Fractional Scaling Might Soon Be Accomplished For GNOME

[doom_Oo7]

I really hope that Plasma will follow soon.

Plasma uses Qt which has supported fractional scaling for... almost a year

[elvenbone]

But neither the scaling slider in Plasma's screen settings KCM nor the QT_SCALING_*-variables work as one would expect (at least not between the integers). Some panels and menus stay the same size, some scale to 2x and some scale partially...
I hope GNOME gets this right, integer scaling is rather useless for anything but 4K laptops.

Honestly, UI scaling is one thing that Microsoft has done better since its WPF framework (and RT framework, the so-called successor). UI adjustment to text scaling is still bad, but the UI scaling itself just works for all the programmes, sorry, apps, that were written in these frameworks. And WPF was conceived with Windows Vista, a decade ago.

[ldo17]

It doesn't work great for when you need things other than the text scaled up. Which is the case with my tablet, for instance. Hitting the close button can be an exercise in frustration... (And yes, the other extreme of 2x scaling with fonts scaled down doesn't work either because elements are too large and thus don't fit on screen. The DPI is 144, which is exactly 1.5x.)

It’s peculiar that Android had a solution to this years ago, by measuring everything in your layouts in “dp” (device-independent pixels, nominally 1/160 inch) and having the UI autoscaled to the actual device DPI. Yet desktop systems have been remarkably slow to adopt anything similar.

[zamadatix]

It’s peculiar that Android had a solution to this years ago, by measuring everything in your layouts in “dp” (device-independent pixels, nominally 1/160 inch) and having the UI autoscaled to the actual device DPI. Yet desktop systems have been remarkably slow to adopt anything similar.

DP is no different than percentage, you've been able to do this on any desktop toolkit for decades. If you really like it being exactly 1/160th an inch save that percentage to a variable called "DP" in your app.

The real difference between is on mobile you've had to deal with common devices on different DPI for over 10 years (which is about when mobile took off meaning no legacy), desktop has only recently had high DPI displays become common and has legacy code to deal with.

[linuxgeex]

If you care more about appearance than performance then you could always use integer scaling and then use xrandr to produce any intermediate fractional scaling you'd like using the --scale and --panning to create a virtual resolution of your choosing.

I use the following to do the exact opposite of HiDPI scaling:
xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1920x1080 --scale 1.5x1.5 --panning 2880x1536

That gives me virtual QHD on a 50" $300 RCA TV so I can have my IDE, browser, shell, skype etc all tiled on the screen at the same time much like having a wall of 4 1440x810 displays. I have subpixel rendering set to greyscale since the RGB no longer aligns. It's slightly blurry compared to having the real display hardware, but I'm using XFCE4's alt+wheel zoom feature when I care about pixels, and I have hotkeys to switch the xrandr scaling on/off as well.

Having subpixel set to greyscale means my fonts aren't super sharp even when I turn the scaling off, but there's an important side-effect that's worthwhile to me: If you do have RGB subpixel rendering enabled then Gimp and Inkscape will idiotically use your machine's hardware pixel order when you save your output. That's great if you never share your work. It's atrocious if you do print layouts, web design, or desktop wallpaper art that you want to share.

[bkor]

If you care more about appearance than performance then you could always use integer scaling and then use xrandr to produce any intermediate fractional scaling you'd like using the --scale and --panning to create a virtual resolution of your choosing.

I use the following to do the exact opposite of HiDPI scaling:
xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1920x1080 --scale 1.5x1.5 --panning 2880x1536

That's pretty much what is planned AFAIK (please correct me if I'm wrong). First use integer scaling, then have the compositor scale down (e.g. xrandr for X11, something else for Wayland). Not sure how that'll interact with fonts.

Question: Why 1536 in above example and not 1620?

[carewolf]

I've been using 160% font scaling for a year and it works great. (Available under "Fonts" in the Gnome Tweak Tool.) I didn't realize that Gnome didn't have fractional HiDPI support.

Font scaling is different, it is basically adjusting the system DPI. 160% font-scaling is just setting the DPI to 96x1.6.

[linuxgeex]

That's pretty much what is planned AFAIK (please correct me if I'm wrong). First use integer scaling, then have the compositor scale down (e.g. xrandr for X11, something else for Wayland). Not sure how that'll interact with fonts.

Question: Why 1536 in above example and not 1620?

Because the angle I look at the TV from distorts the height by roughly 1536:1620 ratio. I've got the gamma adjusted for the angle too as this is a TN panel display.

[darkbasic]

Plasma uses Qt which has supported fractional scaling for... almost a year

You obviously didn't even try to use Plasma with fractional scaling...

[reavertm]

Instead of adding niche features I wish they fixed their broken "reference" email client with sarcastic name "Evolution". Mail composer is totally broken: "undo" doesn't work, clearing formatting doesn't work, setting text style doesn't work, adding columns/rows to tables doesn't work. Garbage level email client. Recipients with spaces and/or commas in name on TO/CC list are improperly quoted when replying, the list of bugs is endless for this "corporate grade" software. The only thing that makes me use Evo is EWS support. If the rest of Gnome is bug ridden garbage like Evo, I'm not surprised nobody sane is using this "reference desktop".