The problem with Windows 11, as I see it...

[Aaron44126]

12 hours ago, Steerpike said:

Would you say that Win 10 is exactly like Win 11 in terms of this area?

.....

I'm also finding that various apps are doing a great job of handling 'on the fly' scaling. In Chrome, if I find myself on a page that is just a bit too small to read comfortably, I can use either Ctrl-+ or Ctrl-(scroll wheel) and the display scales up in 25% increments, and maintains (what looks to me like) 100% sharpness. Outlook similarly supports Ctrl-(scroll wheel) but NOT Ctrl-+ ).

 

AFAIK, Windows 11 and (later versions of) Windows 10 behave the same when it comes to DPI scaling.  That said, I haven't done a whole lot of testing on Windows 11, so there could be improvements that I am not aware of.  I am subscribed to a lot of Microsoft tech blogs where they post about the ins and outs of OS changes, so I'd think that they would have an article if they had made specific improvements to scaling in Windows 11, and I would have seen such a thing... but... maybe not.

 

The scaling inside of applications that you reference is not really related to system-level scaling, it's mostly handled by the application itself.  I think that you would find that the behavior is pretty consistent between Windows 11, and say, Windows 7.  Apps can scale most things fine by just blowing up the font size and adjusting the layout accordingly.  There might have been improvements to font rendering on later versions of Windows to help it look a little bit better.  Rasterized content (i.e. embedded images) might look blurry scaled up, unless the image was already higher resolution than its display size.

 

12 hours ago, Steerpike said:

Have you tried any 'app specific' tweaks for Quicken to get a better experience? It's shocking just how 'ugly' (blurry) Quicken is.

 

So, I haven't done anything to tweak Quicken's scaling, but I might try the "System (Enhanced)" DPI override if you think it works good.

 

I do have a couple of comments that I can make here.

 

The first comment is with regards to how Windows decides to scale applications that do not support native scaling.  It uses bitmap scaling like I mentioned before, basically rendering the apps at 100% and then blowing them up to match the desktop's scaling ratio.  The thing is, though, the bitmap scaling method used is different depending on if you are using an integer scaling ratio (200%, 300%, 400%, etc.) or not (150%, 175%, 225%, etc.).

 

With a non-integer scaling ratio, you get a blurry bilinear filter which I think is what you are complaining about.  Here, I have Quicken scaled to 175% (blurry) behind Notepad scaled to 175% (Notepad supports scaling natively so it is crisp by comparison).  I zoomed it way in so the individual pixels are visible.  (Click the image to zoom in if the forum shows it small.)

 

 

With an integer scaling ratio, Windows uses a pixel doubling / nearest neighbor scaling method.  There is no blur, it looks "blocky" instead.  This is what I experience using Quicken on a 4K panel with 200% scaling.  It basically looks the same as it would running on a 1080p panel at 100%; when you're not zoomed in like this the blockiness isn't noticeable unless you kind of stop and look at it closely.

 

 

This isn't just true of Quicken...  Any app that doesn't support native scaling behaves like this.

 

The second comment is regarding Quicken itself, just a little performance trick that I have discovered which you might find useful.

 

Quicken keeps everything open that you have ever looked at during the current session.  Every view that you open (transaction registers, screens with graphs, etc.) basically gets opened in a window and never closed, even if you move to a different view.  You might have noticed that it gets bogged down and slow if you have been bouncing around between a lot of different screens in the app, and closing and reopening it can restore performance back to "normal".  The reason is that, whenever you change something (add/delete/update a transaction), it has to update not only the window that you are currently looking at, but also all of the other views that you have had open in the current session (even though you can't see them).  ...And Quicken is not exactly super speedy at updating even one view in many cases.

 

The trick is that you can close out views, so that they will not have to be updated anymore, and that will improve performance.  Just hit Ctrl+F4 and the current view will be closed.  I discovered this by accident one day.  I'm in the habit of doing this whenever I am done with anything other than registers for accounts that I use most commonly.

 

Also, when I first open the app, I go to the "All transactions" screen, then I go back to the "Home" screen and close it with Ctrl+F4.  The "Home" screen will have to be updated on pretty much any transaction change, but I never look at it, so there's no reason to spend time waiting for it to update whenever I update or enter a transaction.  ...I have to visit "All transactions" first before going to close "Home" view, because it will not let you close a view if it is the only one running.

 

(You can also press Ctrl+Tab to switch to the most recent opened view "behind" the current one.  It doesn't let you cycle between all open views, though.)

 

I agree on the whole subscription thing, I am similarly disgruntled by the price of Quicken.  I need the Home & Business version which is the most expensive one.  It actually costs more than buying a personal Office 365 subscription, which seems crazy for the amount of "app" that you get.  ...But there's no way around it, and the $6/month or whatever is definitely worth it compared to the thought of trying to do the same work without Quicken.

 

...Though I am happy that the new management is actually cranking out real features and fixing stuff from time to time.  It seems like for the last several years before Intuit sold it, they would release a new version every year that was barely any different than the year before but want to charge full price.  (And you had to pay up at least every few years because they would discontinue online support for the old versions after a period of time.  So it was basically a subscription model already.)

 

[Edit]

One other thing I remembered.  You can actually add "DPI awareness" as a column in Task Manager if you want to see what's going on with each running program.  "Unaware" apps would be the blurry ones.

 

9 hours ago, Etern4l said:

While I don't have an easy way to test this exhaustively right now, in Gnome settings (on X11) scaling is very clearly a property of the display, not the system. Also apparently one can enable fractional scaling in Gnome too.

 

I would like to continue discussing the ins and outs of various Linux things, but separate from this discussion...  I'll try to make a  "Here's everything I'm worried about for a potential switch to Linux!" thread over in the Linux subforum sometime in the next week or two.

[Steerpike]

6 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

...

So, I haven't done anything to tweak Quicken's scaling, but I might try the "System (Enhanced)" DPI override if you think it works good.

...

I'm amazed at how good it's working for me!  It's so sharp I can just about get by without the 'large fonts' setting. But turning on large fonts is really easy on my eyes. 

 

6 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

One other thing I remembered.  You can actually add "DPI awareness" as a column in Task Manager if you want to see what's going on with each running program.  "Unaware" apps would be the blurry ones.

...

 

Good info!  Note, I have about 40 Google Chrome browser tabs open, and this is a snapshot of what I see for chrome in task manager: 

 

All but two sessions are labeled as 'Unaware', with just two 'Per-Monitor (v2)' and yet, Chrome is very sharp (unlike Quicken) and scales nicely.  I'm using Edge and it's the same - has just two 'Per-Monitor (v2)' entries.  So I'm guessing these are two 'non-tab-specific' processes. 

 

This has been a very enlightening discussion! 

[Aaron44126]

5 minutes ago, Steerpike said:

All but two sessions are labeled as 'Unaware', with just two 'Per-Monitor (v2)' and yet, Chrome is very sharp (unlike Quicken) and scales nicely.  I'm using Edge and it's the same - has just two 'Per-Monitor (v2)' entries.  So I'm guessing these are two 'non-tab-specific' processes.

 

Yes, Chrome is weird and launches many processes that don't actually have windows associated with them, and I'd suspect that only the actual GUI processes are marked DPI aware here.  (Chrome's scaling support is very good as you noted.)  ...Every tab gets a process, every extension gets a process, and there are some processes that just manage GPU access, networking, storage, and so on.  I think that they set it up this way just to make it harder for one process crashing to bring down the whole browser?  There are probably articles about it.

 

Anyway, you can see some of what Chrome is doing by looking at its own Task Manager (right-click the top bar, the empty space where tabs go above the URL, and select "Task Manager" from the menu).  You can match the PIDs with the PIDs in Windows Task Manager to see what is what.  (Not sure why you would really need to, but possibly interesting.)

[Mr. Fox]

 

[MyPC8MyBrain]

I didn't read every rant on this thread, I'm on the other side of the scale.

from XP I skipped vista, and windows 7, to windows 8.1.

from 8.1 I skipped 10 and adopted 11 as good enough to replace win8.1 simplicity with latest bells and whistle's.

when I say good enough I mean make it runs, feel, look, and behave the same as my old 8.1.

I never got on the bandwagon of the store based apps.
I am old school full programs for me, either standalone or installer is what I will use, never apps!
its also important which programs you install onto your system.
 

another key for me is I never use retail version of windows I always use Enterprise version.

Enterprise has less often and more scrutinized and stable updates then retail does, 

this gives me all the controls I need most home users don't have nor care for.

stripping the system to its bare minimum is must, I then build from there.

with normal applications and drivers never use apps.

after full treatment for me Win11 is clean snappy and works perfect.

 

 

i have both classic interface and new style whichever I chose to utilize (I prefer classic)

 

 

 

 

 

 

i have the classic task bar behavior restored, i unlocked my task bar so you can notice i have the classic quick launch working as well as gadgets (none of the sticky tab nonsense ty).
 

 

 

i even have old trusty Task manager in place of the new one (i don't like the new task manager)

 

 

in conclusion Win11 is the most feature advanced and malleable than any MS OS provided the end user thus far.

[Mr. Fox]

On 3/8/2023 at 3:12 PM, MyPC8MyBrain said:

in conclusion Win11 is the most feature advanced and malleable than any MS OS provided the end user thus far.

I'm glad that you like it.

 

I find it much uglier, slower, more restrictive and resistant to modification than prior versions of Windows. Windows 10 after v1809 and all versions of Winduhz 11 are probably the least desirable versions of Windows since Millennium Edition.

 

It's probably good that you skipped Windows 7 or you'd probably strongly dislike Windoze 10 and Winduhz 11 and find it very difficult to let it go like I do. They haven't really done anything good or right since Windows 7 in my opinion. All they have done is make it slower, uglier, added more data harvesting malware and increased the payload of worthless filth.

 

Other than tweaking a few unnecessary services, Windows 7 is ready to rock out of the box. W8.X and everything that came after have progressively required greater amounts tweaking and tuning and hacks in order to correct aesthetic atrocities to make them palatable for me. I hate having to waste my time fixing their mistakes, bad judgment and poor taste in GUI design.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

@Mr. Fox I couldn't agree more, I hate that millennials MS execs think that a personal computer should behave like a smartphone. I have to spend so much time on a brand new system just to get it working right. my prospective is not how much time I spend to get it to work rather afterwards when it is setup to my liking. and the fact that undoing the nonsense MS is doing is possible in win11 while retaining latest technology and compatibility.