It's wild how in 2023 some users still expect to be able to change the "resolution" on their LCD panel, as if it could magically change the number of physical pixels it has.
CRTs had variable resolution. LCDs don't, but emulated it with a built-in scaler so they could support the same input signal variety as CRTs. But modern display controllers can already scale their output. So when laptops came around, instead of putting scalers between the GPU and the panel like LCD monitors do, they just used the display controller scaler, to continue to expose a variety of resolutions to legacy software that expected that.
So now we're faking screen modes at the GPU/driver. Software asks the driver to set a very specific screen mode (not just resolution, also timings, analog signal details, etc). The driver/firmware completely ignores all that, takes only the resolution, configures the display controller to scale it up to some unrelated native mode, and goes with that. Likely with a million corner cases around refresh rates and timings being slightly wrong as a result.
Why do people set lower resolution modes on LCDs? Because they want to make things look bigger (and also terrible). But now we have UI scaling, which makes things look bigger and not terrible.
And for times when you actually want to scale, like when you're deliberately playing a game at a lower resolution for performance, the scaling features of display controllers are already exposed to software/compositors through modern KMS APIs directly, without having to use pretend display modes that don't exist.
And now in 2023, I'm having a conversation with KWin developers about how no, you can't just add pretend fake lower resolution screen modes and assume the driver supports them because "every other driver" (read: AMD/Intel/Nvidia drivers with a history of legacy on x86, and nothing else) supports it.
Apparently that feature of faking modes in KWin got added because GNOME added it, because users expected it and it was seen as a regression from Xorg. Users expect legacy nonsense, one DE adds it, the others have to copy it because otherwise people complain, and we keep on carrying legacy nonsense forever. Currently, Asahi Linux users see a pile of fake resolution modes in System Settings that don't work because our driver rightly rejects them as unsupported.
Looks like we found the right gate to hide that stuff on drivers that don't do virtual mode scaling, so hopefully that will go away pretty soon. And I will keep telling our users that if they want to make things bigger on their laptop screen, that's what the UI scale slider is for. Not fake blurry scaled resolutions.
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For once Hackernews is right. Hilarious that he's this pissed about people reacting negatively to his creepy and weird persona.
