6 ms·

Its 2019 and the leading linux DE still doesnt have fractional scaling. Doesn't a single dev use a 1440p screen?

soganess 8y ago
Uh, yes it does (since 3.26)? It's experimental and requires wayland: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/09/enable-fractional-scaling-gnome-linux https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/09/enable-fractional-scalin... But it does work. I personally think it looks way worse than just going to 1x (or 2x) and bumping up (or down) the font size.
- vetinari 8y ago
  That's because it assumes 96 dpi for every X11 client and scales it up, even for non-fractional scaling (i.e. @2x) if the experimental support is enabled. There is supposedly work being done to address the problem by using two Xwayland servers, one exposing real dpi for dpi aware clients, and one fixed dpi for all the rest. Unfortunately, it is highlighted by the fact, that all current Linux browsers are X11 and not Wayland clients, so using it would mean you watch the upscaling ugliness on your display every day.
  - soganess 8y ago
    I'm not trying to imply the situation is perfect, but its way more workable than you are letting on. In the gnome world, you are stuck with GTK3 apps if you want partial scaling that looks alright, but there are options for web browsers. * Epiphany has supported Wayland since the time of the dinosaurs. And I know its not a perfect browser, but it (1) looks native (2) starts up in a second, (3) has libva support support for hardware accelerated video, (4) has a built in adblocker. As for mainstream browsers: * Developer builds of Firefox support Wayland straight from Mozilla: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-Nightly-Ships-Wayland https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-... * Most big name distros have some blessed(like fedora) or less blessed (aur/ppa) builds of the latest stable version of Firefox with baked in wayland support.
    - vetinari 8y ago
      I admit, that I haven't looked at Epiphany for a long time, because at the time I did (~2 years ago), it didn't even support SPNEGO/GSSAPI. The Fedora Wayland Firefox package is experimental for a reason; there are bugs, that would be quite embarrassing for a default browser.
      - soganess 8y ago
        Epiphany for all its virtues is simply not that fast of a browser when compared to Firefox or Chrome. If I ever find myself with enough free time to dedicate to an OSS project, it will be epiphany. Never has there been such a diamond in the rough. It's very serviceable if you are on a fast computer, and hardware accelerated video in a linux web browser is such a treat, but I bet any given release of the big boys has more patches in it than a year's worth of epiphany builds. As for firefox-wayland, I've seen that fat bug tracker, and it doesn't have webrender or many of the fancier performance stuff working, but it does run well. I've been bouncing between the two browsers for a few months now and there doesn't seem to be any showstopping issues. It's just not as shiny as the real deal firefox.
        vetinari 8y ago
        Wayland Firefox: For me, it doesn't work at all with scaling, and on another machine with no scaling, opening new window (in the sense of a new wayland surface, so that includes dialogs) could take 30-60 seconds, during which Firefox would be completely unresponsive (this was fixed in v65 yesterday). Hw accelerated videos: some distributions (fedora, suse, arch?) have patched Chromium with VA-API support. On some GPUs, the allow_rgb10_configs raises it's ugly head though. In also works only in native X11, not in Xwayland. Other than that, it is only way to watch youtube during the more intensive compiles :)
        floatboth 8y ago
        I'm not sure what made it into v65, but Nightly works pretty well with different scale monitors :)
pjmlp 8y ago
No, because real developers are using CLI apps wihtout fancy GUIs. /s
tsar9x 8y ago
Monitor/laptop makers don't help either by introducing weird size/res combinations. The only reasonable company seems to be Apple with 220dpi displays that are perfect for 2x scaling.
- izacus 8y ago
  Even Apple configures their new laptops with non-2x scaling by default.
  - vetinari 8y ago
    Yes, but you get only reasonable resolutions, that look good on a given hardware, not any random choice. Apple doesn't have to solve, how to display 1920x1080 desktop on 2560x1440 display (i.e. @1.333x scale), because they don't offer the choice of doing so.
emersion 8y ago
No matter how you implement fractional scaling, it's not going to look good. The reason is simple: half pixels don't exist. If an app wants to draw a 1px solid border, it can't draw it on a 1.5 scaled display because 1.5 pixel doesn't exist.
- izacus 8y ago
  It looks good on macOS for years now. Even Windows figured out a way to make it work on those displays (although it's worse than on macOS). So your explanation, while common amongst Linux devs, is a rather cheap cop-out in comparison to the bigger two competitors who have mostly solved the problem. The end result is that Linux DEs can be horrible to use on many HiDPI laptops, which don't have exact resolutions to make integer scaling feasable.
  - vetinari 8y ago
    macOS doesn't expose fractional scaling to applications, it is done by the output encoder by scaling the entire framebuffer. For software, it is strictly integer only. It is also careful with the resolutions it supports, it is not just any random scale requested. It is always to scale down, but not lose many pixels. For example, with 2560x1600 physical display (rMBP13), you can go to logical 2880x1800 (@1.78 scale) or 3360x2100 (@1.52 scale), but not further. With Linux (and also Windows), people have weird requests that would not fly in macOS world.
    - emersion 8y ago
      >macOS doesn't expose fractional scaling to applications, it is done by the output encoder by scaling the entire framebuffer. For software, it is strictly integer only. Wayland works the same way.
      - vetinari 8y ago
        I haven't looked into the sources, but my impression was, that it was using GPU to scale surfaces and then compose into final framebuffer, that is the same resolution as display. Not that it uses output encoder. The quick test is, when I do a screenshot, I get a file with dimensions same as physical display, not logical resolution. On macOS, it is exacly the other way. Scaling with GPU is more flexible; you can do things per surface instead of per desktop; but slightly more complicated (because you do things per surface instead of per desktop), takes away GPU capacity/memory bandwidth from applications when then might it, and is more power hungry when the GPU could be idle.
bayulxc5 8y ago
If you think the support for fractional scaling is bad, wait until you see the support for having monitors with different DPI settings. Linux on the desktop is death by a thousand cuts. I would argue that it's getting worse and worse, because new technologies are introduced (like scaling, GPU switching like Optimus, touch, good desktop composition, etc) and they are never well implemented. 15 years ago the biggest problem you could have with Linux is having to recompile your kernel to make your sound work or something like that.
- floatboth 8y ago
  Any current Wayland compositor handles fractional scaling, different scale displays, touch, good composition very well. (idk about Optimus, I don't buy systems with Nvidia or switchable graphics)
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    The Bumblebee tool supports Nvidia Optimus graphics, even without a proprietary driver.
xioxox 8y ago
I use 1.5 scaling in KDE and it mostly works fine except for a bug where horizontal lines appear in the terminal.
- sexydefinesher 8y ago
  Same, though i found that it doesnt appear on xcfe4term
lower 8y ago
For what it's worth, Gnome is very usable on a 1440p screen if one sets Font Scaling to 1.6 (in tweak tools) and leaves the general scaling at factor 1. The result is that the fonts have the right size, while GUI elements are a bit smaller than usual (which is actually quite nice because it saves space). Maybe that's why this hasn't been fixed properly for so long.
Asooka 8y ago
After seeing fractional scaling in Windows, I'd rather just not. 150% was really, really bad on my 1440p screen. Fonts were probably the most horrible I've seen in my life, even for Windows. I just turned scaling off and increased font size where I could.

Uh, yes it does (since 3.26)? It's experimental and requires wayland: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/09/enable-fractional-scaling-gnome-linux https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/09/enable-fractional-scalin... But it does work. I personally think it looks way worse than just going to 1x (or 2x) and bumping up (or down) the font size.

vetinari 8y ago
That's because it assumes 96 dpi for every X11 client and scales it up, even for non-fractional scaling (i.e. @2x) if the experimental support is enabled. There is supposedly work being done to address the problem by using two Xwayland servers, one exposing real dpi for dpi aware clients, and one fixed dpi for all the rest. Unfortunately, it is highlighted by the fact, that all current Linux browsers are X11 and not Wayland clients, so using it would mean you watch the upscaling ugliness on your display every day.
- soganess 8y ago
  I'm not trying to imply the situation is perfect, but its way more workable than you are letting on. In the gnome world, you are stuck with GTK3 apps if you want partial scaling that looks alright, but there are options for web browsers. * Epiphany has supported Wayland since the time of the dinosaurs. And I know its not a perfect browser, but it (1) looks native (2) starts up in a second, (3) has libva support support for hardware accelerated video, (4) has a built in adblocker. As for mainstream browsers: * Developer builds of Firefox support Wayland straight from Mozilla: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-Nightly-Ships-Wayland https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-... * Most big name distros have some blessed(like fedora) or less blessed (aur/ppa) builds of the latest stable version of Firefox with baked in wayland support.
  - vetinari 8y ago
    I admit, that I haven't looked at Epiphany for a long time, because at the time I did (~2 years ago), it didn't even support SPNEGO/GSSAPI. The Fedora Wayland Firefox package is experimental for a reason; there are bugs, that would be quite embarrassing for a default browser.
    - soganess 8y ago
      Epiphany for all its virtues is simply not that fast of a browser when compared to Firefox or Chrome. If I ever find myself with enough free time to dedicate to an OSS project, it will be epiphany. Never has there been such a diamond in the rough. It's very serviceable if you are on a fast computer, and hardware accelerated video in a linux web browser is such a treat, but I bet any given release of the big boys has more patches in it than a year's worth of epiphany builds. As for firefox-wayland, I've seen that fat bug tracker, and it doesn't have webrender or many of the fancier performance stuff working, but it does run well. I've been bouncing between the two browsers for a few months now and there doesn't seem to be any showstopping issues. It's just not as shiny as the real deal firefox.
      - vetinari 8y ago
        Wayland Firefox: For me, it doesn't work at all with scaling, and on another machine with no scaling, opening new window (in the sense of a new wayland surface, so that includes dialogs) could take 30-60 seconds, during which Firefox would be completely unresponsive (this was fixed in v65 yesterday). Hw accelerated videos: some distributions (fedora, suse, arch?) have patched Chromium with VA-API support. On some GPUs, the allow_rgb10_configs raises it's ugly head though. In also works only in native X11, not in Xwayland. Other than that, it is only way to watch youtube during the more intensive compiles :)
        floatboth 8y ago
        I'm not sure what made it into v65, but Nightly works pretty well with different scale monitors :)

pjmlp 8y ago

No, because real developers are using CLI apps wihtout fancy GUIs. /s

tsar9x 8y ago

Monitor/laptop makers don't help either by introducing weird size/res combinations. The only reasonable company seems to be Apple with 220dpi displays that are perfect for 2x scaling.

izacus 8y ago
Even Apple configures their new laptops with non-2x scaling by default.
- vetinari 8y ago
  Yes, but you get only reasonable resolutions, that look good on a given hardware, not any random choice. Apple doesn't have to solve, how to display 1920x1080 desktop on 2560x1440 display (i.e. @1.333x scale), because they don't offer the choice of doing so.

emersion 8y ago

No matter how you implement fractional scaling, it's not going to look good. The reason is simple: half pixels don't exist. If an app wants to draw a 1px solid border, it can't draw it on a 1.5 scaled display because 1.5 pixel doesn't exist.

izacus 8y ago
It looks good on macOS for years now. Even Windows figured out a way to make it work on those displays (although it's worse than on macOS). So your explanation, while common amongst Linux devs, is a rather cheap cop-out in comparison to the bigger two competitors who have mostly solved the problem. The end result is that Linux DEs can be horrible to use on many HiDPI laptops, which don't have exact resolutions to make integer scaling feasable.
- vetinari 8y ago
  macOS doesn't expose fractional scaling to applications, it is done by the output encoder by scaling the entire framebuffer. For software, it is strictly integer only. It is also careful with the resolutions it supports, it is not just any random scale requested. It is always to scale down, but not lose many pixels. For example, with 2560x1600 physical display (rMBP13), you can go to logical 2880x1800 (@1.78 scale) or 3360x2100 (@1.52 scale), but not further. With Linux (and also Windows), people have weird requests that would not fly in macOS world.
  - emersion 8y ago
    >macOS doesn't expose fractional scaling to applications, it is done by the output encoder by scaling the entire framebuffer. For software, it is strictly integer only. Wayland works the same way.
    - vetinari 8y ago
      I haven't looked into the sources, but my impression was, that it was using GPU to scale surfaces and then compose into final framebuffer, that is the same resolution as display. Not that it uses output encoder. The quick test is, when I do a screenshot, I get a file with dimensions same as physical display, not logical resolution. On macOS, it is exacly the other way. Scaling with GPU is more flexible; you can do things per surface instead of per desktop; but slightly more complicated (because you do things per surface instead of per desktop), takes away GPU capacity/memory bandwidth from applications when then might it, and is more power hungry when the GPU could be idle.

bayulxc5 8y ago

If you think the support for fractional scaling is bad, wait until you see the support for having monitors with different DPI settings. Linux on the desktop is death by a thousand cuts. I would argue that it's getting worse and worse, because new technologies are introduced (like scaling, GPU switching like Optimus, touch, good desktop composition, etc) and they are never well implemented. 15 years ago the biggest problem you could have with Linux is having to recompile your kernel to make your sound work or something like that.

floatboth 8y ago
Any current Wayland compositor handles fractional scaling, different scale displays, touch, good composition very well. (idk about Optimus, I don't buy systems with Nvidia or switchable graphics)
- zozbot123 8y ago
  The Bumblebee tool supports Nvidia Optimus graphics, even without a proprietary driver.

xioxox 8y ago

I use 1.5 scaling in KDE and it mostly works fine except for a bug where horizontal lines appear in the terminal.

sexydefinesher 8y ago
Same, though i found that it doesnt appear on xcfe4term

lower 8y ago

For what it's worth, Gnome is very usable on a 1440p screen if one sets Font Scaling to 1.6 (in tweak tools) and leaves the general scaling at factor 1. The result is that the fonts have the right size, while GUI elements are a bit smaller than usual (which is actually quite nice because it saves space). Maybe that's why this hasn't been fixed properly for so long.

Asooka 8y ago

After seeing fractional scaling in Windows, I'd rather just not. 150% was really, really bad on my 1440p screen. Fonts were probably the most horrible I've seen in my life, even for Windows. I just turned scaling off and increased font size where I could.