4 ms·

It looks like there is still no fractional scaling out of the box (always possible with hacks). The elementary team has defended the choice not to introduce it

by jacek 5y ago

It looks like there is still no fractional scaling out of the box (always possible with hacks). The elementary team has defended the choice not to introduce it before [1], but it just makes it unusable for me and many other users. KDE Plasma handles fractional scaling well. Gnome does it mostly fine on Wayland. Now you can also run Gnome on X11 with fractional scaling (at least with Pop OS [2]). There's a cost of running the DE with fractional scaling of course. But I am fine with that if that makes the DE usable! [1] https://blog.elementary.io/what-is-hidpi/ https://blog.elementary.io/what-is-hidpi/ [2] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/10/system76-continue-improving-pop-os-with-fractional-scaling-now-live https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/10/system76-continue-impr...

demarq 5y ago
A DE is not “usable” because it doesn’t have fractional scaling? The elementary team are in so much trouble! Catastrophe!
- techrat 5y ago
  In the age of high density displays, fractional scaling is a must. It's the first thing people will encounter that indicates that a DE is antiquated. On a 11" display at 1920x1080, the alternative is to suffer resolution mismatch (which can introduce any number of artifacts depending on how the panel handles the input, the least of which is a blurry/fuzzy display) or drop the resolution fractionally for pixel accurate rendering. I did not buy a 11" laptop with a FHD display to browse at 960x540.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    This is why I’m totally against using such high resolutions on such small displays in the first place. Sure fractional scaling would help—but sticking to a perfectly reasonable 900p or even 768p would look even better _and_ save battery and processing power! (Remember, we’re talking about an 11" laptop. 1366x768 is perfectly reasonable at that size; totally different from the crappy 15" devices that use that resolution to cheap out.)
    - sgc 5y ago
      That is only 140 ppi. It's not terrible, but it is tiring on the eyes. 1080p at 11 inches is 200ppi. That is not too much for people to ask.
gurkendoktor 5y ago
Agreed on the need for fractional scaling, there is no escape from 13" 1080p and 27" 4K screens. Dell used to sell some laptops and monitors that worked well at 200% zoom, but even they stopped. I've rolled my eyes at the "What is HiDPI" blog post for so long. However, there has been some movement on this issue! Search for "fractional" in this recent blog post: https://blog.elementary.io/look-and-feel-changes-elementary-os-6/ https://blog.elementary.io/look-and-feel-changes-elementary-...
jchw 5y ago
I think it’s a fair philosophical choice. Fractional scaling is really hard. macOS doesn’t bother, choosing instead to render at an integer scale factor and downsample. Doing something similar on Linux would be hard, for mostly historical reasons. At first blush, it felt like a copout to have the compositor downsample. After all, wouldn’t that be blurry? Then it occurred to me: it’s always going to be blurry. You can’t draw a “1px border” at 150% without blurry edges. I am fully aware that rendering at a higher resolution then downsampling will produce a different result, but, still, so as long as we are piggybacking off the fact that our layouts are constrained to a pixel grid to make our UIs look nice and sharp, fractional scale will be blurry. The story only keeps getting worse for fractional scale though. People who have used VSCode on fractional DPI have likely already witnessed a somewhat confounding problem: the terminal is not just blurry, but it is scaled such that it sometimes looks like it is 1px off height or width wise. Because it is. HTML is scalable and DPI independent in part because you are only ever exposed to the virtualized pixels. But on the flip side of that, this means that if you have a canvas somewhere, determining how many actual pixels you need for the buffer is not trivially possible. The grid fitting could be different at different corners of the canvas. This obviously is an example specific to HTML, but similar conundrums should naturally appear any time you have only DPI independent units exposed. Using floating point can get you into trouble too. I have not personally experienced it but I have seen scaling artifacts in Qt that are apparently spurred on by floating point error. While I don’t know the exact mechanism by which this happens, it’s not too hard to construct a scenario in your head. All of this adds up to a bleak picture in my opinion. Wayland has a very good implementation of DPI awareness that lets unaware clients fallback by simply doing nothing[1], which is a big step up from X11. In theory, Wayland compositors could try to avoid fractional scaling by picking an integer scale to advertise and downsampling all of the surfaces. But even failing that, at least you could push legacy apps to just see everything at 1x, and get the extra blurry visuals. Until Wayland is a reasonable successor for all users, though, picking between pushing for Wayland for better fractional scaling over Xorg for better software or hardware support is a tough choice. It may not directly factor into Elementary OS and their decision to not support fractional scaling, but I can only imagine it’s not helping any. There are plenty of problems to solve and improve on in Linux that are a bit more tractable. And then, after we’ve all finally solved all fractional DPI issues, the world will probably have virtually eliminated displays in consumer devices that look too big at 200% scaling. Of course. [1]: https://wayland-book.com/surfaces-in-depth/hidpi.html https://wayland-book.com/surfaces-in-depth/hidpi.html P.S.: I am fully aware I left out details here about font rendering, and some GNOME-powered Wayland issues like their horrid dbus API for cursor size change notifications. It’s already a long enough post that goes into the weeds too much.
jjice 5y ago
Does KDE handle fractional scaling better than Gnome? I use Gnome on X11 and there are problems I run into (AMD GPU if that matters). I end up having to run my 4k display on 1440 to make it usable, which is really unfortunate. Wayland at 4k with fractional scaling has a bunch of visual bugs for me as well. If KDE handles these things better, I'll jump ship in a heart beat.
- xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  Yes it seems to be pretty flawless in my experience, at least. KDE (3/4) used to feel very bloated for me, I find Plasma just stays out of my way.
scythe 5y ago
More recent threads about fractional scaling on elementary include the comment "[fractional scaling] is blocked by moving to Wayland". I can understand the developers not wanting to implement a FS hack that will likely be replaced soon anyway, when the project priority is supposed to be UX innovation. I can also understand delaying the move to Wayland until it meets the standards for stability. But in the meantime it's a frustrating situation, since the likely catalyst will be Ubuntu's 22.04 LTS moving to Wayland, and it's a barrier for many users.
- slver 5y ago
  FS isn't hard to implement, you scale by integer factor and scale down the buffer to fit the screen. This is literally how masOS does it. And they've basically pioneered the concept of scaling for high DPI screen when they introduce Retina.
  - scythe 5y ago
    Well, how about this. I'm going to be on chemotherapy for six weeks and I'm not working. Point me to the files in X.Org that need to change for fractional scaling and maybe I'll write a patch. It's not hard to implement, right?

by jacek 5y ago

demarq 5y ago

A DE is not “usable” because it doesn’t have fractional scaling? The elementary team are in so much trouble! Catastrophe!

techrat 5y ago
In the age of high density displays, fractional scaling is a must. It's the first thing people will encounter that indicates that a DE is antiquated. On a 11" display at 1920x1080, the alternative is to suffer resolution mismatch (which can introduce any number of artifacts depending on how the panel handles the input, the least of which is a blurry/fuzzy display) or drop the resolution fractionally for pixel accurate rendering. I did not buy a 11" laptop with a FHD display to browse at 960x540.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  This is why I’m totally against using such high resolutions on such small displays in the first place. Sure fractional scaling would help—but sticking to a perfectly reasonable 900p or even 768p would look even better _and_ save battery and processing power! (Remember, we’re talking about an 11" laptop. 1366x768 is perfectly reasonable at that size; totally different from the crappy 15" devices that use that resolution to cheap out.)
  - sgc 5y ago
    That is only 140 ppi. It's not terrible, but it is tiring on the eyes. 1080p at 11 inches is 200ppi. That is not too much for people to ask.

gurkendoktor 5y ago

Agreed on the need for fractional scaling, there is no escape from 13" 1080p and 27" 4K screens. Dell used to sell some laptops and monitors that worked well at 200% zoom, but even they stopped. I've rolled my eyes at the "What is HiDPI" blog post for so long. However, there has been some movement on this issue! Search for "fractional" in this recent blog post: https://blog.elementary.io/look-and-feel-changes-elementary-os-6/ https://blog.elementary.io/look-and-feel-changes-elementary-...

jchw 5y ago

I think it’s a fair philosophical choice. Fractional scaling is really hard. macOS doesn’t bother, choosing instead to render at an integer scale factor and downsample. Doing something similar on Linux would be hard, for mostly historical reasons. At first blush, it felt like a copout to have the compositor downsample. After all, wouldn’t that be blurry? Then it occurred to me: it’s always going to be blurry. You can’t draw a “1px border” at 150% without blurry edges. I am fully aware that rendering at a higher resolution then downsampling will produce a different result, but, still, so as long as we are piggybacking off the fact that our layouts are constrained to a pixel grid to make our UIs look nice and sharp, fractional scale will be blurry. The story only keeps getting worse for fractional scale though. People who have used VSCode on fractional DPI have likely already witnessed a somewhat confounding problem: the terminal is not just blurry, but it is scaled such that it sometimes looks like it is 1px off height or width wise. Because it is. HTML is scalable and DPI independent in part because you are only ever exposed to the virtualized pixels. But on the flip side of that, this means that if you have a canvas somewhere, determining how many actual pixels you need for the buffer is not trivially possible. The grid fitting could be different at different corners of the canvas. This obviously is an example specific to HTML, but similar conundrums should naturally appear any time you have only DPI independent units exposed. Using floating point can get you into trouble too. I have not personally experienced it but I have seen scaling artifacts in Qt that are apparently spurred on by floating point error. While I don’t know the exact mechanism by which this happens, it’s not too hard to construct a scenario in your head. All of this adds up to a bleak picture in my opinion. Wayland has a very good implementation of DPI awareness that lets unaware clients fallback by simply doing nothing[1], which is a big step up from X11. In theory, Wayland compositors could try to avoid fractional scaling by picking an integer scale to advertise and downsampling all of the surfaces. But even failing that, at least you could push legacy apps to just see everything at 1x, and get the extra blurry visuals. Until Wayland is a reasonable successor for all users, though, picking between pushing for Wayland for better fractional scaling over Xorg for better software or hardware support is a tough choice. It may not directly factor into Elementary OS and their decision to not support fractional scaling, but I can only imagine it’s not helping any. There are plenty of problems to solve and improve on in Linux that are a bit more tractable. And then, after we’ve all finally solved all fractional DPI issues, the world will probably have virtually eliminated displays in consumer devices that look too big at 200% scaling. Of course. [1]: https://wayland-book.com/surfaces-in-depth/hidpi.html https://wayland-book.com/surfaces-in-depth/hidpi.html P.S.: I am fully aware I left out details here about font rendering, and some GNOME-powered Wayland issues like their horrid dbus API for cursor size change notifications. It’s already a long enough post that goes into the weeds too much.

jjice 5y ago

Does KDE handle fractional scaling better than Gnome? I use Gnome on X11 and there are problems I run into (AMD GPU if that matters). I end up having to run my 4k display on 1440 to make it usable, which is really unfortunate. Wayland at 4k with fractional scaling has a bunch of visual bugs for me as well. If KDE handles these things better, I'll jump ship in a heart beat.

xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
Yes it seems to be pretty flawless in my experience, at least. KDE (3/4) used to feel very bloated for me, I find Plasma just stays out of my way.

scythe 5y ago

More recent threads about fractional scaling on elementary include the comment "[fractional scaling] is blocked by moving to Wayland". I can understand the developers not wanting to implement a FS hack that will likely be replaced soon anyway, when the project priority is supposed to be UX innovation. I can also understand delaying the move to Wayland until it meets the standards for stability. But in the meantime it's a frustrating situation, since the likely catalyst will be Ubuntu's 22.04 LTS moving to Wayland, and it's a barrier for many users.

slver 5y ago
FS isn't hard to implement, you scale by integer factor and scale down the buffer to fit the screen. This is literally how masOS does it. And they've basically pioneered the concept of scaling for high DPI screen when they introduce Retina.
- scythe 5y ago
  Well, how about this. I'm going to be on chemotherapy for six weeks and I'm not working. Point me to the files in X.Org that need to change for fractional scaling and maybe I'll write a patch. It's not hard to implement, right?