GNOME 3.32 Lands Long-Awaited Fractional Scaling Support

GNOME 3.32 already picked up a wealth of improvements, polishing, and fixing this cycle, but as we hit the final stretch ahead of the desktop's release in two weeks a big feature just squeezed in...

To much surprise, hitting the Git branches of GNOME Shell and Mutter just minutes ago is the long in development work on fractional scaling! Nearly three years after Matthias Clasen opened up the bug to track fractional scaling, it's finally been addressed.

Fractional scaling allows for greater control over the UI scaling than the previous integer based scaling of 2, 3, etc, to instead support fractions like 3/2 (1.5) increase in user-interfaces. Fractional scaling is primarily to improve the user experience with modern HiDPI displays.

The GNOME Shell changes and Mutter changes have been merged ahead of GNOME 3.32.0.

It was looking like GNOME 3.32 would be another cycle without fractional scaling merged, but it landed at the last possible moment. Monday marks the hard code freeze for GNOME 3.32.0 ahead of the 3.32 release candidate on Wednesday. If all goes well, GNOME 3.32.0 will debut on 13 March.

Kudos to all those involved in finally getting GNOME's fractional scaling support across the finish line. Fractional scaling paired with multiple Wayland performance improvements, better eGPU support, and other optimizations really have me excited for GNOME 3.32 more so than any shiny end-user features/additions.