KDE Seeing Fresh Improvements For HiDPI Support

[Hibbelharry]

But but but... Windows is supposed to be *the* best OS that Linux distros have to live up to!

In fact fractional scaling works mostly well on Windows 10 these days. It has been really bad in Windows 8 and older, but Windows 10 did a big step forward to the point I consider the scaling to be really usable.

[intelfx]

But but but... Windows is supposed to be *the* best OS that Linux distros have to live up to!

I'm not sure about aufkrawall's experience, but in my opinion fractional scaling on Windows 10 indeed does work quite nicely. I have Windows 10 on my gaming VM — it runs with 150% scaling out of the box (I didn't bother to personalize it in any way) and I have not noticed any bugs or problems with it.

[hetzbh]

Great work!

There is an old big which wasn't fixed with scaling and KDE - and it's the Konsole's. As soon as you enable scaling and you scale a bit, open konsole and try to do some simple stuff - list directories, cat some files - and you'll see some mysterious lines.

This is the bug report: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373232

[aufkrawall]

I'm not sure about aufkrawall's experience, but in my opinion fractional scaling on Windows 10 indeed does work quite nicely.

You can basically find any issue listed by Nate on his blog (and beyond) also for the Windows 10 scaling: Lots of icons don't scale 1:1 with text, text might get cut off, weird spacing where things aren't scaled properly, fonts get fat, lots of administration OS UIs are blurry, dragging the scrollbar in Firefox isn't fluid anymore, other artifacts when resizing UI elements etc.
It's very flawed when taking a closer look.

[intelfx]

You can basically find any issue listed by Nate on his blog (and beyond) also for the Windows 10 scaling: Lots of icons don't scale 1:1 with text, text might get cut off, weird spacing where things aren't scaled properly, fonts get fat, lots of administration OS UIs are blurry, dragging the scrollbar in Firefox isn't fluid anymore, other artifacts when resizing UI elements etc.
It's very flawed when taking a closer look.

Honestly c.b.a. to google for some random dude's blog by his given name. Could you link to any tangible proof directly?

[Ladis]

Windows 10 is with us already for 5 years and the current version has HiDPI/MultiDPI much improved from the initial version. E.g. those blurry old dialogs (not redesigned for HiDPI) are sharper now (renders in the physical resolution but tells the app the LowDPI resolution it expects - only bitmaps are now blurred). Also it's possible to force the DPI mode per app, e.g. an app says it supports HiDPI and you find out it doesn't everywhere - you can force it to run in LowDPI and upscale the window content as a bitmap. Also no more problems with much bigger/smaller context menus etc. among monitors with different DPI. Even that Firefox is smooth nowadays running on HiDPI display.

[ngraham]

Nice work, I've experienced many scaling bugs by myself but I never wrote a bug report as I always expected that these things are too obvious. On my desktop I've only scaled up the DPI value instead as by this the results have been better for me, except for Gtk not increasing font size logically.

What's obvious to you may not be obvious to others. It's obvious to you because you're you!

[Mez']

Are you using KDE with GDM?

I was just about to recommend the newest Mutter 3.36.4 until I realized this is a thread about KDE...

Mthw didn't really specify any DE in his comment (that I was replying to).
Thus, regardless of the article, I was actually talking about GDM with Gnome. The double cursor issue appears with Gnome.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mutter/+bug/1829221

[intelfx]

Mthw didn't really specify any DE in his comment (that I was replying to).
Thus, regardless of the article, I was actually talking about GDM with Gnome. The double cursor issue appears with Gnome.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...r/+bug/1829221

What I meant is, if you are staying on X11 because Wayland can't play 4k@60, then give the newest (3.36.4) Mutter/GNOME Shell a spin. This release fixed a long-standing regression that causes a brutal performance drop.

[markc]

Clevo 17" 4K with Plasma 5.19 and I find that 200% and 300% percent will avoid those nasty horizontal lines in Konsole but my preferred 250% (or anything else) has those damn horizontal lines. 200% is effectively 1920x1080 and 300% is 1280x720 (from a web browsers pov) so seeing as I now need glasses I am trailing 300% and finding it quite comfortable. Back to the '90s If my 4K TV worked then I'd be very happy with 200% but my HDMI output only works with Nvidia and that then introduces a whole other mess of HiDPI artifacts.

If I knew work on fine-tuning HiDPI was held up until someone got the right hardware then I would have been happy to donate funds.