KDE Seeing Fresh Improvements For HiDPI Support

[R41N3R]

Did anybody try some games when scaling is enabled? I tried that on Plasma Wayland and games are somehow scaled up too and the mouse input is completely off. Well, I will disable scaling again and return to my workaround of just increasing the DPI until this is solved.

[zoomblab]

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

I don't know what you mean. Personally I recently had to start using Windows 10 on a hi definition laptop after many years of exclusive Linux usage (mainly Ubuntu Unity and KDE) and I was surprised how well the UI scaling works - in addition to butter smooth performance @ 60 fps and super fast response to my inputs. Sadly that shows to me how behind the whole stack is in Linux.

[R41N3R]

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

Well, I do write bug reports, no worries, but usually for the things that really bother me.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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!

[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.

[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?

[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.