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RMBP 13?

4 points by ncage ↗ HN
Hello Everyone, I currently have windows ultrabook with a high resolution display (2560x1440). I found out with the high res display a linux vm in VMWare workstation 10 was very unusable because everything was so dang tiny. I will be getting rid of it and possibly get a 13 rMBP (not only because the resolution issues but because i hate windows 8). Am i going to have the same resolution issues with linux vms or does the mac handle things so much better than i wont' have issues? If so i might just going with the MBA.

7 comments

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thelogos
I'm not sure how linux handles high resolution but osx only makes the display crisper. You have the option of making everything smaller but that's not quite optimized. If rmbp boots into windows, it has the same issue, last time I check.

If you're getting rmbp, I would go with the 15 in model. 13 in only uses integrated graphic which has trouble handling the high resolution.

catinsocks
What trouble? I haven't had any issues so far, maybe if you want to play games at that resolution it would be a problem.
thelogos
I'm not sure if the new version is any different but anandtech did bring up the issue of low framerate while scrolling in some webpages. It was really noticeable when I tried it in the store. Even the 15in has trouble with low framerate sometimes too.
catinsocks
I don't know maybe the intel iris (I think 5100) is a substantial improvement, the only review I found on anandtech was for 2012 version which had the hd4000. Or maybe the performance increase from haswell has helped.

Either that or it is something I don't run into. I don't play games really but I haven't noticed any frame lag when scrolling.

osivertsson
Are you sure you can't just increase size of UI elements?

In Linux I live in tmux + emacs + i3 + browser, and they can easily be configured with larger fonts etc.

I would love to move to a quality display with resolution > 2560x1440 to get crispier fonts (although many other aspects of a display are just as important as resolution).

catinsocks
I have a RMBP13" from late 2013 and it depends on what you are going to do.

My VMware Fusion linux image has the option to use full retina resolution which doesn't work well yet because linux isn't really up to par on dpi scaling, but it also has the option to use the faux resolution 1280x800 (or whatever it is) which comes out looking a little blurry but okay to me.

If you still have your ultrabook you can look at this image at it's normal resolution (not scaled by the browser) and see what the blur looks like http://i.imgur.com/QDdoWNM.png

ncage
Thanks everyone it seems to be more of a linux problem than something inherent with my win ultra book. I also have a 2012 mba and it looks just fine to me. To be honest the only reason i was going to go the pro route was because of the option to get 16GB Ram. Maybe i'll just go the air route again but this time instead opt for 8GB of ram.

Oh as an aside i was trying to use Lubuntu (LXDE).