My lower res, lower DPI display from my old Dell laptop looks much more sharp and crisp than the fancy pants Framework 13 high res display.
Mac OS has has this nailed down basically perfectly for over 10 years now, even windows has been great in the last 5+ years. Not having scaling done right in the age of 4k displays being cheap is a sin.
I see scaling problems on Windows 11 (work PC) almost everywhere, in new dialogs and the older stuff. My own Linux box with Gnome has no issues; only webkit-gtk produces blurry fonts on some pages when my minimal font size conflicts with font-size of the page. This is a problem of the specific web page, I guess.
No HiDPI display here, btw. My old monitor is still good enough and fonts look awesome.
Disclaimer: I wear glasses and cannot see pixels where others might notice them. I increase font sizes everywhere, so font hinting has more to work with and everything looks sharp to me.
Only Windows manages to make it worse. ^^
Fractional scaling in Windows is still eh, largely because they can’t do a whole lot about icons not designed for that scale. For example in Rhino a bunch of the icons get weird pixel doubling when running 150% because they were designed for 100% and use a lot of 1 pixel wide elements.
It’s honestly the main reason I keep hanging on to my now 10 and 15 year old displays. I’m hoping for a 6k 32" display so I can run true 200%. Dell makes one but they put a stupid webcam forehead on it.
Legacy apps have problems in windows also, I guess in MacOS now basically you are not able to run them, but 3 years ago I remember same issues with old apps, blurry or pixelated…
The main issue is gnome not letting apps to scale themselves, whereas kde has just a toggle for that. So in gnome you have consistent size across monitors (cool) but blurry apps when running in xwayland (horrible)
