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The author does not address the screen resolution (and just says the screen is nice) but I'm hearing that the screen res is a bit to high to work with without s

The author does not address the screen resolution (and just says the screen is nice) but I'm hearing that the screen res is a bit to high to work with without scaling and a tad to low to do 2x scaling. And people don't like fractional scaling, at least in Gnome (it seems to look weird). Is this still an issue? I tend to prefer 1080p for this reason on 12-14" screens. My Thinkpad X13 gen 2 has a 13.3", 1920x1200 screen, windows sets it to 150%, which seems ok, although Ubuntu works well for me without scaling still. The Frame work laptop has an even higher res (2256x1504). I do hear people scaling the fonts and that seems to be a nice solution... I remember from back in the old days that I never really liked the look of this. What do people think of this? I'm hoping that in the future you can choose the screen (and easily get replacements as well, I hear they are working on that). Edit: I hope these issues are being addressed by established DE's, I'm assuming they won't be an issue on Canonical's (hypothetical ;)) Flutter based DE that's (obviously ;)) coming and on System76's Rust based new DE for Pop OS [0]. [0]: https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/08/system76_developing_new_linux_desktop/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/08/system76_developing_n...

deleted 5y ago
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gdwatson 5y ago
I run Mint with 2x scaling on mine and I like it a lot. The screen's not quite as sharp as the one on the old XPS it replaced, but it's still quite nice. I run a middling-width monospace font, and I can't quite fit two 80-column windows side by side at 2x without reducing the font size, but if you want that then you want smaller text anyway. (If you run a narrow font it shouldn't be an issue.) Other UI elements are not unreasonably large in my opinion, but YMMV.
flurdy 5y ago
I've run Gnome+Wayland at 125% on a 32" 4k screen for over a year and noticed no issues. But that is just a sample size of 1. But a 1080p screen would be a no for me. At 2256x1504 on 13.5" screen I think Framework laptop would probably be fine at 100% ie no scaling
- Gigachad 5y ago
  As soon as you open up a legacy X application it looks blurry. The main offender was Chrome/Electron but I think this has been fixed last year.
- oever 5y ago
  Isn't scaling from 3072x1728 to 3840x2160 (so 125%) very blurry? A one-pixel line at 3072x1728 would be spread over slight more than line pixel wide on 4k. To get nice integer scaling one could render at 15360x8640 (16k) which is 5x3072x1728 and 4x3840x2160 but I doubt that's what Wayland is doing. No common graphics card could handle that. The font hinting relies on the resolution too. By scaling the rendered pixmap 125% the fonts would look bad too. Rendering the fonts in a larger size at the native screen resolution should look better.
  - Karliss 5y ago
    Who said anything about scaling rendered pixmaps? Proper UI scaling is handled at the desktop and UI toolkit level, instead of brute force changing desktop resolution or scaling rendered windows. That's why it's not a simple problem and support varies not only based on operating system, but also UI libraries used by applications, their combination, application developers updating their UI libraries and using the new APIs. Whether the UI toolkit exposes it to application developer by having the graphic api operate at pixel independent units or having the developer manually calculate sizes based on the scaling factor or relative to something like default font size varies. Basic geometric shapes and text (assuming vector instead of bitmap fonts) can be rendered at any size and resolution. As for more photo like images downscaling them by fractional amount typically works quite well, so if they are big enough for integer 2x scaling they also work with 1.25 scale.
    - oever 5y ago
      Here is an explanation of fractional scaling of GNOME in Wayland which is what the parent is using at 125%: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/how-fractional-scaling-works-in-wayland/5373 https://discourse.gnome.org/t/how-fractional-scaling-works-i... For scaling 125%, the client windows are rendered at 2x their size and sampled down. On the parent's system, a full-screen window would be rendered at 6144x3456 and scaled down to 3840x2160 (0.625%). This gives a blurry result and is taxing on the graphics chip. Qt apps and Firefox support scaling themselves which gives a much crisper result for fonts and line-art.
42jd 5y ago
I’m not on Ubuntu but using Wayland on nixos. Fractional scaling does not look or work well at all in my experience. I decided on 1.0 scaling and pushed it all over to font sizing (around 1.5). This works pretty well for most apps but it is a little small sometimes. The biggest issue is having to manually scale up some apps that don’t keep my preferences.
- monopoledance 5y ago
  Gnome's accessibility feature "larger text" works a bit better than font scaling IMEx. With font scaling often some alignment and spacing seems odd. And you can toggle "larger text" with one click, if you make the accessibility menu permanent.
- NCFZ 5y ago
  This is what I do as well. I find it works better than fractional scaling.
vladvasiliu 5y ago
> I do hear people scaling the fonts and that seems to be a nice solution... I remember from back in the old days that I never really liked the look of this. I'm doing this, in particular on a 24" 4k screen. It's true that it may look a bit "weird", in that fonts are huge compared to other UI elements. However, for me that's a win. I don't care to have huge buttons or what have you, I mostly use shortcuts. So I get nice, sharp fonts and also get to have smaller UI elements which leave more screen space for the text.
91edec 5y ago
I don't understand why 1440p hasn't become the standard on laptops. Its always 1080p or 4K which is useless on such a small display.
- Kletiomdm 5y ago
  It's not useless. Resolution is independent of size. Just because it doesn't work perfectly on Linux high DPI is much nicer and easier to read. The decapsulate on of resolution and size is btw already quite old. Games have this as well were they dynamically change the internal resolution but not the screen resolution. And you might not care about it but: - text is much smoother - images from DSLR have higher resolution than 4k for ages and you can see the difference The only arguments against 4k on smaller screens should be power consumption and not scaling issues. But for this we should focus on dynamic refrehsrates and similar power saving mechanism and again NOT complaining about 4k. MacOS is doing this flawless for years. Windows can do it and under Linux it starts to be usable based on comments of this article.
  - altcognito 5y ago
    MacOS doesn't scale. You can change font sizes, you can change resolution, but scaling via DPI isn't present. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/193723/scaling-all-ui-elements-when-using-an-external-monitor https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/193723/scaling-all... If somebody understands the situation better on MacOS I'd be interested, but based on my experience, Windows is the only OS that gets this as close as possible to right. It's a single setting that affects all applications and I can set monitors independently and it will scale on the fly (even if it does look a little weird as you drag an app across and it dynamically shifts) Every now and then I'll come across a app that doesn't quite deal with high DPI scaling correctly, but it is the exception to the rule. Linux also works pretty well, but as with everything Linux, it's almost always "it depends and well, not quite" (not usually multi-monitor aware, lots of per app settings)
    - Kletiomdm 5y ago
      Huh? I'm not sure what you mean. My MacOS does the scaling and it looks good. How is MacOS scaling different?
fsh 5y ago
In my experience, fractional scaling in Gnome Wayland works at least as well as on Windows. I use 150% on my 4K 27" monitor and have experienced basically zero problems in the last few months.
michaelt 5y ago
Even if you're on 1x scaling, you always have the option to adjust the zoom in your browser, and the text size in your terminal/IDE/text editor.
k1rcher 5y ago
Anecdotal personal experience: I’m on PopOS running Wayland with fractional scaling to 200%. It looks fantastic imo and have only had some issues with Guake terminal when plugged in to an external monitor, which I believe may be a Guake-Wayland-specific bug.
- morsch 5y ago
  200% is not fractional scaling, though?
  - k1rcher 5y ago
    Oops, you’re right. 150% is what I have set, typo on my end!
ximeng 5y ago
I used to have issues with two different screens that needed different scaling but as of 20.04 it's mostly fine to use fractional scaling on one monitor and not the other. I've still had some issues with some applications not scaling their widgets properly, but it's mostly ok.
keawade 5y ago
I’ve been using Fedora 35 with Wayland and fractional scaling set to 150% on my Framework laptop and it works great for me.
- nikodunk 5y ago
  Agreed. FWIW fractional scaling on gnome works great for me for developing with VSCode. I’m also at 150%.
- addicted 5y ago
  As an aside, I’m increasingly convinced that Fedora is probably the best Linux distro around right now for both enthusiasts and beginners. Great stability. Close to the edge of progress. And they focus on delivering real unique value on top of what others have created as opposed to reskinning and hacking Gnome. I’ve never used Fedora but I’m keen on moving over my personal desktop the next time I have a couple of days to mess around with it.
pja 5y ago
Personally, I've found fractional scaling on Gnome makes the window furniture too large for my taste. I've settled on boosting the default font size in gnome-tweaks to 125% instead, which makes font rendering match the DPI of my monitor but leaves window bars / tool bars etc at a more sensible size.
Karliss 5y ago
I am on gnome 41+wayland and quite satisfied with fractional scaling. That is with 4k@1.5X+2560x1440@1X. Fractional scaling related issues don't seem to be more often than programs not supporting wayland and scaling at all (in which case those programs are slightly blurry but reasonable size). There are certain settings which need to be enabled, they might be enabled by default on some distros. I might not notice some of the issues due to bad scaling at 4k still being comparable to lower resolution screen, unless things break badly. Issues might be more obvious with ~2K at 1.25-1.5 scale. Things may be slightly simpler in single monitor setups without mixed scaling. How much of effort configuring stuff is acceptable depends on person and what kind of software they commonly use. * Gnome the desktop -> org.gnome.mutter/experimental-features "scale-monitor-framebuffer". Only integer scales available without this. Following assume that this is enabled. * gnome apps: work great out of the box * QT apps: Qt5 requires QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland environment variable to force wayland backend. Enabled by default in Qt6. Used to be quite bad ~1-2 years ago, but is now usable. * Firefox: MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 * chromium and electron: --ozone-platform=wayland seems fine for chrome, but some electron apps went crazy when moving between windows with different scale. Maybe the electron app bundled an older chrome version. No issues (except less sharp text) when not enabling the experimental wayland backend.
colordrops 5y ago
I've got a Thinkpad with a 14" screen at 2256x1504. Running Wayland and SwayWM, I could never get integer or fractional scaling to work just right. In the end, turning off system-wide scaling and configuring apps that don't scale automatically was what did the trick.
- 3np 5y ago
  How long ago did you try last? I recently started using Sway and haven't hit any issues yet.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Sorry, I wasn't clear - just mentioning that I'm using Sway, but it's not the problem. The problem was with apps running in XWayland, e.g. Gimp, Firefox, Spotify, Slack, gnome apps, etc
    - 3np 5y ago
      Ah, gotcha. The Wayland situation in Firefox has been changing for every major release BTW. Been running it in native Wayland since recently and so far it’s mostly been good and stable. Still the occasional crash or popup glitch but since ~v94 it already feels worth it.
3np 5y ago
I like my fonts on the quite small side; ~14" @ 2256x1504 sounds ideal to me. That aside, I've been playing around with fractional scaling in Wayland on everything from a 6" Pinephone to 32"@4k in various configurations and it's been mostly painless. Mostly terminal, web browsing, Steam games (latter not on the Pinephone obv). I wouldn't be surprised if there can be issues with xwayland that I'm yet to experience.
- carlob 5y ago
  >I've been playing around with fractional scaling in Wayland Even with Intel graphics? I have stumbled on a number of showstopping bugs and moved back to X, which is also pretty horrible...
  - 3np 5y ago
    Oh, actually not yet. That's surprising as in general I think Intel graphics tend to have the best compatibility out there. Currently main workstation on amdgpu on a 5xxxG - I'm still not sure if I've gotten the hardware transcoding etc working properly but that's all unrelated to fractional scaling, I assume.
loganwedwards 5y ago
I use Pop_OS on my Framework and loved 1.5x scaling except for screen tearing I get (YouTube for example). I reverted to 1x and increased icon and font sizes to semi compensate.
- teekert 5y ago
  Do you still get the tearing when you use Wayland?
eptcyka 5y ago
Instead of scaling the whole of the UI, I find that scaling via fonts works well enough when integer based scaling is not an option.
cycomanic 5y ago
I've been wondering about this for a while. Why do we need scale numbers and can't use dpi? Essentially if wayland (or desktops shells) would specify sizes in a "real world unit" changing the size of windows, text etc would just mean changing the dpi. In particular it would be trivial to have different size/resolution monitors display the elements at the same size. Considering if elemtents are vector graphics we don't even need fractional scaling for desktop elements. Now we still would need to scale images etc, but that is much less an issue than fractional scaling text or lines etc.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  The only program I’ve seen do it “properly” is Darktable, which has a dots-per-inch setting for things which have to be compatible with real-world linear measurements (WYSIWYG stuff for the most part), a dots-per-degree setting for things which depend on how far away you are sitting from your screen (UI element size), and a font size. I suspect the reason people don’t regularly do this is the same as the reason CSS no longer has pixels: it’s difficult to design (in the declarative CSS model) with more than one independent length unit. (I just went to check my several-years-old impressions against Darktable’s almost-undocumented config file, and... it no longer seems to have these settings? I’m not sure.) Unfortunately, the “UI scale” thing seems to be baked into Wayland nowadays; I have no idea how to get Evince to realize that an A4 sheet at 100% should be 210 cm wide whatever my screen resolution and “UI scale”.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > it’s difficult to design (in the declarative CSS model) with more than one independent length unit. Modern CSS is quite close to Turing complete, so an entirely constraint-driven design (which is what's needed when more than one unit is being chosen by the user) ought to be feasible. You need at least "real world units" for stuff like the minimum size of touch targets, and "angular units" (like CSS pixels) for the general scaling of widgets. Plus it would be nice to add a separate scaling factor for text, since users differ widely in what they find most readable. So that makes for three independent settings, in the general case.
LawnGnome 5y ago
The screen resolution is my least favourite aspect of the Framework, for sure. Not a deal breaker, but every now and then my eye catches a poorly aliased bit of text and gets sad. I've basically resigned myself to running Sway in 1.5x scale mode, which means that things get rendered at 2x and scaled down. Sway does about as well as I think any desktop environment could be expected to, but it's never going to be the same as rendering at true screen resolution. Alas, running in 1x or 2x and using font settings to handle it breaks down the moment you connect to an external display that really is 1x or 2x. That said, I love the rest of the laptop (well, maybe except the battery life), so my hope is that at some point we can buy a replacement screen at a more useful resolution, at which point I'll be first in line to buy and install it.
nvarsj 5y ago
I love high res smaller screens. I have the X13 with 2560x1600. I leave the screen at 100% (perfect size for window widgets, etc.) and scale fonts by 1.5. Works great and everything is super sharp. I can also scale down the fonts if I want and don't lose the sharpness due to the increased dpi.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

gdwatson 5y ago

I run Mint with 2x scaling on mine and I like it a lot. The screen's not quite as sharp as the one on the old XPS it replaced, but it's still quite nice. I run a middling-width monospace font, and I can't quite fit two 80-column windows side by side at 2x without reducing the font size, but if you want that then you want smaller text anyway. (If you run a narrow font it shouldn't be an issue.) Other UI elements are not unreasonably large in my opinion, but YMMV.

flurdy 5y ago

I've run Gnome+Wayland at 125% on a 32" 4k screen for over a year and noticed no issues. But that is just a sample size of 1. But a 1080p screen would be a no for me. At 2256x1504 on 13.5" screen I think Framework laptop would probably be fine at 100% ie no scaling

Gigachad 5y ago
As soon as you open up a legacy X application it looks blurry. The main offender was Chrome/Electron but I think this has been fixed last year.
oever 5y ago
Isn't scaling from 3072x1728 to 3840x2160 (so 125%) very blurry? A one-pixel line at 3072x1728 would be spread over slight more than line pixel wide on 4k. To get nice integer scaling one could render at 15360x8640 (16k) which is 5x3072x1728 and 4x3840x2160 but I doubt that's what Wayland is doing. No common graphics card could handle that. The font hinting relies on the resolution too. By scaling the rendered pixmap 125% the fonts would look bad too. Rendering the fonts in a larger size at the native screen resolution should look better.
- Karliss 5y ago
  Who said anything about scaling rendered pixmaps? Proper UI scaling is handled at the desktop and UI toolkit level, instead of brute force changing desktop resolution or scaling rendered windows. That's why it's not a simple problem and support varies not only based on operating system, but also UI libraries used by applications, their combination, application developers updating their UI libraries and using the new APIs. Whether the UI toolkit exposes it to application developer by having the graphic api operate at pixel independent units or having the developer manually calculate sizes based on the scaling factor or relative to something like default font size varies. Basic geometric shapes and text (assuming vector instead of bitmap fonts) can be rendered at any size and resolution. As for more photo like images downscaling them by fractional amount typically works quite well, so if they are big enough for integer 2x scaling they also work with 1.25 scale.
  - oever 5y ago
    Here is an explanation of fractional scaling of GNOME in Wayland which is what the parent is using at 125%: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/how-fractional-scaling-works-in-wayland/5373 https://discourse.gnome.org/t/how-fractional-scaling-works-i... For scaling 125%, the client windows are rendered at 2x their size and sampled down. On the parent's system, a full-screen window would be rendered at 6144x3456 and scaled down to 3840x2160 (0.625%). This gives a blurry result and is taxing on the graphics chip. Qt apps and Firefox support scaling themselves which gives a much crisper result for fonts and line-art.

42jd 5y ago

I’m not on Ubuntu but using Wayland on nixos. Fractional scaling does not look or work well at all in my experience. I decided on 1.0 scaling and pushed it all over to font sizing (around 1.5). This works pretty well for most apps but it is a little small sometimes. The biggest issue is having to manually scale up some apps that don’t keep my preferences.

monopoledance 5y ago
Gnome's accessibility feature "larger text" works a bit better than font scaling IMEx. With font scaling often some alignment and spacing seems odd. And you can toggle "larger text" with one click, if you make the accessibility menu permanent.
NCFZ 5y ago
This is what I do as well. I find it works better than fractional scaling.

vladvasiliu 5y ago

> I do hear people scaling the fonts and that seems to be a nice solution... I remember from back in the old days that I never really liked the look of this. I'm doing this, in particular on a 24" 4k screen. It's true that it may look a bit "weird", in that fonts are huge compared to other UI elements. However, for me that's a win. I don't care to have huge buttons or what have you, I mostly use shortcuts. So I get nice, sharp fonts and also get to have smaller UI elements which leave more screen space for the text.

91edec 5y ago

I don't understand why 1440p hasn't become the standard on laptops. Its always 1080p or 4K which is useless on such a small display.

Kletiomdm 5y ago
It's not useless. Resolution is independent of size. Just because it doesn't work perfectly on Linux high DPI is much nicer and easier to read. The decapsulate on of resolution and size is btw already quite old. Games have this as well were they dynamically change the internal resolution but not the screen resolution. And you might not care about it but: - text is much smoother - images from DSLR have higher resolution than 4k for ages and you can see the difference The only arguments against 4k on smaller screens should be power consumption and not scaling issues. But for this we should focus on dynamic refrehsrates and similar power saving mechanism and again NOT complaining about 4k. MacOS is doing this flawless for years. Windows can do it and under Linux it starts to be usable based on comments of this article.
- altcognito 5y ago
  MacOS doesn't scale. You can change font sizes, you can change resolution, but scaling via DPI isn't present. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/193723/scaling-all-ui-elements-when-using-an-external-monitor https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/193723/scaling-all... If somebody understands the situation better on MacOS I'd be interested, but based on my experience, Windows is the only OS that gets this as close as possible to right. It's a single setting that affects all applications and I can set monitors independently and it will scale on the fly (even if it does look a little weird as you drag an app across and it dynamically shifts) Every now and then I'll come across a app that doesn't quite deal with high DPI scaling correctly, but it is the exception to the rule. Linux also works pretty well, but as with everything Linux, it's almost always "it depends and well, not quite" (not usually multi-monitor aware, lots of per app settings)
  - Kletiomdm 5y ago
    Huh? I'm not sure what you mean. My MacOS does the scaling and it looks good. How is MacOS scaling different?

fsh 5y ago

In my experience, fractional scaling in Gnome Wayland works at least as well as on Windows. I use 150% on my 4K 27" monitor and have experienced basically zero problems in the last few months.

michaelt 5y ago

Even if you're on 1x scaling, you always have the option to adjust the zoom in your browser, and the text size in your terminal/IDE/text editor.

k1rcher 5y ago

Anecdotal personal experience: I’m on PopOS running Wayland with fractional scaling to 200%. It looks fantastic imo and have only had some issues with Guake terminal when plugged in to an external monitor, which I believe may be a Guake-Wayland-specific bug.

morsch 5y ago
200% is not fractional scaling, though?
- k1rcher 5y ago
  Oops, you’re right. 150% is what I have set, typo on my end!

ximeng 5y ago

I used to have issues with two different screens that needed different scaling but as of 20.04 it's mostly fine to use fractional scaling on one monitor and not the other. I've still had some issues with some applications not scaling their widgets properly, but it's mostly ok.

keawade 5y ago

I’ve been using Fedora 35 with Wayland and fractional scaling set to 150% on my Framework laptop and it works great for me.

nikodunk 5y ago
Agreed. FWIW fractional scaling on gnome works great for me for developing with VSCode. I’m also at 150%.
addicted 5y ago
As an aside, I’m increasingly convinced that Fedora is probably the best Linux distro around right now for both enthusiasts and beginners. Great stability. Close to the edge of progress. And they focus on delivering real unique value on top of what others have created as opposed to reskinning and hacking Gnome. I’ve never used Fedora but I’m keen on moving over my personal desktop the next time I have a couple of days to mess around with it.

pja 5y ago

Personally, I've found fractional scaling on Gnome makes the window furniture too large for my taste. I've settled on boosting the default font size in gnome-tweaks to 125% instead, which makes font rendering match the DPI of my monitor but leaves window bars / tool bars etc at a more sensible size.

Karliss 5y ago

I am on gnome 41+wayland and quite satisfied with fractional scaling. That is with 4k@1.5X+2560x1440@1X. Fractional scaling related issues don't seem to be more often than programs not supporting wayland and scaling at all (in which case those programs are slightly blurry but reasonable size). There are certain settings which need to be enabled, they might be enabled by default on some distros. I might not notice some of the issues due to bad scaling at 4k still being comparable to lower resolution screen, unless things break badly. Issues might be more obvious with ~2K at 1.25-1.5 scale. Things may be slightly simpler in single monitor setups without mixed scaling. How much of effort configuring stuff is acceptable depends on person and what kind of software they commonly use. * Gnome the desktop -> org.gnome.mutter/experimental-features "scale-monitor-framebuffer". Only integer scales available without this. Following assume that this is enabled. * gnome apps: work great out of the box * QT apps: Qt5 requires QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland environment variable to force wayland backend. Enabled by default in Qt6. Used to be quite bad ~1-2 years ago, but is now usable. * Firefox: MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 * chromium and electron: --ozone-platform=wayland seems fine for chrome, but some electron apps went crazy when moving between windows with different scale. Maybe the electron app bundled an older chrome version. No issues (except less sharp text) when not enabling the experimental wayland backend.

colordrops 5y ago

I've got a Thinkpad with a 14" screen at 2256x1504. Running Wayland and SwayWM, I could never get integer or fractional scaling to work just right. In the end, turning off system-wide scaling and configuring apps that don't scale automatically was what did the trick.

3np 5y ago
How long ago did you try last? I recently started using Sway and haven't hit any issues yet.
- colordrops 5y ago
  Sorry, I wasn't clear - just mentioning that I'm using Sway, but it's not the problem. The problem was with apps running in XWayland, e.g. Gimp, Firefox, Spotify, Slack, gnome apps, etc
  - 3np 5y ago
    Ah, gotcha. The Wayland situation in Firefox has been changing for every major release BTW. Been running it in native Wayland since recently and so far it’s mostly been good and stable. Still the occasional crash or popup glitch but since ~v94 it already feels worth it.

3np 5y ago

I like my fonts on the quite small side; ~14" @ 2256x1504 sounds ideal to me. That aside, I've been playing around with fractional scaling in Wayland on everything from a 6" Pinephone to 32"@4k in various configurations and it's been mostly painless. Mostly terminal, web browsing, Steam games (latter not on the Pinephone obv). I wouldn't be surprised if there can be issues with xwayland that I'm yet to experience.

carlob 5y ago
>I've been playing around with fractional scaling in Wayland Even with Intel graphics? I have stumbled on a number of showstopping bugs and moved back to X, which is also pretty horrible...
- 3np 5y ago
  Oh, actually not yet. That's surprising as in general I think Intel graphics tend to have the best compatibility out there. Currently main workstation on amdgpu on a 5xxxG - I'm still not sure if I've gotten the hardware transcoding etc working properly but that's all unrelated to fractional scaling, I assume.

loganwedwards 5y ago

I use Pop_OS on my Framework and loved 1.5x scaling except for screen tearing I get (YouTube for example). I reverted to 1x and increased icon and font sizes to semi compensate.

teekert 5y ago
Do you still get the tearing when you use Wayland?

eptcyka 5y ago

Instead of scaling the whole of the UI, I find that scaling via fonts works well enough when integer based scaling is not an option.

cycomanic 5y ago

I've been wondering about this for a while. Why do we need scale numbers and can't use dpi? Essentially if wayland (or desktops shells) would specify sizes in a "real world unit" changing the size of windows, text etc would just mean changing the dpi. In particular it would be trivial to have different size/resolution monitors display the elements at the same size. Considering if elemtents are vector graphics we don't even need fractional scaling for desktop elements. Now we still would need to scale images etc, but that is much less an issue than fractional scaling text or lines etc.

mananaysiempre 5y ago
The only program I’ve seen do it “properly” is Darktable, which has a dots-per-inch setting for things which have to be compatible with real-world linear measurements (WYSIWYG stuff for the most part), a dots-per-degree setting for things which depend on how far away you are sitting from your screen (UI element size), and a font size. I suspect the reason people don’t regularly do this is the same as the reason CSS no longer has pixels: it’s difficult to design (in the declarative CSS model) with more than one independent length unit. (I just went to check my several-years-old impressions against Darktable’s almost-undocumented config file, and... it no longer seems to have these settings? I’m not sure.) Unfortunately, the “UI scale” thing seems to be baked into Wayland nowadays; I have no idea how to get Evince to realize that an A4 sheet at 100% should be 210 cm wide whatever my screen resolution and “UI scale”.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > it’s difficult to design (in the declarative CSS model) with more than one independent length unit. Modern CSS is quite close to Turing complete, so an entirely constraint-driven design (which is what's needed when more than one unit is being chosen by the user) ought to be feasible. You need at least "real world units" for stuff like the minimum size of touch targets, and "angular units" (like CSS pixels) for the general scaling of widgets. Plus it would be nice to add a separate scaling factor for text, since users differ widely in what they find most readable. So that makes for three independent settings, in the general case.

LawnGnome 5y ago

The screen resolution is my least favourite aspect of the Framework, for sure. Not a deal breaker, but every now and then my eye catches a poorly aliased bit of text and gets sad. I've basically resigned myself to running Sway in 1.5x scale mode, which means that things get rendered at 2x and scaled down. Sway does about as well as I think any desktop environment could be expected to, but it's never going to be the same as rendering at true screen resolution. Alas, running in 1x or 2x and using font settings to handle it breaks down the moment you connect to an external display that really is 1x or 2x. That said, I love the rest of the laptop (well, maybe except the battery life), so my hope is that at some point we can buy a replacement screen at a more useful resolution, at which point I'll be first in line to buy and install it.

nvarsj 5y ago

I love high res smaller screens. I have the X13 with 2560x1600. I leave the screen at 100% (perfect size for window widgets, etc.) and scale fonts by 1.5. Works great and everything is super sharp. I can also scale down the fonts if I want and don't lose the sharpness due to the increased dpi.