Fractional Scaling Might Soon Be Accomplished For GNOME

It looks like support for fractional scaling might be working in time for GNOME 3.26 to help out HiDPI users where integer-based scaling may be less than ideal.

A Phoronix reader pointed out some news today that I missed last weekend about prominent GNOME developer Matthias Clasen mentioning the work that's soon to happen on fractional scaling for GNOME. They have been making steps in this direction to support scaling at say 1.5x or any other fraction as an alternative to only scaling at 1x, 2x, or other whole numbers as is the case right now with GNOME's current HiDPI support.

With their changes around per-monitor frame-buffers, a new Mutter display configuration API, and other changes, they are nearly there in being able to support fractional scaling.

Canonical/Ubuntu ended up sponsoring a hackfest taking place in just over one week in Taipei where GNOME developers will be working on this fractional scaling support, possibly XWayland client support, and more. Details on that upcoming hackfest here. More details via Clasen's blog.

Good to see this HiDPI improvement for GNOME potentially being ready soon. Fractional scaling is also something KDE wants to eventually support too for improving their HiDPI support.