On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 20:46 -0600, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
The native DPI of one of my laptops is 221 (Sony Vaio P) and the other is 140 (Vaio Z). Needless to say, 11pt at 96dpi looks fairly uselessly tiny on both. Assuming 96dpi seems rather the contrary of all the other design decisions in GNOME 3 - assuming brokenness and accommodating it, rather than 'doing the right thing' for the long term.
And what do you have the X server report when you plug said laptops in to external monitors or projectors? It's not even remotely a trivial problem to solve...
How about defaulting to 96dpi when you don't know any better, rather than all the time?
I know it's not a trivial problem to solve. (this is, of course, why historically there was a setting for it.) It does seem odd, though, that the chosen 'solution' is rather in the opposite vein to the trend of other chosen 'solutions' for GNOME 3, which is all I said.