5 ms·

Does Gnome under X11 allow you to set the desktop's size higher than the screen resolution and scale that down? Because that's all Apple's "fractional" scaling

Does Gnome under X11 allow you to set the desktop's size higher than the screen resolution and scale that down? Because that's all Apple's "fractional" scaling does-- macOS only supports integer scaling (specifically, 1x and 2x; iOS does 3x but not macOS); the "more space" scaling settings just render the screen at a resolution higher than the physical size of the panel and scale it to fit (for example, current 15" MacBook Pro panels are physically 2880x1800; the default screen resolution on the current machines is 3360x2100 with 2x scaling).

CyberShadow 8y ago
> Does Gnome under X11 allow you to set the desktop's size higher than the screen resolution and scale that down? FWIW, this is possible under X11 directly. Try running: xrandr --scale 2x2
- anticensor 8y ago
  I tried that and it said you need to specify an output.
  - gnomewascool 8y ago
    xrandr --scale 2x2 --output OUTPUT where OUTPUT will vary depending on what screens you actually have, but will usually be something like LVDS1 or VGA1. You can get the possible values with auto-completion in Bash (on Debian at least) or by running just xrandr.
kuschku 8y ago
Gnome does exactly that. While Android, Windows, Qt/KDE and the web went with real fractional scaling, GTK/Gnome, macOS and iOS went with just increasing the framebuffer size and scaling it down. As result, when rendering a GTK app (be it a video player or a game like Minecraft) on a 4K screen at 1.5x scale, you're actually rendering it at 6K resolution, which utterly destroys performance.
- vetinari 8y ago
  Gnome seems to do that per window, not per framebuffer like macOS does. The framebuffer size seems to be exactly the display resolution, plus you need GPU to do window scaling, you cannot let the output encoder to do the job. The Windows and Qt approach has it's own issues with fractional pixel positions, and the resulting problem with mapping integer input coordinates to these. And of course, it doesn't work nice with legacy apps (Gnome has to handle X11 apps, that won't tell anything about the scale they work with. See also: Gimp).

CyberShadow 8y ago

> Does Gnome under X11 allow you to set the desktop's size higher than the screen resolution and scale that down? FWIW, this is possible under X11 directly. Try running: xrandr --scale 2x2

anticensor 8y ago
I tried that and it said you need to specify an output.
- gnomewascool 8y ago
  xrandr --scale 2x2 --output OUTPUT where OUTPUT will vary depending on what screens you actually have, but will usually be something like LVDS1 or VGA1. You can get the possible values with auto-completion in Bash (on Debian at least) or by running just xrandr.

kuschku 8y ago

Gnome does exactly that. While Android, Windows, Qt/KDE and the web went with real fractional scaling, GTK/Gnome, macOS and iOS went with just increasing the framebuffer size and scaling it down. As result, when rendering a GTK app (be it a video player or a game like Minecraft) on a 4K screen at 1.5x scale, you're actually rendering it at 6K resolution, which utterly destroys performance.

vetinari 8y ago
Gnome seems to do that per window, not per framebuffer like macOS does. The framebuffer size seems to be exactly the display resolution, plus you need GPU to do window scaling, you cannot let the output encoder to do the job. The Windows and Qt approach has it's own issues with fractional pixel positions, and the resulting problem with mapping integer input coordinates to these. And of course, it doesn't work nice with legacy apps (Gnome has to handle X11 apps, that won't tell anything about the scale they work with. See also: Gimp).