Darktable3.0 on Windows 10 vs Mint Tricia

Software
1

I use Linux at home and at work, but I recently bought a refurbished Dell “gaming” laptop to use on the road.

It had Win10 on it so I left it that way. I wanted to experiment with the infamous new powershell and to run SketchUp natively. I hadn’t used Windows since Borland C++ and WinNT were all the news.

My first two days of gulf coast birding produced blurry results when viewed in RawTherapee and Gimp. And even in the Windows File Browser. I wondered if my automatic focus was on the fritz.

I also didn’t like Windows so I got a USB drive and installed Mint Tricia this morning.

Now it turns out my images are sharp as a tack after all. WTF?

How can this be? Linux displays better than Windows?

(Windows pestered me with spam popup dialogs on my desktop, multitasking wasn’t niced well and app windows minimized if I so much as looked the wrong way)

2

Maybe OpenCL is on on Windows and off on Linux? Can lead the different results. Did you notice any speed difference in dt?

3

I was disturbed to find Darktable doesn’t run on Windows, so I had to use RawTherapee and Gimp. RT is good software but it isn’t what I’ve grown to rely on (I love Darktable).

Anyway RT was annoyingly slow on Windows. Perhaps this was a ‘gaming laptop’ anomaly.

4

You’ll have to elaborate on this… As it certainly does run on windows

5

Ok I got that (Darktable doesn’t run on Windows) wrong. I only had Windows running two weeks.

6

Check Control Panel, Display, “Change the size of all items”. If this is set to anything other than “Recommended size”, then Windows will enlarge or shrink everything. In your case, I suspect Windows is enlarging, which causes blurriness.

EDIT: I’m on Windows 8.1, but I expect Windows 10 is similar.

7

Screen resolution set to something different than the native of the display?

8

When you say that, does it mean that the disk was reformatted and W10 reinstalled?

9

was Windows reinstalled?

That I don’t know. Dell sells “refurbished” computers at attractive prices. I changed nothing but the system font size. I do that with Linux as well.