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Description
Desktop from 2 or 3 months ago. OS at the time was Slackware, and x.org defaulted to the monster size of 2048x1536 on my 21". That's about 130 pixels per inch in the horizontal and vertical (100 is more usual), and I could read text at nearly small-print sizes. it was great. Truth be told it was a -little- too fuzzy, and I came down to 1920x1440 for a while before switching to 1600x1200 for the sake of web browsing. This was fun while it lasted though.

The window manager is Fluxbox, a lightweight one, and on this machine operated at significantly better than eyeblink speeds. Two remote desktops can be seen, the one at the top is from a machine also running Fluxbox, although on a Gentoo Linux base, and the other is my iBook which was running OS X Tiger at the time. I'm typing a roleplay post into the post-it note application on the iBook.

By the way, if you've used the old style X applications, the black-on-white ones with the pixelly scrollbars, you'd be surprised how good they look at 130 pixels per inch. I reckon that's what they were originally made for, and backing that up is an old Viglen monitor I had a few years back. This beasty was only a 14", but it was so sharp that the resolution of 800x600 (which is usual for 14" monitors) looked all pixelly and horrible. I had to run it at 1024x768, which is normally a it hard to read on a 14", but is about 140 pixels per inch. Viglen, as far as I can figure, make or made real pro monitors; real top of the tree jobs, and it figures to me that something like that Viglen would have been used for developing the first windowing systems. There's more circumstantial evidence, like the way the older window managers are not well suited to displaying everything maximised or heavily overlapping like you have to do on a 640x480 or 800x600 screen. We've come down since then.

Description
Desktop from 2 or 3 months ago. OS at the time was Slackware, and x.org defaulted to the monster size of 2048x1536 on my 21". That's about 130 pixels per inch in the horizontal and vertical (100 is more usual), and I could read text at nearly small-print sizes. it was great. Truth be told it was a -little- too fuzzy, and I came down to 1920x1440 for a while before switching to 1600x1200 for the sake of web browsing. This was fun while it lasted though.

The window manager is Fluxbox, a lightweight one, and on this machine operated at significantly better than eyeblink speeds. Two remote desktops can be seen, the one at the top is from a machine also running Fluxbox, although on a Gentoo Linux base, and the other is my iBook which was running OS X Tiger at the time. I'm typing a roleplay post into the post-it note application on the iBook.

By the way, if you've used the old style X applications, the black-on-white ones with the pixelly scrollbars, you'd be surprised how good they look at 130 pixels per inch. I reckon that's what they were originally made for, and backing that up is an old Viglen monitor I had a few years back. This beasty was only a 14", but it was so sharp that the resolution of 800x600 (which is usual for 14" monitors) looked all pixelly and horrible. I had to run it at 1024x768, which is normally a it hard to read on a 14", but is about 140 pixels per inch. Viglen, as far as I can figure, make or made real pro monitors; real top of the tree jobs, and it figures to me that something like that Viglen would have been used for developing the first windowing systems. There's more circumstantial evidence, like the way the older window managers are not well suited to displaying everything maximised or heavily overlapping like you have to do on a 640x480 or 800x600 screen. We've come down since then.