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Ask Slashdot: Good Linux Desktop Environment For Hi-Def/Retina Displays?
Volanin writes "I have been using Linux for the last 15 years both at home and at work (mostly GNOME and now Unity). Recently, I gave in to temptation and bought myself a Macbook retina 15". As you can read around, Linux still has no good support for this hardware, so I am running it inside a virtual machine. Running in scaled 1440x900 makes the Linux fonts look absolutely terrible, and running in true 2880x1800 makes them beautiful, but every UI element becomes so tiny, it's unworkable. Is there a desktop environment that handles resolution independence better? Linux has had support for SVG for a long time, but GNOME/Unity seems adamant in defining small icon sizes and UI elements without the possibility to resize them."
No one cares about Linux and Retina support because Retina is Apple and no one uses Linux that cares about Retina/Apple.
A hypothesis which is proven false by virtue of the question it is a response to.
Jackass.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Yes, because apple is the only company that does high-dpi displays.
(Actually, that's unfortunately pretty true right now, but I hope to start seeing better displays out of the hardware makers soon.)
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Hey troll, like Apple or not they're addressing a glaring problem by bringing out the retina display. Our screen resolution has stagnated and even regressed due to HDTV and the buzz word compliance of 1080i. I can only hope throwing down the gauntlet as they have will push other hardware makers to bring out their own 4K displays.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
HiDPI on Linux is a work-in-progress .. and even when it *does* work, battery life goes down the crapper. Also, thunderbolt hot-plug hasn't been figured out, but it will work as long as your Ethernet dongle is plugged in ahead of power-on. Wifi requires bw-fwcutter, etc.
.. so the entire thing has to be reverse-engineered from scratch.
.. buy rMBPs for the developers actually working on the drivers.
.. solves all the above issues and really isn't that big of a performance hit. Probably not the "purist" answer you were after but it's the easiest way to get it done in the meantime.
It's the same as Linux on any other bleeding-edge hardware (and from a very Linux-unfriendly company)
Want it done faster?
Like all things Linux, they'll get it figured out eventually. Until then, the best way about it is just run VMware Fusion and run Linux inside of that
On consumer, desktop equipment, yes. Consumer mobile equipment is starting to see ludicrous DPI even in middle of the road devices, and commercial medical displays have offered very high DPI for some time.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".