KDE Lands Wayland Fractional Scaling Support

[oiaohm]

Cue Mr. oiaohm who will explain in 10 paragraphs how blurry fonts under Wayland is how things should be and I just need a 300 dpi monitor.

No, avis, you don't need only need a 300 dpi monitor. The correct setup to read his post is to use 5×3 wall of 300 dpi monitor.

That is not what I have ever written. The method Wayland protocol was first designed for we do need for applications that don't DPI scale they do exist under X11.

"properly antialiased" that the biggest problem. Wayland scaling solution was design while freetype was blocked by patents from having anti-aliasing. Blur of frational downscaling * Blur of anti-aliasing fonts=too much blur. Yes one or the other equals not jagged fonts.

I never said you need a 300dpi monitor.

Lastly under XFCE my fonts for all applications are crisp however when I start Firefox under Wayfire its fonts turn into a blurry mess. They are seemingly properly antialiased but it looks like they are scaled and scaled horribly. I've got zero environment variables.

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/3b393f95a2b4

Firefox had in fact implemented the core bit for application fractional scaling under Wayland 19 months ago. Yes the manual setting of firefox scale was hiding under about:config instead of environmental var. The stall was getting agreement on what protocol extension for sending fractional scale information to applications should win for automatic setting of this value.

avis I did say a while back firefox under Wayland had fractional scaling to you and that the hold up was agreement on protocol. Of course firefox still will need the final patch making application fractional scaling controlled by the protocol extension that won.

avis I have a 1080p monitor that due it size has a odd DPI. Guess what there are lots of applications that don't like that monitors DPI value and either don't scale or don't run with X11. So a single monitor setup can be hell. Yes a 1080p monitor that is only 30cm wide. Yes it not technically hidpi and it not technically lowdpi is that nice nasty middle ground. So application side scaling does not always work.

The reality we need both. Integer upscale and down scale to fractional for applications that cannot scale self correctly with the price of some blur. And applications that can be able to scale self.

Issue here X11 dpi work around was only half the fix and Wayland integer up fractional down was also only half the fix.

[skeevy420]

There's no anti-Wayland crowd, there's a crowd of people who want to get shit done, not jerk off to something which is touted a second coming of Christ while it makes your life horrible. Wayland was proclaimed ready to use at least five years ago. And it's only good/more or less complete if you're a Gnome user and lots of people (I'd say most people as indicated by various polls about your favorite DE over the past couple of years) are just not Gnome fans.

Lastly under XFCE my fonts for all applications are crisp however when I start Firefox under Wayfire its fonts turn into a blurry mess. They are seemingly properly antialiased but it looks like they are scaled and scaled horribly. I've got zero environment variables. XWayland is not even installed, so it's a pure Wayland session. And I don't know where to look, nor I'm interested in that at all. Fonts are absolutely basic and crucial for me. I don't want to break my neck Googling for solutions.

Under X.org you set your DPI and it just works (for a single monitor which is how ~99% of people work). Under Wayland? Nope. 25 levels of complexity.

Cue Mr. oiaohm who will explain in 10 paragraphs how blurry fonts under Wayland is how things should be and I just need a 300 dpi monitor.

On KDE my desktop is sometimes a blurry mess when I resume from standby and, when that happens, games will sometimes take a 20FPS or more hit until I log out and log back on...oh, wait, logging off when using SDDM Wayland causes my system to completely freeze up...so I get this FPS hit until I re-fscking-boot. I need to create a 2nd user to see if user switching fixes KDE when it goes Wayland Wonky. I shouldn't need to create a 2nd user for "In Case Shit" reasons.

And this is using 200% scaling with Wayland. That's one of the values that should Just Work®.

On X11 I set it to 200% scaling, equivalent to 192 DPI, and I'm happy. I can log on and off without having to hard power off. If my screen blanks it isn't a crap shoot that I'll resume with crisp or blurry fonts, responsive or laggy programs, or blacked out windows or drawn windows. I don't have to drop SMPlayer for VLC since my preferred video player doesn't work on Wayland. I'd prefer my scaling to be a hair higher, but since I alternate between X and W I leave them the same so I only have to tweak the mouse pointer size between sessions...which is damn annoying when you're using a session where you can't log off...

On KDE the scaling on Wayland and X11 are done the same way, in the same places, so it's the same level of complexity regardless. IMHO, that says more about XFCE's shortcomings than it does about Wayland not being ready.

Here's what's very, very ironic between my setup and yours -- when the blurriness happens to me Firefox and other GTK programs are still crisp. It's Qt programs and KDE itself that are blurred up.

What sucks is that I know that a lot of times I come off as anti-Wayland® when I'm really just pro-stuff-that-just-works™. I really do want Wayland to succeed because I understand why they're doing what they're doing and a lot of the benefits it can potentially bring. At the same time, however, when the GUI breaks then, for most people, basically everything breaks so it is very, very understandable that people complain about that.

And if I had some heavy duty aluminum foil hand I could go into how "They" seem to not like working with "Not GNOME".

Anyhoo, I hope this stuff fixes my issues so that I can finally bump it up to 225% like I do on Windows. 200% is just a hair too tiny but 300% is way, way too much. Scroll wheel zooming with Firefox, Kate, Yakuake, etc is currently my ass saver.

[MorrisS.]

There's no anti-Wayland crowd, there's a crowd of people who want to get shit done, not jerk off to something which is touted a second coming of Christ while it makes your life horrible. Wayland was proclaimed ready to use at least five years ago. And it's only good/more or less complete if you're a Gnome user and lots of people (I'd say most people as indicated by various polls about your favorite DE over the past couple of years) are just not Gnome fans.

Lastly under XFCE my fonts for all applications are crisp however when I start Firefox under Wayfire its fonts turn into a blurry mess. They are seemingly properly antialiased but it looks like they are scaled and scaled horribly. I've got zero environment variables. XWayland is not even installed, so it's a pure Wayland session. And I don't know where to look, nor I'm interested in that at all. Fonts are absolutely basic and crucial for me. I don't want to break my neck Googling for solutions.

Under X.org you set your DPI and it just works (for a single monitor which is how ~99% of people work). Under Wayland? Nope. 25 levels of complexity.

Cue Mr. oiaohm who will explain in 10 paragraphs how blurry fonts under Wayland is how things should be and I just need a 300 dpi monitor.

xfce is not ready for wayland. Not all depends on Wayland. Reading the main article where it is understandable how much graphical apis impact on the whole operating system. Wayland is a structural change which involves all the operating system and apps as well. So many factors influence the good implementation of Wayland such as the changes the developer of the several operating systems and apps have to do in order to make all the stuff Wayland compliant. Xfce is not ready for Wayland and Wayland developers cannot develop what involves others' competence.

[oiaohm]

On KDE my desktop is sometimes a blurry mess when I resume from standby and, when that happens, games will sometimes take a 20FPS or more hit until I log out and log back on...oh, wait, logging off when using SDDM Wayland causes my system to completely freeze up...so I get this FPS hit until I re-fscking-boot. I need to create a 2nd user to see if user switching fixes KDE when it goes Wayland Wonky. I shouldn't need to create a 2nd user for "In Case Shit" reasons.

I have kwin kde compositor after restore from suspend when running with X11 also resume with a blurry mess. Yes under X11 I have end up setup with way to kill and restart kwin with its different miss behaviors.

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/wikis/Restarting

Kde wayland will most likely need this restarting stuff to work.

skeevy420 its really simple to miss all the ways kwin compositor goes wacko under X11 as well. Yes I have need a second user for when kwin under X11 jumps really south and decides to block all input and output. Lot of ways kwin need to be better quality in general.

[skeevy420]

I have kwin kde compositor after restore from suspend when running with X11 also resume with a blurry mess. Yes under X11 I have end up setup with way to kill and restart kwin with its different miss behaviors.

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/wikis/Restarting

Kde wayland will most likely need this restarting stuff to work.

skeevy420 its really simple to miss all the ways kwin compositor goes wacko under X11 as well. Yes I have need a second user for when kwin under X11 jumps really south and decides to block all input and output. Lot of ways kwin need to be better quality in general.

I haven't had X11 resume blurry. I'll consider myself lucky in that regard. Usually it's the compositor and effects that quit working and I have to Shift+ALT+12 to turn them back on...and it has been a while since I've had to do that. Heck, on X11 I just made Firefox go wonky by turning the compositor on and off and changing the window size fixed it. When Firefox goes wonky on Wayland I have to restart it (fortunately Firefox saves its state).

I'm not saying that X11 sessions don't have their issues, but compared to Wayland the issues are minimal and can sometimes even be fixed by tapping a keyboard shortcut instead whereas on Wayland "Did you try turning it off and back on again?" (restarting programs or sessions) is basically the only fix when things go south.

That's my experience between X and W on KWin and KDE. Your results may vary...Shit, everyone's results seem to vary on KDE.

[Quackdoc]

YAY!, finally a use for fractional scaling, this will fix so many issues, people run into, but mainly im just happy my gpu will stop working overtime xD

[TemplarGR]

Wayland is just Pulseaudio v.2.0 . Like Pulseaudio, initially there were some issues, many not Pulse's fault, but rather ALSA's, drivers', or distros' (Ubuntu), and many people bashed it constantly online. A few years later and it became the defacto standard, so much so that when Pipewire audio came to replace it, many insist on using Pulse still.... Same will happen with Wayland, 2-3 years from now we will all have forgotten Xorg ever existed.

[bple2137]

I don't want to think about that. Sorry. I've filed close to a thousand bug reports in my life, I couldn't care less about something whose core features are outright broken. Wayland doesn't deal with fonts, I know, but I don't want to bang my head against the wall trying to figure out whether it's a Firefox or Wayfire issue. I'm not sixteen any more. I want things to work out of the box. Just, you know, as they work in Windows, MacOS, Android or iOS.



I've noticed with Wayland all the issues are not Wayland's, the protocol is just perfect.

I'm unable to reproduce that on any compositors and I tried Mutter, Kwin and Sway (which is based of the same library as Wayfire). Just saying. I know it still isn't perfect, I know there are still some features missing and for some that is deal breaker, but I was able to forget I'm running a Wayland session on both my (differently purposed) setups and just get anything I need done (from my coding/devOps job, calls and screen sharing, music making to gaming) so I wouldn't consider it fundamentally broken either.

Nobody sane considered it ready 5 years ago and I wouldn't even consider it completely ready now. Though now is the time that the tech has actual push and there are clear improvements that we witness. Heck it already does few things here and there better than X11 could ever do... Fine, don't use it if you like your classic WM, but why depreciating it?

[avis]

Wayland is just Pulseaudio v.2.0 . Like Pulseaudio, initially there were some issues, many not Pulse's fault, but rather ALSA's, drivers', or distros' (Ubuntu), and many people bashed it constantly online. A few years later and it became the defacto standard, so much so that when Pipewire audio came to replace it, many insist on using Pulse still.... Same will happen with Wayland, 2-3 years from now we will all have forgotten Xorg ever existed.

Wayland is nothing like PA.

PA retains a near perfect ALSA compatibility and offers great features on top of it, first of all, multiplexing which was horrible to set up in ALSA using dmix and then applications still could open ALSA devices exclusively. PA got into a great working shape in a few years at most.

We've had Wayland for close to 15 years now and it's still a bloody mess and there's little to no compatibility with X11. For instance XWayland applications cannot use the systray along with being unable to do most of the stuff available under Xorg.

[avis]

I'm unable to reproduce that on any compositors and I tried Mutter, Kwin and Sway (which is based of the same library as Wayfire). Just saying. I know it still isn't perfect, I know there are still some features missing and for some that is deal breaker, but I was able to forget I'm running a Wayland session on both my (differently purposed) setups and just get anything I need done (from my coding/devOps job, calls and screen sharing, music making to gaming) so I wouldn't consider it fundamentally broken either.

Nobody sane considered it ready 5 years ago and I wouldn't even consider it completely ready now. Though now is the time that the tech has actual push and there are clear improvements that we witness. Heck it already does few things here and there better than X11 could ever do... Fine, don't use it if you like your classic WM, but why depreciating it?

I didn't depreciate it, I objected to the earlier poster.