting that 1080p & 27" with a typical viewing distance is already higher resolution than the eye can resolve. Looking at my 1080p 27" screen from a metre away with 20/20 vision I am inclined to agree!

Are you sure you have 20/20 vision? I can absolutely resolve individual pixels with zero effort whatsoever on 1080p 27-inch displays.

Back when I had a 27-inch 1080p display at work, my MacBook's 13-inch Retina Display effectively became my main monitor. The 27-inch monitor was relegated to displaying documentation and secondary content, because I found its low resolution totally eye straining

Edit: I might have found it so eye straining because MacOS does not support sub pixel rendering. That means a lot of people will need a 4K or Retina monitor to have a comfortable viewing experience on the Mac.

You can still turn it on although it requires the command line.

That combined with the fairly massive software complexity of subpixel rendering is probably why mac dropped it.

If you can't see the difference between 4k and 1080p on a 24" monitor, then you probably need reading glasses. On a 27" monitor it's even worse. It's not so much that you can "see" the pixels, sub pixel rendering and anti-aliasing go a long way to making the actual blocky pixels go away, the difference is crisp letters versus blurry ones.

Haven't seen any scaling issues on Windows in years. Last time was Inkscape but they fixed that.

I know my company's ones do.

I've now reverted to RDP-ing from my old laptop, and using the newer one for video calls, scrum boards, Spotify and other stuff that doesn't require a VPN connection or access to my dev machine. It mostly works OK in that configuration.

I've seen other weird things happen when using other Terminal Services clients, though.

Low DPI monitors are pretty much unusable since MacOS dropped subpixel rendering - with fonts being a blurry mess. You can only really use MacOS with high DPI monitors now for all day working. It’s a huge problem for everyone I know who wants to plug their MacBook into a normal DPI display. Not that the subpixel/hinting was ever that good - Linux has always had much better font rendering in my opinion across a wider range of displays.

Nonsense, fonts look fine on non-Retina monitors; they were fine on my old 24" 1920x1200 monitor and are fine on my new 27" 2560x1440 one. Can I see a difference if I drag window from the external monitor to the built-in Retina display? Yes, but text is not blurry at all on the external monitor.

If it matters, "Use font smoothing when available" is checked in System Preferences (which only appears to have an effect on the Retina display, not the monitor).

As an aside, I wonder whether the article's explanation of how font hinting works -- I confess for all these years I didn't know the point of "hinting" was to make sure that fonts lined up with a rasterized grid! -- explains why I always found fonts to look a little worse on Windows than MacOS. Not less legible -- arguably hinted fonts are less "fuzzy" than non-hinted fonts on lower-resolution screens, which (I presume) is what people who prefer hinted fonts prefer about them -- but just a little off at smaller sizes. The answer is because they literally are off at smaller sizes.

[1]: https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/subpixel-hinting.htm...

What does not work perfect is mixing hidpi and lowdpi screens. On wayland with wayland compatible apps it works fine but on X11 or with xwayland apps like electron it will not scale properly when you move the window to the other screen, it will scale to one screen and be wrong when moved over. Overall I don't find this to be too much of an issue and when chrome gets proper wayland support the problem will be 99% solved.

It's good to hear things aren't as bad as some have suggested.

PyCharm had high CPU consumption issues with a Macbook connected to a 4k display running in a scaled resolution. Native 4k was fine, using the default resolution was fine but "more space" made it use tons of CPU since it had to rescale text and UI elements on the CPU.

There is an option to change the scale manually (-Dsun.java2d.uiScale=<floating point value> in the JVM rags), but I don’t know if it helps or not.

It's why I actively avoid monitors with small pixels. My trusty old Dell U3011 and the two rotated 1600x1200's flanking it suit me just fine.

I've no inclination to change my OS, either, just for the sake of fonts.

Kudos to those commenters still on CRT displays. One complaint I have with LCD's is reset lag time, which can make it tricky to catch early BIOS messages.

I think the problem is right there. You’re living in the past so you get the past’s problem.

I haven’t seen a BIOS message in a decade.

I’m sure those U3011 are beautiful and hard to let go (I used to have a U27) but it’s also hard to look at a low-dpi screen once you’ve seen the light

BTW what's wrong with BIOS or UEFI messages? I much prefer them to cosmetic boot graphics.

In fact historically, some of the higher-end hardware yielding the best performance during operation (an axis along which I optimize) actually added time to the boot sequence. The storage subsystem on my workstation is backed by a mix of four Intel enterprise-grade SSD's in RAID-0 (raw speed) and 8 big spinning platters in RAID-6 (capacity), plugged into an Areca 1882ix RAID card w/ 4GB dedicated BBU cache. Unfortunately that card adds a non-bypassable 30 seconds to the boot sequence, no matter what system you plug it into. But once there, it screams. It's only just the last couple years PCI-NVMe drives have come out that can match (or finally beat) the performance metrics I've been hitting for ages.

So I actually kind of feel like I've been living in the future, and the rest of the world just caught up ;-).

Same. I haven’t run into any apps that don’t support high dpi mode. Even terminal apps look great on my Retina 4k iMac screen.

Before getting this machine nearly a year ago, I couldn't natively view high dpi graphics for web projects I’d work on, which was a problem since there are billions of high dpi devices out there.

Added bonus: wide gamut is a thing and there's increasing support for this in browsers, including new color spaces: https://lea.verou.me/2020/04/lch-colors-in-css-what-why-and-...

The version of pgAdmin not based on electron had pixelated fonts on a 5k iMac. I haven't checked recently.

Audacity has extremely low framerates and chugging when interacting with the waveform on retina screens. Even running in low DPI mode doesn't fix it. Only runs nice on non-retina displays.

The post I quoted was: "No matter what operating system you're on". I quoted that particular bit for a reason.

The ergonomics of better screen resolution don't change just because your OS isn't good at dealing with high resolution.

When you pick an operating system (if you have the choice), there are a lot of factors, it's good to know what's important to you and choose appropriately.

It's almost as if there's more operating systems than MacOS...

I either need a bigger (deeper) desk to sit back farther or just a smaller monitor physically with the same resolution.

I also was thinking I didn't particularly like the large desktop and screen at first, but now that I treat it as a combined wallboard and desk space, I can't imagine going back (and using the large but not quite 4k monitor at my desk at the office always felt like a step backwards).

I do set default scaling for Firefox and Thunderbird to be about 125% of normal though, as I don't like squinting at small text. I generally like how small all the other OS widgets are though, so I don't scale the whole desktop.

It has been an iterative process but I’m getting a handle on it.

I have a sit/stand desk, I’m considering moving my recliner in to the office and elevating the monitor. Working from a reclined position seems ideal but I also thought a 43” monitor was a good idea...

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/tree/master/src/modul...

For example, Super + Up Arrow will move a window into the central third section of the display. Pressing it again will expand the window a little bit.

Nice and simple. Makes working with large displays pleasant.

I cannot imagine using a large display without it!

To be honest, I think I may stick to it. At first, the huge monitor was fun, and initial change to having less screen real estate was definitely a drag. But, now that I'm accustomed to it again, I'm finding that "I can fit less stuff on the screen at once" is just another way of saying, "it's harder to distract myself with extra stuff on the screen." My productivity is possibly up, and certainly no worse.

Also for my particular workload real estate is very handy. I totally agree with there being some virtue to constraints but several times a day I really need the space.

At typical desk monitor distances you shouldn't be able to see distinct pixels anyway.

My previous monitor iterations have been LGs and I really like the USB-C charging capability, KVM and the OSD/buttons.

Got one of these in my cart right now: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07NS7JKJH

I'm gonna sleep on it and double check the return policy on this 43".

Pretty much no maintstream UX has properly solve the large screen problem and instead we have to workaround it with smaller, multiple monitors.

It’s quite a piece of hardware. It lets me plug a USB hub into it. It supports USB-C for its display adapter. So it’s the dream: one USB-C cable to charge the laptop, drive the display, and provide a USB hub for keyboard, mouse, etc.

I do find my head is on a swivel comparatively, but while noticeable without being a negative. Overall I like it. A lot. The only thing that is painful is sharing the desktop over Webex/skype. That does bog the system down and requires manual resizing of font size to inflate it so that viewers on lower resolution systems can cope with it.

I actually evolved my office setup from dual 24" 1920x1200 and went to dual 28" 4K. But with the COVID lockdown, I only have one of the same spec monitor at home for several months, and realize that I barely miss the second monitor. I was probably only using 1.25 monitors in practice as the real estate is vast.

People who complain that a monitor is too large should stop opening a single window full-screen and discover what it is like to have a windowing system...

Interesting idea thought just effectively having a massive monitor.

It basically works out as 4 seamless 1080p monitors, and I use i3 for a 3x2 window layout

In my experience MacOS multi-monitor support is effectively non-existent.

Recently I picked up a 49” ultra-ultra wide monitor (basically 2x27” panels). It is one monitor but MacOS can’t drive it. They just don’t detect that resolution. I switched to a 43” 4k monitor (technically more pixels) and MacOS drives it fine.

My experience with MacOS is not “it just works” unless you are doing something Apple already predicted. That’s fine for me, I just wish they still sold a reasonable monitor themselves so I could be assured it would work properly.

I finally got sick of this and wrote a Hammerspoon script to deal with this. The config looks like this:

      local dualLayout = {
          {"Firefox",       nil,         primary,   topLeft,             nil, nil},
          {"Preview",       nil,         primary,   topLeft,             nil, nil},
          {"Sublime Text",  nil,         secondary, topHalf,             nil, nil},
          {"Slack",         nil,         secondary, topRight,            nil, nil},
          {"Notes",         nil,         secondary, topRight,            nil, nil},
          {"iTerm2",        nil,         secondary, topRight,            nil, nil},
          {"Safari",        nil,         secondary, topRight,            nil, nil},
          {"IntelliJ IDEA", "cursive",   primary,   hs.layout.maximized, nil, nil},
          {"IntelliJ IDEA", "community", secondary, hs.layout.maximized, nil, nil},
      }

I tend to have one space per task and have at least a Firefox and an iTerm on every one.

Just running a single monitor is the way to go for me. The benefits of multiple monitors just doesn't make up for all the fiddling.

Maybe we can get to the bottom of this. What is your use case?

I ask because as long as I plug them into the same ports it remembers how I arranged them previously (2018 macbook pro 15"). I haven't had to arrange them in over a year... even remembered when updating to latest operating system. Occasionally, I even plug in my LCD TV as a third external monitor and it remembers where that one should go in the arrangement too.

The fact that it was all one physical monitor may have further confused the OS as a sibling comment mentions.

The solution was to sell the monitor to a Windows-using architect friend and buy a different panel with a resolution MacOS supports. She has a macbook too but it's the fancy one with discrete graphics which can drive 5120x1440.

The value proposition of MacOS to me is that I plug things in and they work. Any fiddling beyond that destroys the benefits of using this platform. I'm willing to iterate on hardware until I find something that works.

For other readers, this is not technically correct. The 2020 13” MacBook Pro can drive the Pro Display XDR with its integrated Intel graphics.

This limitation is specific to the MacOS drivers. Windows in Bootcamp is able to drive 5120x1440 on these devices.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/221498 and https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/233854 has how to fix this. It doesn't sound much fun though.

I have two different monitors that wake up at very different speeds and it's no problem here. My 15" 2013 and 2015 macbook pros had no problem with this either, and I've had 4 different monitors in the mix through those years too. I've transitioned to a CalDigit Thunderbolt 3 dock now and still no problem with it remembering.

So there's definitely something unique about that monitor. That is sad news for me too -- I'm hoping they make a 2x4K ultra wide monitor like that someday. Hopefully they've solved this problem by then.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210205

I currently have the Apple LG 4K but plan to upgrade to the 5K.

I agree with you on the just works thing. I have the same keyboard, trackball, monitor, tbolt dock and external HD on my desk at home and work.

At least for apps that are dedicated to one screen + virtual desktop, right click its icon in the dock and assign it to that display and workspace.

Note that the effectiveness of window restoration also depends on the make/model of your monitors – many manufacturers incorrectly share EDID's across all units of the same model and sometimes across multiple models, making it much more difficult for operating systems to uniquely identify them.

I'm thinking of flipping my monitor upside down so I'll never accidentally brush that area while picking up something on the table.

Reports I read stated that while you can select it with SwitchResX it was scaled.

I never tried installing it myself because I’m not a fan of modifying the system on a Mac, especially one I don’t own.

From my poking around I think the horizontal resolution is the problem. The system scans possible resolutions to see what works. Apple just never expected a single display that wide.

There’s some reports that newer MacBooks with discrete graphics on Catalina can indeed run this resolution. It used to not work regardless of hardware, now apparently discrete graphics MacBooks can run it. Maybe because they updated the drivers/system for their new super fancy monitors.

macOS Mojave 10.14.6

MacBook Pro 15” 2019

Radeon Pro 555X

Intel UHD 630

I’ve seen zero reports of anyone successfully running 5120x1440 using Intel graphics.

As far as I can tell it is the same as Option-clicking on scaled in the display preferences.

I was plagued with performance problems, mostly in IntelliJ, until I realized it didn't work well with scaling. Going to native resolution solved it.

The worst thing about it is that scaling seems to use more CPU than running natively and the OS has some noticeably additional latency when running scaled.

At work I have a mac mini and a Windows box, and I use three crapola Asus monitors between them, and my impression has been that macOS does a better job rendering text on said crapola monitors (the Windows box does a better job at compiling C++ in a timely fashion, though, so I mostly work on that one).

But yes, I didn't know that they ripped out subpixel rendering in late 2018 by default.

In general with a HiDPI screen I don't find any need for it. But on a low-res display like the typical 24" 1080P models it certainly helps.

I would also add, when it comes to 4K and, for example, MacBooks, things fall apart quickly in my opinion. Cables, adapters/dongles/docking stations just must match up for everything to work in proper 60fps, and it gets worse if you have two external displays.

As for my home set up, also stayed at 25" 1440p. Nice balance for work, hobby and occasional gaming without braking the bank for a top-tier GPU.

I agree it's a bit of a mess, but USB-C monitors solve all those issues. I just plug my MacBook in with USB-C, and instantly my 4K (60 Hz) display is connected, along with external sound and any USB peripherals. No fussing with a million different cables and adapters. It's the docking workstation setup I've dreamed of for a decade.

This seems like a long-standing problem with Linux, rather than a reason to dislike high-res screens.

What is the software that people are using that creates problems?

  # This affects every GTK app. 
  xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Xft/DPI -s 144

What is really tricky, though, it's having two monitors with different DPI. Win 10 does an acceptable job with it; no Linux tools I'm aware of can handle it reasonably well. Some xrandr incantations can offer partial solutions.

This is a non issue to me. I don't use apps half way across 2 screens. Its just a minor bit of weirdness while dragging them.

I'm running a couple medium high density monitors alongside one of the highest density ones available. I don't scale the HIDPI monitor at all, which means when I drag windows to it they are tiny. Instead it works in two ways, as a status screen for activity monitors/etc and as a text/document editing screen. AKA putting adobe acrobat, firefox or sublime/emacs/etc on the high DPI screen and then zooming in gives all the font smoothing/etc advantages of high DPI without needing OS support.

So the TLDR is, turn off dpi scaling, and leave the hidpi screen as a dedicated text editor/etc with the font sizes bumped to a comfortable size. Bonus here is that the additional effort of clicking the menu/etc will encourage learning keyboard shortcuts.

I don't think the reasons you illustrated support that conclusion. You don't actively dislike the extra pixel density of a 4K display. You seem to only dislike the compatibility issues relevant to your use case.

>No matter what operating system you're on, you'll eventually run into an application that doesn't render in high dpi mode.

FWIW, I can't recall the last time I has a problem with apps not rendering correctly in hidpi mode on MacOS. Unless you've got a very specific legacy app that you rely on for regular use it's a non-issue.

>Configuring my preferred linux environment to work with 4k is either impossible or just super time consuming

Ah, I think I found the real issue ;-) If your linux desktop rendered 4K beautifully, seamlessly, and without any scaling issues right out of the box, I could all but guarantee that your opinion would be different.

> My argument in favor of 1080p is that I find text to just be... completely readable.

Yes, me too. To me it's more than just readable, I find the text crisp and comfortable. I don't need anything else.

Primary apps go in the middle, such as code editor, etc.. Tertiary windows, such as documentation go on the outer edges. Still quite usable, but a little out of the way for extended reading.

I like Retina DPI, but this is good enough. It’s not very curved, but it has some curvature. I don’t think it’s worth it. 1440p is good enough for me.

There’s only two or three things that would make this better. A high DPI variant, more vertical space and a greater refresh rate. Given those two things, I think that’s the endgame for monitors (in a productivity context).

(I think that’s 8x the bandwidth so it’s a while away!)

I do agree with you that 4K under 27” isn’t necessary.

What issues actually? Xmonad on Arch user here and I find the sweet spot for me is 27-32" 4k, 1440p on laptop (I guess 4k would be nice here too, but not sure if it motivates the increased power draw). After getting used to the increased real-estate, I do feel limited on my older 1080p laptop screen; fonts smaller than 8p (which is still all good) noticably impacts the readability to the point I can feel my eyes strain faster. It did take a bit of playing around with Dpi settings to get it right, though, out of the box it's not great. The Arch wiki has some great material.

The only frustration I do have (which IS super-frustrating, specifically for web browsing) is with multi-monitor setups with different pixel density - your point 2, I guess. Even plugging anything larger than 19" with 1080p into my 1080p Thinkpad is annoying.

I think it should be possible to configure it correctly but I just gave up and end up zooming in/out whenever I do this and send windows between screens. Haven't looked at it, but maybe a mature DE like KDE or GNOME (which, if you don't know, you can still use with i3) should be able to take care of this.

Also, this is all on X11, have no idea if and how wayland differs.

So I had a '14 13"(? Might have been 15" but probably not) RMBP on the left with email and chat stuff, 24" main monitor in landscape and then another 24" monitor in portrait on the right. I think at some point I put a newer panel on the IBM mount. It was sweet.

Back then we still had desktop PCs at our actual desks so there was a KVM on the main monitor! What a time to be alive!

These days I do prefer a single monitor workflow if possible. It's just cleaner and move convenient.

Plus, if I take a working vacation somewhere it's a lot more practical to schlep around one 24" or 27" than an ultrawide.

Also, just as an ergonomic thing, I could angle in the two outer screens a bit while not having one of those icky curved screens.

I'm working on an old 24"16/10 display (the venerable ProLite B2403WS) and an OK 32" 4K display with a VA panel. Both are properly calibrated.

There is no amount of tinkering that can make fonts on the 24" look good. It looks like dog shit in comparison to the 4K screen. It might not be obvious when all you got in front of your eyes is the 24" display, but it's blatant side to side.

On top of it, the real life vertical real estate of the 4K display is also quite larger.

I've never been a big 16/9 fan, but frankly at the size monitors come in today and the market prices, I don't a reason not to pick a few of these for developing.

I haven't had this experience (MacOS, 4K monitor for 2.5 years)

> 2. If the 4k screen is on your laptop, good luck ever having a decent experience plugging in a 1080p monitor. Also good luck having anyone's random spare monitor be 4k.

shrug - 4K and 1080p seem to work together just fine for me. I've currently got a 27" 4K monitor and a 24" 1080p monitor both running off my 2015 13" MacBook Pro; the 4K is on DisplayPort (60Hz @ 3840x2160) and the 1080p is on HDMI (and it happens to be in portrait mode). I use all three screens (including the laptop's), and while the 1080p is noticeably crappier than the other two, it's still usable, and the combination of all three together works well for me. A couple of extra tools (e.g. BetterTouchTool) really help with throwing things between monitors, resizing them to take up some particular chunk of the screen, etc. - my setup's quite keyboard-heavy with emphasis on making full use of the space inspired by years of running i3 (and before that xmonad, ratpoison and others) on linux and freebsd.

> 3. Configuring my preferred linux environment to work with 4k is either impossible or just super time consuming.

That's a statement about linux and i3, not monitors. (And again, I like i3, but stating this limitation as if it's a problem with monitors not i3 seems... odd.)

> That's a statement about linux and i3, not monitors. (And again, I like i3, but stating this limitation as if it's a problem with monitors not i3 seems... odd.)

It is also wrong. I am a long time i3 user. Never had a problem with it, never done anything special. Most of the time I'm running Debian stable, so I even use software versions that most people consider 'old'.

Never happened to me in 4 years, see below. That said, I barely use any graphical programs besides kitty, firefox, thunderbird and spotify.

> 3. Configuring my preferred linux environment to work with 4k is either impossible or just super time consuming. I use i3 and it adds way more productivity to my workflow than "My fonts are almost imperceptively sharper" ever could

This is just not true. I have used the same 32" 4k monitor for 4 years running NixOS with bspwm (a tiling window manager, which does even less than i3) on 3 different laptops - thinkpad x230 (at 30 Hz), x260 and x395 and it all worked completely fine.

I used a script like this to setup monitors, I would run it every time I would change my monitor setup (e.g. on the go): https://github.com/rvolosatovs/infrastructure/blob/0e17a1421...

It depends on a very simple tool I wrote, because I was sick with `xrandr`: https://github.com/rvolosatovs/gorandr , but `xrandr` could easily be used as alternative.

Recently I switched to Sway on Wayland and it could not be smoother - everything just works with no scripting, including hot-plug.

> I genuinely think 4k provides no real benefit to me as a developer unless the screen is 27" or higher, because increased pixel density just isn't required. If more pixels meant slightly higher density but also came with more usable screen real estate, that'd be what made the difference for me.

Indeed, screen size is way more important than resolution. In fact, even 4k at 27" seemed too small for me when I had to use that in the office - I would either have to deal with super small font sizes and straining my eyes or sacrificing screen space by zooming in.

I have been running two 1440p displays on a 4K retina MBP and the experience has been impressively seamless. Both with Catalina (the latest) and High Sierra

The biggest problem is with Apple port splitters; they are crap and sometimes monitors wake from sleep with a garbled picture

Since aging has forced me into wearing reading glasses, I wear single vision computer glasses that are optimized for the distance range of my monitors' closest and furthest points.

Because I dont have scaling enabled, I don't get any of the HiDpi issues that I've gotten on my laptops with Windows.

I have found that I am still wanting for even more screen real estate, and for a time I had a pair of ultrawide 23" monitors underneath my main monitors, but it created more problems than it solved and I recently went back to only two monitors.

Because I prefer to use the same model of monitor when doing a grid, so I don't think I want to add to my existing setup, because my monitors are discontinued, and they're displayport only for 4K60.

I think they have more than a few years of life left in them, but I'll definitely look into a configuration like yours at upgrade time.

A 4k monitor is now $300 (new). Used are even cheaper.

> Configuring my preferred linux environment to work with 4k is either impossible or just super time consuming. I use i3 and it adds way more productivity to my workflow

I use Gnome 3.36 and many HiDPI issues I was having before are now gone, without any extra configuration.

> My argument in favor of 1080p is that I find text to just be... completely readable.

It is readable but fonts are pixelated, unlike 4k.

My only problem is that macOS has some artificial limitations when it comes to using non-Apple monitors. Like a lower refresh rate. My solution? Use Linux.

What do you mean, fonts are pixelated at 1080p? Whether you can see the pixels probably depends on pixel size. I certainly can't see them on my 23" LG monitor unless I try really hard.

I am using using Emacs and tmux under Linux, in the Gnome desktop. Gnome has HDPI scaling. For me, that works fine with a 4K 43 inch display. The thing you need to watch out for is to get a graphics card with proper open source (FOSS) driver support. Some cards are crap and don't come with FOSS drivers. You can get them to run but it is a PITA on every kernel update. Don't do that to yourself, get a decent card.

I did a lot of research before buying an xps-13 and went with the 1080p version due to basically all the reasons you just stated + poor battery life and video performance.

I have hope for the future though... what would really make transitioning easier is a way to automatically upscale incompatible programs, even if it means nearest neighbor scaling at least it will make them usable on super hi-dpi monitors.

I still switched to 1440p as 4K is just better looking 1080p. You cannot fit more information on the screen with scaling and without scaling everything is too small. I work as backend developer so space is more important for me than visual quality.

Happy i3 arch linux 4k monitor user here for over 2 years. I only set an appropriate Xft.dpi for my monitor size/resolution in ~/.Xresources once and that was it.

Can't imagine being easier than this tbh.

Or, if you are using decent graphics hardware, you could even get two of them and have four times more display space than you have now.

Not that it excuses bad UX, but you might consider keeping your browser window at something below full width. I find this more comfortable anyway.

Total aside: I've noticed Windows and Linux users tend to keep their windows fully maximized, whereas Mac users don't. Doesn't apply to everyone of course, but enough to be noticed. This was true even before Apple changed the behavior of the green Zoom button, and I've always wondered why.

Also any power user that cares will use a tool like Divvy on macOS for arranging windows with hotkeys.

Alt-tab goes between applications

Interesting, I've noticed the exact opposite. Mac devs, especially younger ones, tend to have full-screen IDEs and browsers and constantly flick back and forth between apps. My theory was always that Windows and Linux users had gotten comfortable with the desktop metaphor while a large percentage of newer Mac users grew up using iPads which were all full-screen, all the time.

It used to be that if you clicked the green button on Mac, most apps (not all apps, for weird aqua-UI reasons, but certainly web browsers) would grow to fill the screen without outright hiding the menu bar and dock, just like the maximize button on Windows.

To this day I still rarely press that button because of years of it doing nothing but unpredictable nonsense.

Could you clarify when in your life you've had a 4k screen with good OS support, so that we know what experience you are speaking from when you say that?