More accurately, you have spotted not a Linux user in general, but a user of certain Linux distributions, which in my opinion have inadequate display configuration settings.
I am also using only Linux on all my desktops and laptops, and I have never used any display with a resolution less than 4k, for at least the last 12 or 13 years.
Despite of that, I have never encountered any problems with "scaling", because in Linux I have never used any kind of "scaling" (unlike in Windows, which has a font "scaling").
In the kind of Linux that I have been using, I only set an appropriate dots-per-inch value for the monitor, which means that there is no "scaling", which would reduce graphic quality, but all programs render the fonts and other graphic elements at an appropriate size and using in the right way the display resolution.
I configure dots-per-inch values that do not match the actual dpi values of the monitors, but values that ensure that the on-screen size is slightly larger than the on-paper size, because I stay at a greater distance from the monitor than I would keep a paper or a book in my hand (i.e. I set higher dpi values than the real ones, so that any rendering program will believe that the screen is smaller than in reality, so it will render e.g. a 12 point font at a slightly bigger size than 12 points and e.g. an A4 page will be bigger on screen than an A4 sheet of paper; for instance I use 216 dpi for a 27 inch 4k Dell UltraSharp monitor).
Emacs user. And the fonts I use have to work with anti-aliasing turned off.
Right now I'm using a Dell/Alienware AW3225DM and it's perfect for my needs (work + occasional gaming, and most of my gaming is retro). Best Buy was discounting these during the Xmas season.
I do not want anything higher than 2560x1440 because it makes my fonts look tiny, or I have to turn anti-aliasing on. Neither option is OK with me.
Any fonts look much better on a monitor with a higher resolution and the size of the fonts must not vary with the resolution of the monitor. A 4k monitor always provides more legible text than an 2560x1440 monitor.
The size of the fonts used by your documents is specified in typographic points, e.g. 12 points or 14 points. This corresponds to a fixed size on the screen, regardless of the screen resolution. The increased resolution only makes the letters more beautiful, not smaller.
If your fonts become smaller on a monitor with a higher resolution, then you are holding it in the wrong way, i.e. your operating system is badly configured and it does not know the correct dots-per-inch value for your monitor, so it uses a DPI value that corresponds to the obsolete VGA monitors.
A decent operating system should configure automatically the right DPI, because the monitor provides this value to the GPU when it is initialized.
Despite this, for some weird reason many operating systems do not use the DPI value read from the monitor to configure automatically the graphics interface, so it must still be configured manually by the user. Even worse is that the corresponding setting is frequently well hidden, so it is difficult to discover.
In any case, these endless discussions about fonts being to small on high-resolution monitors have been caused only by some incompetent morons who for inexplicable reasons have been in charge of the display settings of the popular operating systems. The user may have reasons to override the true DPI value of the monitor, but by default the OS should have always used the value provided by the monitor EDID, and then you would have never seen any change in font sizes when substituting monitors with different resolutions (except when even more incompetent Web designers specify some sizes in pixels instead of length units; allowing pixels besides length units for the sizes of graphic elements has been a huge mistake, but when this was done several decades ago, most computers did not have GPUs yet, so there were concerns about the rasterization speed in software).
I used to work in my mom and dad's print shop when I was a kid. 6 picas in an inch, 12 points in a pica, and by the time you go home your hands smell like hypo. That should give you an idea of how old I am.
For a kid I was passably good at setting up headlines for paste-up, but I never had to be the one who used an X-Acto Knife.
I'll die on the hill where 2K is better than 4K if your livelihood depends on having to stare at a screen at a distance of 60cm for upwards of 10 hours a day, longer sometimes.
I also think you missed my point about about the anti-aliasing. For various reasons I still use Windows and some of my favorite monospace fonts only exist in the the .FON format. I can emulate the X-Windows experience of using the misc-fixed-medium family and it works just fine for my needs.
I agree that on monitors with insufficient resolution ancient bitmap fonts can be sharper, because they are free of artifacts caused by mismatch between the shape of the letters and the pixel grid.
Your problem is precisely that you use monitors with a too low resolution. On monitors with a high enough resolution, you approach the quality of printed paper and you can use monospace fonts that are more beautiful than any bitmap fonts, without being able to perceive the pixels.
The only problem is that big monitors also need a bigger resolution and the combination of big size with big resolution can be expensive.
While for a size of 27" or 32" the 4k monitors can be quite cheap, I believe that at such sizes a 5k resolution is the minimum for good text rendering, and 5k monitors remain expensive.
In the limit, as pixel density increases, regular, unhinted floating-point-x text looks just like it would on a printed page. How can you get better than that? With enough resolution, you free yourself from all the hacks we've devised to make text on a computer halfway tolerable. Shouldn't doing so be the goal?
If you want that blocky-font retro look, you can use vector art to make squares.
plasma 6 for example has really good fractional scaling, i'd argue it works nicer than windows, where some old apps do not get rendered in higher resolution, some apps do not properly take advantage of it.
I mean, sure, but you're basically saying "anything other than the absolute top-end displays are absolutely awful". 133 PPI is going to be higher pixel density than >99% of desktop monitors that people are actually using.
e.g. The Steam hardware survey only goes down to 0.23% usage, and doesn't have any >4K resolution listed.
No, it is a poor pixel density when compared with a printed book, which should be the standard for judging any kind of display used for text.
At the sizes of 27" or 32", which are comfortable for working with a computer, 5k is the minimum resolution that is not too bad when compared with a book or with the acuity of typical human vision.
For a bigger monitor, a 4k resolution is perfectly fine for watching movies or for playing games, but it is not acceptable for working with text.
I have an LG OLED C3 as a monitor, 42". I may be able to distinguish separate pixels if looking at a '.' or something like that (a stuck pixel happened for a few weeks, which I could notice on a white background).
But the density is definitely enough for text for the distance required for such a screen size. At least when using grayscale AA, because OLED subpixel...
