My Experience Using the Pinebook Pro as a Daily Driver

[moonwalkers]

btw. reducing from 1920x1080 to 1366x768 INCREASES the available dpi for the screen to show.

Sorry mate, but I'm afraid you have to go back to the math class - DPI stands for "dots per inch", and the lower the resolution the lower the number of dots per inch is available, so dropping the resolution from 1920x1080 to 1366x768 in no way "increases the available dpi". But it would increase the apparent size of everything on the screen, that's correct. On an LCD screen - at the cost of image sharpness, I'm afraid. Unless you're using one of those extremely high-DPI screens like on modern high-end smartphones, where the pixels are so small it no longer matters how out of alignment the resolution used is with the physical grid.

Unlike on Windows or macOS, on Linux there are multiple ways to make things appear bigger or smaller on the screen. One of them is adjusting the screen resolution, which doesn't work on PBP (and BTW that doesn't work on Macbooks either), another is adjusting font sizes (no longer works in Windows, not sure if ever worked in macOS), and another is adjusting DPI scaling. As you've already been told, if you want to adjust the sizing of everything at the same time your best bet is to adjust DPI scaling. Some of the more "advanced" desktop environments like KDE and GNOME should have a setting to configure scaling using GUI, but if you're still using X11 then you can also adjust scaling by e.g. launching X.org with appropriate -dpi parameter. Where you set that -dpi parameter depends on how you launch your X.org - if you do it through display manager like SDDM it will be in that display manager's config files. I like setting mine to the actual physical resolution of the screen, which in case of PBP is 157 (roughly corresponds to scaling factor of 157/96=~1.6). That makes all fonts appear approximately the same size as if they were actually printed, so a 9-point element will take those ~9/72 of an inch on the screen just like it would on paper. The size appearance of your desired resolution of 1366x768 can be achieved by setting scaling factor to 1920/1366=~1.4 or 1.4*96=~135 DPI.

I get it, you just want to keep doing things the old way and expect to continue the old ways to work. But if that's the case then perhaps you should stay with the old hardware and software. No offense intended - I myself am a collector of old computers and somewhat of a computer history aficionado. But if there is anything I learned about computers, technology in general, or life overall through my hobby is that there is only one constant - change. That said, those changes do not happen overnight. systemd has been around for 11 years, by now it is a plenty established technology, and while it has plenty valid criticisms targeting it, making things easier from the viewpoint of a user managing services is a goal it does achieve, if you're willing to learn just a tiny bit (pretty much just run `systemctl --help`). ARM has been around for ages, but it is only now that it makes a headway into the desktop/laptop usage. There are architectural differences with x86 that go beyond just instruction set. If you don't like them - nobody is forcing you to buy an ARM laptop. You can always sell your PBP if you don't like it - thanks to the parts shortages, I'm sure you'll be able to sell yours in no time. Buying PBP and expecting things to work exactly the same way they work on an x86 laptop is like replacing Windows with Linux and expecting exactly the same experience - it's foolhardy.