KDE Seeing Fresh Improvements For HiDPI Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Seeing Fresh Improvements For HiDPI Support

It took the GNOME/Ubuntu side until Canonical developer Daniel van Vugt picked up a 4K display with Intel graphics for various 4K/Intel graphics optimizations to be discovered and continue to be addressed for the GNOME desktop. Now on the KDE side, well known contributor Nate Graham recently picked up a new laptop with HiDPI display and there he has been working to resolve a number of lingering high DPI issues on the KDE front...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-HiDPI-2020-Improvements

[edwaleni]

Sounds like we need an open source regression test lab.

Some feature doesn't work unless 1 person in 1 group gets 1 piece of hardware.

This sounds incredibly inefficient.

[FireBurn]

I've reported a couple of these recently, lets see how they get on at fixing them. The good news is Martin is no longer around auto-closing bugs he doesn't like

[aufkrawall]

This sounds incredibly inefficient.

It indeed does, but look how bad fractional scaling is on Windows 10. I couldn't stand it with 27" @4k vs. 1440p.

[Mthw]

Speaking about HiDPI, hopefuly, fractional scaling on Wayland will get fixed soon as well (It works fine on X11).
There is an entire list of things:

• Cursor being twice as big with the same settings,
• Desktop widgets being bigger,
• Desktop icons being bigger,
• Panel being blurry,
• Screenshots having the scaled down size,
• Mouse cursor size varying by app (Qt,GTK,Wayland,Xwayland).
• Dragged items being bigger
• Xwayland apps not scaling, just being stretched/blurred
• ...

Not counting the usual issues like:

• clipboard not working
• dragging an item crashing plasmashell
• plasmashell not starting on startup (black screen with cursor only) or starting and crashing repeatedly on startup
• random processes like kdeconnectd using 100% of CPU until killed
• ...

Anybody else?

[mroche]

Sounds like we need an open source regression test lab.

Some feature doesn't work unless 1 person in 1 group gets 1 piece of hardware.

This sounds incredibly inefficient.

We need a better way for developers to get access to equipment necessary to round out what is or will be "commonplace" functionality. Or even try to get ahead of the curve for once. Something other than "let’s hope someone decides to one day buy one of their own." Maybe some kind of vendor lending pool that orgs can contract with, or better yet, put some org budget towards supplying the devs directly.

As someone in the graphics and animation space, the lackluster approach to HiDPI, wider gamuts, higher bit-depth, and HDR is disappointing, but I know a stack dev is unlikely to go out of their way to purchase something with those specs. And they have to be interested in doing it in the first place, unless they are hired/paid to do that specific task.

Personal opinion/experience incoming:

In regards to HiDPI specifically, I use a 15" 2017 MacBook Pro [220ppi] for $dayJob (not by choice). I have it hooked up to my personal non-HiDPI 27" 2560x1440 108ppi display, and use both monitors simultaneously. I also set the MBP to true Retina (i.e. "200%" so logical resolution is 1440x900) and I have to be honest the text content is significantly crisper, cleaner, and nicer to read on the MacBook display compared to my monitor. That's not to say that the display is bad, it's not and I love it, but when comparing text _at the same perceptual size_ there's no comparison. It's a visible difference, particularly noticeable in monospace fonts. And the HiDPI display handles smaller fonts much better than the external monitor. And yes, I verified it has the same behavior on my Linux side with font-rendering, so it's not just macOS botching scaling somehow.

However, Apple has decided to forgo this and use fractional scaling by default, so the experience of text is similar until you force the correct, non-fractional scaling.

Cheers,
Mike

[Mez']

Speaking about HiDPI, hopefuly, fractional scaling on Wayland will get fixed soon as well (It works fine on X11).
There is an entire list of things:

• Cursor being twice as big with the same settings,
• Desktop widgets being bigger,
• Desktop icons being bigger,
• Panel being blurry,
• Screenshots having the scaled down size,
• Mouse cursor size varying by app (Qt,GTK,Wayland,Xwayland).
• Dragged items being bigger
• Xwayland apps not scaling, just being stretched/blurred
• ...

Not counting the usual issues like:

• clipboard not working
• dragging an item crashing plasmashell
• plasmashell not starting on startup (black screen with cursor only) or starting and crashing repeatedly on startup
• random processes like kdeconnectd using 100% of CPU until killed
• ...

Anybody else?

On X11, there's still an ugly bug with fractional scaling intermediate values (125, 150, 175%). The GDM mouse cursor is kept (and stuck) in the foreground of the desktop session while the X cursor is working normally. Making it 2 cursors in your session.
That's really annoying for my 65" 4K TV monitor, as 100% is not legible in any way, but I'm not old enough to need 200%.

It's bothering the hell out of me, and the fix in the bug report doesn't work at launch, you have to log out and back in, Making it a real blocker to use it.
And since wayland can't play videos at 4k60, I can't use it instead.

[R41N3R]

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.

[intelfx]

The GDM mouse cursor is kept (and stuck) in the foreground
<...>
And since wayland can't play videos at 4k60, I can't use it instead.

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...

[Vistaus]

It indeed does, but look how bad fractional scaling is on Windows 10. I couldn't stand it with 27" @4k vs. 1440p.

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