Canonical’s Michael Hall announced on December 5, 2016, that Ryan Sipes, Community Manager at System76, reports on the fact that both UK-based companies are currently working together to improve HiDPI support in the Ubuntu Linux operating system.
It appears that a team of System76 engineers discussed last week with Martin Wimpress of the Ubuntu Desktop team and the leader of the Ubuntu MATE flavor about the improvements that could be made to the HiDPI (High Dots Per Inch) support for the Unity 7 user interface of Ubuntu. We’re not saying the HiDPI support is lacking in Ubuntu, but it can be improved in some areas to offer users an out-of-the-box HiDPI experience for their 4K Oryx Pro and BonoboWS laptops manufactured by System76.
“With our HiDPI laptops, everything is twice as crisp; it’s like a high-quality printed magazine instead of a traditional computer display. The user interface is clearer, text is sharper, photos are more detailed, games are higher res, and videos can be viewed in full lifelike 4K. This is great whether you’re anyone from a casual computer user to a video editor producing high end content or a professional developer who wants a better display for your code editor,” said Cassidy James Blaede, a developer at System76 and co-founder of elementary OS.
Better HiDPI support for Unity 7 is coming very soon to Ubuntu users
Ubuntu and System76 developers have been working hard in the past few weeks to improve HiDPI support for the Unity 7 user interface of Ubuntu Linux, and they’ve already have a bunch of patches in review that should land in the stable repositories of the supported Ubuntu releases in the coming days. We don’t know yet which Ubuntu versions will receive these patches, but we can guess that they’ll be available at least for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak).
To accelerate the review process, they are asking for Ubuntu community’s help to contribute patches to existing HiDPI bugs in Canonica’s Launchpad project management infrastructure. System76’s engineers are already contributing heavily to the development process of improving HiDPI support in Ubuntu Linux for the Unity 7 interface, but it looks like numerous members of the Ubuntu community have expressed their interest in contributing as well. As for the rest of the world, make sure that you always keep your Ubuntu PCs up to date to get the latest HiDPI improvements.
