okay so macOS 11 (or maybe the M1's GPU) has trouble with doing the virtual 2880p HiDPI -> 2160p scaling that my monitor needs.
So right now I'm running my 27" 4K monitor at native 1:1 resolution and... I actually like it? and I can read the text pretty well? jesus christ my eyes are way better than they have any right to be
the text on my screen is literally two millimeters tall and I can read it just fine from a meter away. It's not quite as clear as it was back when I did this unironically in grad school, but, what the heck.
Of course it'd be nice if macOS supported arbitrary UI scaling instead of this weird inbetween crap, but... whatever!
of course the fringe benefit of most apps really being fancy browsers these days is I can just zoom them in at the app level anyway so if this is ever too hard to read I can cmd-+ a couple times and give my eyes a break. At least it works in Slack and Discord.
Just wish I could get my browser tabs etc. to resize too. There's probably a hidden Firefox setting for that though.
Incidentally there are two problems with display scaling on macOS 11 right now:
1. Weird color fringing on colored antialiased text (like even on non-subpixel-AA text, fringing would be expected on subpixel-AA but only a handful of things do that anymore on Mac)
2. Whenever my computer wakes from sleep the screen is showing the 2880p virtual canvas but not scaling it down to fit in 2160p actual, so everything's zoomed and cropped
Turns out that even if I have the display set to 1:1 it still comes up in the craptastic wants-to-be-1080p mode. Ugh. But power cycling the monitor fixes it, as it turns out, so maybe I'll stick to the 2:1 1440p mode.
haha I'm actually liking it at the 2880p 2:1 (1440p-equivalent) with my fonts scaled out to like 80%, which makes it only slightly larger text than it was at 2160p 1:1.
now I *really* wish macOS just let me set an arbitrary UI scaling factor like Windows 10 does.
There's some really weird stuff with how this computer gets along with this monitor in general, too. Like whenever I switch the input on the monitor, or turn it off then back on, all of my windows temporarily flash over on the secondary monitor I have wall-mounted behind my keyboard. So I think this monitor is doing something really weird with its DDC signaling.