Linux Desktop and high DPI issues?

[ekianjo]

The Pyra will have afaik a hd ready screen (720p) and I was wondering what was planned by the OS devs to take in account the fact that this screen format will be effectively a high DPI screen? The concerns are that for now, Linux distros have uncomplete support for high dpi screens for windows/text and other interface items. There are different solutions depending on whether u use kde or gnome but again none of them are perfect at this stage.

What is the current thinking about this potential issue?

 

[mrpalmtop]

I use Linux frequently on my Viliv N5 which has a pretty high resolution for its screen size. I just set my GTK font DPI to 170 and everything works fine. The icons can be adjusted as well. The web browsers though are just not very well behaved. Firefox explicitly ignores the GTK font settings. They apparently consider it a "feature" to do this. I like QupZilla but unfortunately it supports -webkit-text-size-adjust which is really bad for interoperability since it makes user-adjusted font sizes ignored. Sadly, this board uses that CSS attribute

The browsing situation will be annoying, unfortunately. The rest of the Linux desktop is just fine, we just need good default icon and font sizes.

 

[ekianjo]

The browsing situation will be annoying, unfortunately. The rest of the Linux desktop is just fine, we just need good default icon and font sizes.

How about the windows sliders and buttons sizes?

 

[mrpalmtop]

The browsing situation will be annoying, unfortunately. The rest of the Linux desktop is just fine, we just need good default icon and font sizes.

How about the windows sliders and buttons sizes?

Are you referring to scrollbars?

The button sizes automatically scale to fit the text of the buttons within. Or do you mean window titlebars?

 

[Ziz]

The browsing situation will be annoying, unfortunately. The rest of the Linux desktop is just fine, we just need good default icon and font sizes.

 How about the windows sliders and buttons sizes?

Why don't you test it yourself? Just set the dpi up, have a look, what is still "too small" (in fact just normal size, but that is not, what we want to test) und try to fix it. If you log your attempts, you will probably help the pyra os developers, too!

 

[ekianjo]

The browsing situation will be annoying, unfortunately. The rest of the Linux desktop is just fine, we just need good default icon and font sizes.

 
How about the windows sliders and buttons sizes?

Why don't you test it yourself? Just set the dpi up, have a look, what is still "too small" (in fact just normal size, but that is not, what we want to test) und try to fix it.
If you log your attempts, you will probably help the pyra os developers, too!

I wish I had a 5 inches 720p screen to do the tests you describe Doing it on my Full HD 22'' will do not good to help design the Pyra OS look

 

[Ziz]

The browsing situation will be annoying, unfortunately. The rest of the Linux desktop is just fine, we just need good default icon and font sizes.

 How about the windows sliders and buttons sizes?

Why don't you test it yourself? Just set the dpi up, have a look, what is still "too small" (in fact just normal size, but that is not, what we want to test) und try to fix it. If you log your attempts, you will probably help the pyra os developers, too!

 I wish I had a 5 inches 720p screen to do the tests you describe Doing it on my Full HD 22'' will do not good to help design the Pyra OS look

Of course it will do good to help. It's not about finding the perfect value for the Pyra. It's about finding out, whethers programs are able to show stuff with bigger dpi at all - and which are not.

 

[EvilDragon]

720p is not that bad with 5".

The FullHD screen was bad, I even needed to manually change the GIMP config as even the hugest iconset was too small.

With 720p, the standard setup is okay for me (though I love really small stuff ), so it should work with minor tweaks.

I can tell you more once I got the prototype with the rotator chip. Then we also start to optimize the default setup for the small screen.

 

[TrashyMG]

I have an 18" 720p resolution HDMI Monitor for my devboard.. You can kind of get a feeling what it would be like on a smaller screen by imagining how it would be if it was only a 5" screen.. I don't think it would be too bad by default. 


 

 

[mcobit]

Just sit about 3 meters away from it and you'll have a good comparison

 

[mrpalmtop]

720p is not that bad with 5".


The FullHD screen was bad, I even needed to manually change the GIMP config as even the hugest iconset was too small.


With 720p, the standard setup is okay for me (though I love really small stuff ), so it should work with minor tweaks.


I can tell you more once I got the prototype with the rotator chip. Then we also start to optimize the default setup for the small screen.

I don't think the screen dpi is going to be an issue for the most part, especially if the first-run setup program includes a slider to specify preferences for scaling of display elements such as icons, fonts, and window controls.

Only the web browsers will be tricky to keep sane.

 

[ekianjo]

Only the web browsers will be tricky to keep sane.

Yeha and this it what we are going to use most of the time. I hope we find some good methods to improve things there. At least Otter has a pretty good Zoom slider that works very well.

 

[fusion_power]

720p is not that bad with 5".


The FullHD screen was bad, I even needed to manually change the GIMP config as even the hugest iconset was too small.


With 720p, the standard setup is okay for me (though I love really small stuff ), so it should work with minor tweaks.


I can tell you more once I got the prototype with the rotator chip. Then we also start to optimize the default setup for the small screen.

I hope the elements can be adjusted to finger-usable size, I hate small stuff

I find many stuff on the Pandora Screen already way to small, scrollbars for example and sometimes overall text. Would be bad if all that stuff is even smaller onto the Pyra.  I don't like smartphones at all but at least they alwaays have big enough screen elements that you can never miss. ^^"

 

[shadow.8]

The browsing situation will be annoying, unfortunately. The rest of the Linux desktop is just fine, we just need good default icon and font sizes.

 
How about the windows sliders and buttons sizes?

Why don't you test it yourself? Just set the dpi up, have a look, what is still "too small" (in fact just normal size, but that is not, what we want to test) und try to fix it.
If you log your attempts, you will probably help the pyra os developers, too!

I wish I had a 5 inches 720p screen to do the tests you describe Doing it on my Full HD 22'' will do not good to help design the Pyra OS look

I was thinking about this last week and realized I had something similar: my smartphone. I have a Nexus 5 (with a 5" screen) so I downloaded some desktop screenshots at 720p and viewed them in fullscreen. Not quite the same but close enough for me. The resolution was fine for me so I don't think I'll have issues with the Pyra. 

I also considered installing Debian in Virtualbox and resizing the window to be 5" but I figured that was more work than it was worth.