The Continuing Story of Laptop Screen Resolutions

I have a new laptop. It runs linux (yay!), and it has a screen (duh).

The screen is 1440x900 pixels, and approximately 30x19 cm in size (that's 12" by 7.5" for you non-metric folks). Some elementary arithmetic gives a screen resolution of just about exactly 120 dpi.

Now, DPMI (or something) happily rattles this information on to the X server, which then duly loads up all my tools with 120-dpi fonts. All is wonderful, yes?

All is not wonderful.

The problem with this shenanigan is that the screen is SMALL. I want maximum information - and I usually sit close to the screen (unlike with my gigantic at-work monitors). And there is LOTS of software that has only ever been tested at 96 dpi resolution - the 120-dpi fonts simply don't fit into their dialog boxes, which conveniently have their sizes specified in pixels. (BLETCH!)

There's help to be had - deep in the KDE menus, "Control Center / Appearance & Themes / Fonts", there's a choice that says "Force fonts DPI", which I can toggle between "Disabled", "96 DPI" and "120 DPI". That fixes the issue for KDE-aware programs, and a seemingly random selection of other programs. Not all by any means!

But - why oh why is it that I have to go through this rigmarole to achieve the desired result, fixing only part of the problem - when it would be SO much simpler if I could just tell the X server to lie to the software about the screen resolution?

Ours not to wonder why.... that's the way it is.

Of course the RIGHT solution is to make people stop specify dialog boxes in pixels, and make them resizable to the font size. And pigs should fly, too.

Sigh.