OS X has a very nice looking HiDPI mode where the effective screen resolution is only half of the monitor resolution, but with very smooth looking fonts. Is something like that also available for Windows 7 or Ubuntu 12.04?
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Windows already has DPI settings for decades. But most programs simply don't respect Windows' DPI value, therefore running a program with scaling larger than 100% in Windows XP or earlier often result in severely broken interface with overlarge or super small text, and blurry or pixelated graphics items.
Since Windows Vista, MS has added another scaling style in which all programs are reported to run on a 96-DPI screen and then be scaled uniformly, except when the app explicitly states that it supports custom DPI. That means old apps will have a blurry interface but is still large enough to be usable (no more in Windows 10, see below). But they still defaults to the old XP-style scaling until Windows 8.1
Although Windows 7's high DPI support is not as good as Windows 8/8.1, it's still much better than XP and previous versions. In Windows 8.1 MS has completely removed XP-style scaling options and you can only turn off that for each app individually. Also Windows 8.1 provides a new 200% DPI scaling option which you must manually set in Windows 7, and the result will almost be like OS X's HiDPI mode. It also supports different DPI setting for each display
Windows 10 made further progress by automatically scale text rendering in GDI apps so they don't appear blurry anymore (at least most of their interfaces are now crisp). For more information read
- High DPI Desktop Application Development on Windows
- Improving the high-DPI experience in GDI based Desktop Apps
- High-DPI Scaling Improvements for Desktop Applications in the Windows 10 Creators Update (1703)
Linux also have partially support for text scaling and/or DPI setting before but it's not very good. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is the first version that has complete support for tablets and high-DPI screens so unfortunately you won't have a good experience on Ubuntu 12.04. However almost all desktop environments just support integer scaling, very few have decent fractional scaling support
As of now (2020) it seems many desktop environments (DEs) already have good enough fractional scaling support. However KDE Plasma is the best per my experience. Many other DEs simply scale the text fractionally while scaling the interface in integer steps so the result is still terrible although it'll make the text readable. For some apps you may still need manual configuration though. For more information about setting HiDPI support on Linux read