Would like to know where are you getting this information. I don't know a single person that has a >200PPI monitor, and most of them are Mac users and also programmers.
If they have a mac laptop or iMac they have a >200 PPI monitor. If you have a higher end PC laptop, a lot of them go well past that.
If you're only talking about desktop displays, then I 100% agree that almost no one has them because until very recently, hardly any have existed because the only people who cared about it are people using MacOS. But given the increased number of 5k monitors with high refresh and gaming features shown off at CES and expected to hit the market this year, on top of a smattering of productivity-oriented displays with high PPI coming out in the past year, this could likely change.
I'd say it's something that benefits Windows and Linux because fractional scaling still isn't perfect on either OS. But Windows, frankly, does scaling for desktop in a much more pragmatic and (for most people) better way than MacOS, so having to set your 4k 27 inch monitor to 150% scaling isn't a big deal. Things still look relatively sharp. On MacOS, not so much.
They don't need to. A lot of PC laptops feature high PPI displays. If you're using a moderately modern laptop, it's probably a high PPI display. A 14 inch laptop with a 1080p display is already at close to 160PPI. That's an option on a T480, a laptop from 2018. A P14S has an option for a 14 inch, 2880x1800 display, or 240+ PPI! The Dell Pro 14 has both an option for 1080p (~160PPI) and 2560x1600 (~215PPI). A 16 inch display with the same 2560x1600 resolution is close to 190PPI. Intel Macbooks Pro have had retina displays since 2012.
It's neither a novelty nor a Mac-only feature these days. A huge portion of the pc laptop market has high PPI displays and it's becoming increasingly rare to see anything that'd comfortably display at 1x scaling.
> A 14 inch laptop with a 1080p display is already at close to 160PPI.
I have one of those, this kinda of screen is uncomfortable at 2x scale (everything gets too big), so I generally set up to 1.25x or 1.5x. This is not what is being set by default by Omarchy though.
> A huge portion of the pc laptop market has high PPI displays and it's becoming increasingly rare to see anything that'd comfortably display at 1x scaling.
That is true, but you're moving the goal posts. This thread was talking about the 2x scale set by Omarchy by default, that is really only good if you have 200+ DPI.
This is still the minority of users even nowadays, and definitely not "98% of the user base" of the distro.
> I have one of those, this kinda of screen is uncomfortable at 2x scale (everything gets too big), so I generally set up to 1.25x or 1.5x. This is not what is being set by default by Omarchy though.
It's better that everything be a bit too big that requires tinkering than everything being way too small (where you can't read the text on the screen). The 2x scale is pretty usable for even 150PPI.
As I mentioned in another post, hyprland does support using the preferred scaling based on the EDID information which is probably the right choice, but I can't really verify that myself.
> It's better that everything be a bit too big that requires tinkering than everything being way too small (where you can't read the text on the screen). The 2x scale is pretty usable for even 150PPI.
I think it depends. 2x in my 14' 1080p laptop makes text and UI elements so huge that I can barely interact with the screen, so it is unusable either way.
