The local electronic warehouse tempted me with a Samsung 4K 28" monitor
at a nice price. Since my graphics card would be able to handle it
and since the space where I planned to put it is wide enough, I
fell for the temptation.
But my Ubuntu Studio distro did not like it at all. I’ve never ever seen
such small fonts – and Ubuntu seems not to have a HiDPI solution at all.
According to Web searches, Linux Mint in the Cinnamon flavour ought
to be the distro that can handle 4K monitors straight from the download.
I also got a 4K 28" monitor that was discounted a few months back - in my case an Acer. At the time, I was running a fairly new 27" Acer monitor and two smaller, older LCDs. I discovered that my system couldn’t drive 1 4K and two other devices so I now just use the two large monitors and am generally quite content with screen real estate.
HOWEVER … although I can run 4k on the one, having one monitor at 1920x1080 and the other at 3840x2160 makes little sense - either the menus are too small on the 4k monitor, or scaling everything means things are too large on the 2k monitor. Besdes, why scale things when you have high resolution - isn’t the point to use the high resolution?!
So I’ve ended up running both monitors at 1920x1080, and Kubunutu 18.04 does this very nicely.
It can be nice to have a much larger proportion of the screen for my pictures when editing (I use darktable), but the text in the sidebars becomes worthy of squinting. So darktable is certainly a piece of software that would benefit from being adapatable to 4k monitors.
Occasionally I ramp up to 4K on the new monitor for OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon), but even then I usually prefer spreading my game across two monitors of the same resolution.
After reading again the darktable FAQ I made a determined hunt for the darktable.css file and modified it to experiment with using 4K resolution. Wthout changing the width of the sidebars (thus using maximum resolution for my edit), the result is as here:
It seems usable, if looking a little chunky.
[I guess this post is now less hardware- and more darktable-specific. ]
It didn’t occur to me, which is also another way of saying my trawling through the docs came up with modifying the .css. (All I did was change the fontsize from 8 to 12 to 16 by way of experimentation).
In darktablerc I see the line:
screen_dpi_overwrite=-1.0
So, inituitively, I set that to something like 250 (16 inch horizonal / 4000 pixels) approx and the UI of darktable will adjust automatically?
]