6 ms·

Generally speaking, multi-display monitor support is a mess on Linux (especially if you so anything slightly out of the ordinary). KDE honestly seems the best

Generally speaking, multi-display monitor support is a mess on Linux (especially if you so anything slightly out of the ordinary). KDE honestly seems the best for this, although on the latest version of GNOME has fractional scaling available behind a flag (although also buggy and very slow).

ognarb 7y ago
Hopefully, Wayland will improve the situation a bit.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Yep, just need to give it another decade or so I suppose.
  - vetinari 7y ago
    The future is already there, just not evenly distributed ;)
  - cies 7y ago
    My guess: 1 year more for Gnome, 3 more years for KDE. That assumes non-Nvidia hardware. If you have one of those you are on a potentially very different timeline, that I do not dare to predict.
- jhoechtl 7y ago
  Duke nukem forever!
opencl 7y ago
System76 added a 'HiDPI daemon' for handling mixed-DPI multimonitor setups in GNOME to their PopOS distro, in my experience it works less badly than the alternatives. https://blog.system76.com/post/168340008923/hidpi-is-released-work-on-initial-setup https://blog.system76.com/post/168340008923/hidpi-is-release...
- nonbirithm 7y ago
  It's open source also, so you could theoretically use it in a different distro. https://github.com/pop-os/hidpi-daemon https://github.com/pop-os/hidpi-daemon
shrikant 7y ago
> [...] multi-display monitor support is a mess on Linux (especially if you so anything slightly out of the ordinary). Testify :( I'm still struggling to get my (IMHO, extremely vanilla) setup working (Ubuntu on Thinkpad T430 + 2 external QHD monitors), and I'd appreciate any pointers to any resources that can help me resolve this.
- toupeira 7y ago
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI has lots of information. I have a Thinkpad X1C and an external monitor, both with QHD resolution. What I ended up with is using xrandr scaling to increase the resolution of the external monitor (probably should have gotten a 4K instead...), and tweaking font sizes and Firefox's UI scaling until it looks okay on both screens. For QT apps I also had to set QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0. Some proprietary apps are still too small though, so I tend not to use them ;-) The xrandr scaling is applied through a script and not persistent, so I mapped it to a keyboard shortcut I can press when I reconnect the monitor. My script looks like this: xrandr \ --output eDP-1 --pos 0x0 --scale 0.9999x0.9999 \ --output DP-2 --pos 2560x0 --scale 1.25x1.25 The silly 0.9999x0.9999 scaling on the first screen is to work around a mouse flickering bug in the modesetting driver: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/issues/70 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/issues/70
  - shrikant 7y ago
    This looks useful -- thanks! Will try out some of the suggestions mentioned here.
- diffeomorphism 7y ago
  Is that about weird multistream displayport connections? Two times QHD is definitely not vanilla and was unsupported on windows until a while ago as well.
NullPrefix 7y ago
>Generally speaking, multi-display monitor support is a mess on Linux (especially if you so anything slightly out of the ordinary). Works fine for me on i3 (X11).

ognarb 7y ago

Hopefully, Wayland will improve the situation a bit.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Yep, just need to give it another decade or so I suppose.
- vetinari 7y ago
  The future is already there, just not evenly distributed ;)
- cies 7y ago
  My guess: 1 year more for Gnome, 3 more years for KDE. That assumes non-Nvidia hardware. If you have one of those you are on a potentially very different timeline, that I do not dare to predict.
jhoechtl 7y ago
Duke nukem forever!

opencl 7y ago

System76 added a 'HiDPI daemon' for handling mixed-DPI multimonitor setups in GNOME to their PopOS distro, in my experience it works less badly than the alternatives. https://blog.system76.com/post/168340008923/hidpi-is-released-work-on-initial-setup https://blog.system76.com/post/168340008923/hidpi-is-release...

nonbirithm 7y ago
It's open source also, so you could theoretically use it in a different distro. https://github.com/pop-os/hidpi-daemon https://github.com/pop-os/hidpi-daemon

shrikant 7y ago

> [...] multi-display monitor support is a mess on Linux (especially if you so anything slightly out of the ordinary). Testify :( I'm still struggling to get my (IMHO, extremely vanilla) setup working (Ubuntu on Thinkpad T430 + 2 external QHD monitors), and I'd appreciate any pointers to any resources that can help me resolve this.

toupeira 7y ago
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI has lots of information. I have a Thinkpad X1C and an external monitor, both with QHD resolution. What I ended up with is using xrandr scaling to increase the resolution of the external monitor (probably should have gotten a 4K instead...), and tweaking font sizes and Firefox's UI scaling until it looks okay on both screens. For QT apps I also had to set QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0. Some proprietary apps are still too small though, so I tend not to use them ;-) The xrandr scaling is applied through a script and not persistent, so I mapped it to a keyboard shortcut I can press when I reconnect the monitor. My script looks like this: xrandr \ --output eDP-1 --pos 0x0 --scale 0.9999x0.9999 \ --output DP-2 --pos 2560x0 --scale 1.25x1.25 The silly 0.9999x0.9999 scaling on the first screen is to work around a mouse flickering bug in the modesetting driver: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/issues/70 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/issues/70
- shrikant 7y ago
  This looks useful -- thanks! Will try out some of the suggestions mentioned here.
diffeomorphism 7y ago
Is that about weird multistream displayport connections? Two times QHD is definitely not vanilla and was unsupported on windows until a while ago as well.

NullPrefix 7y ago

>Generally speaking, multi-display monitor support is a mess on Linux (especially if you so anything slightly out of the ordinary). Works fine for me on i3 (X11).