Sat 17 January 2026

I was reading in Ploum's excellent blog yesterday about his history with Ubuntu, when I stumbled upon a lovely screenshot of his FVWM setup circa 2003, and it brought me back to a friendly, and long-raging debate with some fedifriends on the subject of pixels, namely, whether or not you can tell the difference between videos at various resolutions on various types of devices, and at what point do those pixels become wasteful?

While I am a fan of viewing high-quality 4k content up-close on a 4k TV for that really filmic feel, I still don't have any computing devices capable of displaying 4k or HIDPI content, not counting any phones.

I remember having laptops with resolutions of 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768. Especially with the first two, if your eyes were young, you could see every pixel. Sub-pixel, even!

Not one pixel was wasted, and honestly, I have to wonder if we really need our modern high-resolution displays for anything. I'm not even talking about HIDPI here, just 1080p!

Looking at screenshots of linux desktops at what we would call today very low resolutions: I'm amazed at how much information they could display comfortably:

A screenshot of FVWM2 taken from the fvwm-ewmh sourceforge page

This was (originally) only an 800x600 screenshot! I scaled it up (nearest-neighbor) to prevent blurring when viewed on high-resolution devices. I think (other than the screen aspect ratio) it displays nearly as much information as most people view on their 4k monitors, unless they have extremely large monitors or very sharp eyesight.

That said, I'm not sure I'd elect to go back to 1024x768. Even 1366x768 (which is what I'm running on this BSD laptop) feels far more roomy.

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