Indeed 1024x768 resolution was the most common in early 2000s, in 2011 it was overtaken by 1366x768, in 2020 it was overtaken by 1920x1080.
(source: Desktop Screen Resolution Stats Worldwide | Statcounter Global Stats)
Ten years ago, 95% met the 1024 minimum width, 768 minimum height requirements. Unfortunately, nowadays there is a wider variety of image resolutions around, so all that we can say is that screens have become wider (from 1.33 to 1.78) and maximum resolution increased. We should change the recommended resolution based on a wide-screen aspect ratio, but I don’t think we can require higher resolution than 1366x768. I’ve submitted a pull request to update the documentation to 1366x768 minimum, 1920x1080 recommended.
However, in layout problems the most important factor is text size, because that determines the size of most Qt widgets. Text size depends on:
- size of the font chosen in the Slicer application settings
- font scaling setting of the operating system
- chosen application language (for example, German translation tends to be longer than the English original)
Font scaling is much more complex, as it is operating system dependent, and acceptable range depends on the screen size and eyesight of the user.
We could describe in the documentation how the text scaling may need to be adjusted if there are layout problems. We could also add more tests for detecting too wide widgets (current tests only check the module widget size in pixels and they don’t detect any issues now). But probably this new layout issue on macOS requires an investigation that focuses on this specific problem. It very well may be a macOS bug and we can live with workarounds (e.g., adjust application font size in Slicer application settings or don’t use maximized mode) until it fixed. If Apple does not provide a fix then Qt probably will, but we would need to update to Qt6 for that, which will take at least a couple of months.