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HiDPI displays is what I see mentioned the most. But when you then ask if fractional scaling works on Wayland, the answer is "yes, but it doesn't work for any a

HiDPI displays is what I see mentioned the most. But when you then ask if fractional scaling works on Wayland, the answer is "yes, but it doesn't work for any app you actually use". If all you want to do is download a "demo" terminal, and put it in a HiDPI display, and enable fractional scaling, to show it to your friends, then yes, this works. If you want to get some work done on any app (a text editor, web browser, ...). Then its worse than Xorg at the moment.

pedrocr 6y ago
This is false. I can and do set whatever scale factor I want for each screen in sway and all apps are scaled correctly. This includes my browser, my text editor, my terminal, word processor and spreadsheet. There's literally no app I use where I have a problem.
- fluffything 6y ago
  All apps I use have a problem. Slack, Zoom, Chrome, Emacs, LibreOffice. The only app I use that doesn't have a problem is Alacritty, which is the terminal emulator I kind of have to use to avoid this problem. Other terminal emulators I've tried do have this problem.
  - pedrocr 6y ago
    Anything that's GTK and Qt based will definitely be Wayland native and thus not have the XWayland issue with fractional scaling. So Libreoffice works fine and so does gnome-terminal. I use those daily. If you have problems with those there's something else wrong. For the other examples it's probably XWayland scaling at 1x and then being scaled up instead of 2x and down. The patches to fix that exist but I'm not sure where they're already merged in. All those apps except Emacs should go Wayland native in the next few months though.
    - fluffything 6y ago
      > will definitely be Sure, eventually, that will be the case. But right now, most GTK apps are not Wayland native and look bad on Wayland. Those that are Wayland native have so many bugs on Wayland that they are still objectively significantly worse than their Xorg alternatives.
      - pedrocr 6y ago
        That's not what I was saying. To clarify, everything that's GTK and Qt is already Wayland native and scales just fine. It's also not true at all that everything is full of bugs and unusable. In fact I can only think of a single Wayland-specific bug in a GTK app, and it's already fixed.
pkulak 6y ago
Totally unrelated, but I refuse to buy an HDPI monitor until someone makes one at a resolution that can use integer scaling. Fractional scaling will _never_ look good. Even Apple, who controls their entire stack, doesn't like fractional scaling and exclusively makes monitors and displays that support 2X scaling. Everyone looking for good fractional scaling support is going to be looking for a very long time, no matter what compositor they use.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  Apple does fractional scaling in all their laptops. And the reason it doesn't always look great is that everyone has decided to do integer scaling and then scale down for fractional scaling instead of just rendering at the destination resolutions. Most things you care about for sharpness are already resolution independent (fonts, images) and would just work. Both Chrome and Firefox already render the whole browser in a resolution independent way but end up being rendered at 2x and scaled down for less sharpness and performance than just asking them directly to render whatever window size and scaling factor is needed. Hopefully Wayland will end up fixing this IMHO bad decision. To avoid all this right now it's possible to just pick 1x or 2x and tweak font sizes to get a good mid-step. For a single screen this always works, but it makes combining different ones harder.

pedrocr 6y ago

This is false. I can and do set whatever scale factor I want for each screen in sway and all apps are scaled correctly. This includes my browser, my text editor, my terminal, word processor and spreadsheet. There's literally no app I use where I have a problem.

fluffything 6y ago
All apps I use have a problem. Slack, Zoom, Chrome, Emacs, LibreOffice. The only app I use that doesn't have a problem is Alacritty, which is the terminal emulator I kind of have to use to avoid this problem. Other terminal emulators I've tried do have this problem.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  Anything that's GTK and Qt based will definitely be Wayland native and thus not have the XWayland issue with fractional scaling. So Libreoffice works fine and so does gnome-terminal. I use those daily. If you have problems with those there's something else wrong. For the other examples it's probably XWayland scaling at 1x and then being scaled up instead of 2x and down. The patches to fix that exist but I'm not sure where they're already merged in. All those apps except Emacs should go Wayland native in the next few months though.
  - fluffything 6y ago
    > will definitely be Sure, eventually, that will be the case. But right now, most GTK apps are not Wayland native and look bad on Wayland. Those that are Wayland native have so many bugs on Wayland that they are still objectively significantly worse than their Xorg alternatives.
    - pedrocr 6y ago
      That's not what I was saying. To clarify, everything that's GTK and Qt is already Wayland native and scales just fine. It's also not true at all that everything is full of bugs and unusable. In fact I can only think of a single Wayland-specific bug in a GTK app, and it's already fixed.

pkulak 6y ago

Totally unrelated, but I refuse to buy an HDPI monitor until someone makes one at a resolution that can use integer scaling. Fractional scaling will _never_ look good. Even Apple, who controls their entire stack, doesn't like fractional scaling and exclusively makes monitors and displays that support 2X scaling. Everyone looking for good fractional scaling support is going to be looking for a very long time, no matter what compositor they use.

pedrocr 6y ago
Apple does fractional scaling in all their laptops. And the reason it doesn't always look great is that everyone has decided to do integer scaling and then scale down for fractional scaling instead of just rendering at the destination resolutions. Most things you care about for sharpness are already resolution independent (fonts, images) and would just work. Both Chrome and Firefox already render the whole browser in a resolution independent way but end up being rendered at 2x and scaled down for less sharpness and performance than just asking them directly to render whatever window size and scaling factor is needed. Hopefully Wayland will end up fixing this IMHO bad decision. To avoid all this right now it's possible to just pick 1x or 2x and tweak font sizes to get a good mid-step. For a single screen this always works, but it makes combining different ones harder.