GNOME 44 Mutter Adds fractional_scale_v1 Wayland Support

[mrjayviper]

So what's the fractional scaling that's available on gnome tweaks? Thanks

[curfew]

So what's the fractional scaling that's available on gnome tweaks? Thanks

That's restricted to font sizing. The actual scaling factor can be chosen from the main settings UI from under displays section. And no, it isn't experimental, it has been there for years.

[Aryma]

No it does not, simply because you have no need for such a feature and you would never use it anyway.

toxicity of Linux community at finest here

[skerit]

As darkdragon pointed out, you could already set a fractional scale in a Gnome Wayland session before but all applications would render at the next highest integer scale and the compositor would scale it down to the fractional scale. This would allow the compositor to communicate a fractional scale to the applications and, if they support fractional scaling, they render at that scale and don't need to be re-scaled by the compositor. My understanding is that applications that only support integer scales (all GTK apps) would tell the compositor they're using an integer scale and the old behavior will be followed.

I've always wondered why XWayland doesn't do the same.
It seems to do the opposite: render at the lowest integer scale & then upscales it. Causing the dreaded blurry windows.

[oiaohm]

I've always wondered why XWayland doesn't do the same.
It seems to do the opposite: render at the lowest integer scale & then upscales it. Causing the dreaded blurry windows.

The answer is horrible is so that legacy X11 applications that don't support HDPI have a usable sized interface.

https://pointieststick.com/2022/06/17/this-week-in-kde-non-blurry-xwayland-apps/

KDE has a option between scale by compositor and have X11 applications scale themselves. Yes set X11 applications to scale self and attempt to use a HIDPI incompadible X11 application say hello to insanely small not usable interface.

I do wish this setting was able to be chosen on a application by application base.

fractional_scale_v1 is not about the compositor scaling its about the compositor being able to put request to wayland application for X fractional scale if application say yes it can fractional scale at X scale then application itself renders at that scale. This can get around some scaling artifacts due to application side having more data.

Last time I looked gtk does not support fractional_scale_v1 newer versions of qt does. Hopefully gnome mutter having this feature that GTK will get support for it some point in future.

[Myownfriend]

That's restricted to font sizing. The actual scaling factor can be chosen from the main settings UI from under displays section. And no, it isn't experimental, it has been there for years.

It IS experimental but I believe some distros enable it out of the box. Either that or you set the flag years ago and forgot.

The following links to a discussion about whether or not they should have a toggle to enable it in settings. The most recent post is only 4 months old.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/1351

[Myownfriend]

Last time I looked gtk does not support fractional_scale_v1 newer versions of qt does. Hopefully gnome mutter having this feature that GTK will get support for it some point in future.

My understanding is that GTK5 is the earliest that they could support fractional scaling because the changes required would break the ABI.

[mangeek]

I'm really excited for this. I use fractional scaling today, but the screen size reported to my QEMU VMs is all wonky because the compositor tells QEMU that my 3000x2000 screen is 1714x1142. Hopefully this can help my emulators and VMs look better.

[oiaohm]

My understanding is that GTK5 is the earliest that they could support fractional scaling because the changes required would break the ABI.

That does not hold up. This is a backend problem.and will. GTK developers have not had the will to fully implement fractional scaling in the back-end. Around fonts under X11 and Windows there is a form of fractional scaling implemented in GTK that not provided under Wayland so GTK is not feature equal across platforms either.

[Estranged1906]

So will there be an official setting in GNOME 44 already? Or only further down the line?