3 ms·

That DPI value AFAIK only changed the text scale, not the scale of widgets. You are thinking of two different things, the GTK3 integer scale actually affects wi

by md8z 5y ago

That DPI value AFAIK only changed the text scale, not the scale of widgets. You are thinking of two different things, the GTK3 integer scale actually affects widgets. The Xft.dpi setting also originally only meant text scale but has apparently been overloaded to apply to widgets in Qt? I'm not sure, I haven't tried this recently and I don't use X11. But it's right there in the name: Xft is the X freetype font rendering. I understand your frustration but from what I have seen, nothing has actually been removed. This is just a feature that was never implemented because nobody signed up to implement it. Wayland could be extended to support it eventually but somebody actually has to put in the work. I think the best bet for somebody working on this would be to get it fully working and stable in KDE first, since Qt apparently has the toolkit support for it, and then maybe it can be adapted to work for GTK.

kuschku 5y ago
> I understand your frustration but from what I have seen, nothing has actually been removed. This is just a feature that was never implemented because nobody signed up to implement it. Wayland could be extended to support it eventually but somebody actually has to put in the work. I think the best bet for somebody working on this would be to get it fully working and stable in KDE first, since Qt apparently has the toolkit support for it, and then maybe it can be adapted to work for GTK. The issue with that is that first of all, the wayland protocol needs to be modified to add support for this, and the entire freedesktop/gnome community refuses to even consider adding support for anything like this because gnome doesn’t need it/can’t support it. I’ve talked with vendors of devices using Linux with Wayland, who’ve been trying to get the committee to add support for years. I’ve talked with KDE devs who’ve been frustrated without limits. There’s a lot of people who are absolutely burnt out and angered by the constant stonewalling from Gnome, pretending for a decade that no one needs this and so it shouldn’t even exist.
- md8z 5y ago
  I really have no idea what you're talking about or what committee you're referring to. KDE can develop its own Wayland extensions and already has a lot of them. They don't need GNOME's approval. I believe they are housed in this git repository. https://invent.kde.org/libraries/plasma-wayland-protocols https://invent.kde.org/libraries/plasma-wayland-protocols Once they become stabilized and if other desktops took an interest, then they could be proposed as standard. But KDE does not need to wait for GNOME to implement a feature in Wayland, or vice versa. If you could mention which KDE developer you were talking to then maybe we could help them get this implemented in KDE first? Then afterwards if they can offer some tips to offer GTK (or other toolkits) on how to implement this, that would be valuable to everyone.
  - kuschku 5y ago
    Honestly, you're right. I should just stop trying to discuss with the wayland wg and gnome devs and just create my own protocol extension without asking anyone, submit patches to Qt, Kwin, and certain webbrowsers, and then just use those myself. Sure, Gnome still won't adopt them ever because they're stubborn and think they know everything better, but at least I'd have a somewhat working solution. Maybe elementary OS would actually use it too, they've already got support for just scaling everything based on the font size. Thing is, I need this functionality yesterday. And it's been an absolute pain hearing that even if you spend an excessive amount of work today, in a community where all of gnome is against you, maybe someday in a decade it'll get better.
    - md8z 5y ago
      I think that sounds like a great idea. But I just don't understand why you were so invested in GNOME adopting them when it seems clear that they weren't really that interested, and now it seems like it actually doesn't even matter to you? I'm sure you know not to "put all your eggs in one basket" as it were.
      - kuschku 5y ago
        Honestly, the big issue is that Gtk is used as basis to obtain the scaling factors for all browsers, Java, and several other tools including everything based on electron. As long as Gtk refuses to support this, I can fix KDE, but I can't fix Java or browsers. Java, Firefox and Chrome reject patches, saying Gnome is responsible. Gnome says they don't care. And I don't want to run custom builds of Firefox and Java anymore. It was such a hassle constantly building them from source with my old patchset.
        md8z 5y ago
        I think if KDE actually had a working implementation of this then that would go a really long way towards convincing those other things to support it. IIRC Chrome at least doesn't get the scale from GTK. But KDE's Wayland implementation is still unstable (in part because it seems to have a lot more features than GNOME's wayland implementation) so I think it will be a while before that happens too. If you are really committed to using Linux and don't want to wait then I said it before but I think a better use of your time would be to spend a few hundred dollars on some different monitors that can work at just 2x scale, and then let someone else deal with this.

by md8z 5y ago

kuschku 5y ago

> I understand your frustration but from what I have seen, nothing has actually been removed. This is just a feature that was never implemented because nobody signed up to implement it. Wayland could be extended to support it eventually but somebody actually has to put in the work. I think the best bet for somebody working on this would be to get it fully working and stable in KDE first, since Qt apparently has the toolkit support for it, and then maybe it can be adapted to work for GTK. The issue with that is that first of all, the wayland protocol needs to be modified to add support for this, and the entire freedesktop/gnome community refuses to even consider adding support for anything like this because gnome doesn’t need it/can’t support it. I’ve talked with vendors of devices using Linux with Wayland, who’ve been trying to get the committee to add support for years. I’ve talked with KDE devs who’ve been frustrated without limits. There’s a lot of people who are absolutely burnt out and angered by the constant stonewalling from Gnome, pretending for a decade that no one needs this and so it shouldn’t even exist.

md8z 5y ago
I really have no idea what you're talking about or what committee you're referring to. KDE can develop its own Wayland extensions and already has a lot of them. They don't need GNOME's approval. I believe they are housed in this git repository. https://invent.kde.org/libraries/plasma-wayland-protocols https://invent.kde.org/libraries/plasma-wayland-protocols Once they become stabilized and if other desktops took an interest, then they could be proposed as standard. But KDE does not need to wait for GNOME to implement a feature in Wayland, or vice versa. If you could mention which KDE developer you were talking to then maybe we could help them get this implemented in KDE first? Then afterwards if they can offer some tips to offer GTK (or other toolkits) on how to implement this, that would be valuable to everyone.
- kuschku 5y ago
  Honestly, you're right. I should just stop trying to discuss with the wayland wg and gnome devs and just create my own protocol extension without asking anyone, submit patches to Qt, Kwin, and certain webbrowsers, and then just use those myself. Sure, Gnome still won't adopt them ever because they're stubborn and think they know everything better, but at least I'd have a somewhat working solution. Maybe elementary OS would actually use it too, they've already got support for just scaling everything based on the font size. Thing is, I need this functionality yesterday. And it's been an absolute pain hearing that even if you spend an excessive amount of work today, in a community where all of gnome is against you, maybe someday in a decade it'll get better.
  - md8z 5y ago
    I think that sounds like a great idea. But I just don't understand why you were so invested in GNOME adopting them when it seems clear that they weren't really that interested, and now it seems like it actually doesn't even matter to you? I'm sure you know not to "put all your eggs in one basket" as it were.
    - kuschku 5y ago
      Honestly, the big issue is that Gtk is used as basis to obtain the scaling factors for all browsers, Java, and several other tools including everything based on electron. As long as Gtk refuses to support this, I can fix KDE, but I can't fix Java or browsers. Java, Firefox and Chrome reject patches, saying Gnome is responsible. Gnome says they don't care. And I don't want to run custom builds of Firefox and Java anymore. It was such a hassle constantly building them from source with my old patchset.
      - md8z 5y ago
        I think if KDE actually had a working implementation of this then that would go a really long way towards convincing those other things to support it. IIRC Chrome at least doesn't get the scale from GTK. But KDE's Wayland implementation is still unstable (in part because it seems to have a lot more features than GNOME's wayland implementation) so I think it will be a while before that happens too. If you are really committed to using Linux and don't want to wait then I said it before but I think a better use of your time would be to spend a few hundred dollars on some different monitors that can work at just 2x scale, and then let someone else deal with this.