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I fully agree. And Wayland supports HiDPI with fractured scaling very well. Also tablet devices work better on Wayland. If you’re running Linux on a Surface, yo

by immnn 5y ago

I fully agree. And Wayland supports HiDPI with fractured scaling very well. Also tablet devices work better on Wayland. If you’re running Linux on a Surface, you should definitely switch to Wayland. It’s really time to ditch XServer and I wonder why Ubuntu and derivates still use it by default.

pkolaczk 5y ago
> And Wayland supports HiDPI with fractured scaling very well Very well only for the apps that cooperate well, e.g. GTK-based apps. Non-native apps (eg IntelliJ Idea) on my Ubuntu desktop were blurry when I used any kind of scaling - not just fractional scaling but any scaling != 100%. Reducing the display resolution by 2x resulted in much crispier rendering than full resolution with 2x scaling for those apps.
- chousuke 5y ago
  I think that's because "non-native" apps run inside an X server running as a Wayland client. So you're basically getting the X experience :/
  - francasso 5y ago
    That's not the case, intellij text rendering looks perfect on X/Gnome with fractional scaling (at least for me)
    - kaba0 5y ago
      But you are still using it as an X app, which uses X configs over wayland’s.
int_19h 5y ago
Isn't fractional scaling on Wayland done by integer upscaling followed by downscaling? Or is it just a Gnome thing?
- jannes 5y ago
  Is that a problem? I think macOS works the same way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19052960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19052960
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Afaik macos doesn’t even have fractional scaling anymore, they only do integer-scaling. But for that retina screens are a must.
    - jannes 5y ago
      I can certainly select fractional settings in the display settings right now (default is 2x). But as mentioned before, the fractional scaling factors are not exposed to any software. https://imgur.com/a/w4PAipI https://imgur.com/a/w4PAipI
  - int_19h 5y ago
    Yes; the quality of such upscaling is noticeably worse than just doing proper upscaling, especially when it comes to text rendering. IIRC macOS does it this way because it historically only had integer upscaling, and when apps depend on that, changing it can be a major break.
- kaba0 5y ago
  That’s only for Xwayland apps. Otherwise it is framework-dependent, but they can at least have a reliable way of reading out the requested zoom level.
lgvld 5y ago
Yep. Gnome on Wayland has been the best HiDPI experience I had on a Linux system so far. Also includes night mode out of the box.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  "Night mode", but nothing else. The GTK devs promised a theming interface as consolation for their libadwaita rollout, but that's trapped in limbo afaict...
blihp 5y ago
nVidia is the dominant discrete GPU vendor, as well as having a fair amount of laptop market share, and their drivers haven't adequately supported it. It's rather difficult to flip the switch when a big chunk of your userbase can't make the move. I finally switched off of nVidia, in part because of the Wayland situation, but the majority of users aren't likely to do so.

by immnn 5y ago

pkolaczk 5y ago

> And Wayland supports HiDPI with fractured scaling very well Very well only for the apps that cooperate well, e.g. GTK-based apps. Non-native apps (eg IntelliJ Idea) on my Ubuntu desktop were blurry when I used any kind of scaling - not just fractional scaling but any scaling != 100%. Reducing the display resolution by 2x resulted in much crispier rendering than full resolution with 2x scaling for those apps.

chousuke 5y ago
I think that's because "non-native" apps run inside an X server running as a Wayland client. So you're basically getting the X experience :/
- francasso 5y ago
  That's not the case, intellij text rendering looks perfect on X/Gnome with fractional scaling (at least for me)
  - kaba0 5y ago
    But you are still using it as an X app, which uses X configs over wayland’s.

int_19h 5y ago

Isn't fractional scaling on Wayland done by integer upscaling followed by downscaling? Or is it just a Gnome thing?

jannes 5y ago
Is that a problem? I think macOS works the same way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19052960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19052960
- kaba0 5y ago
  Afaik macos doesn’t even have fractional scaling anymore, they only do integer-scaling. But for that retina screens are a must.
  - jannes 5y ago
    I can certainly select fractional settings in the display settings right now (default is 2x). But as mentioned before, the fractional scaling factors are not exposed to any software. https://imgur.com/a/w4PAipI https://imgur.com/a/w4PAipI
- int_19h 5y ago
  Yes; the quality of such upscaling is noticeably worse than just doing proper upscaling, especially when it comes to text rendering. IIRC macOS does it this way because it historically only had integer upscaling, and when apps depend on that, changing it can be a major break.
kaba0 5y ago
That’s only for Xwayland apps. Otherwise it is framework-dependent, but they can at least have a reliable way of reading out the requested zoom level.

lgvld 5y ago

Yep. Gnome on Wayland has been the best HiDPI experience I had on a Linux system so far. Also includes night mode out of the box.

smoldesu 5y ago
"Night mode", but nothing else. The GTK devs promised a theming interface as consolation for their libadwaita rollout, but that's trapped in limbo afaict...

blihp 5y ago

nVidia is the dominant discrete GPU vendor, as well as having a fair amount of laptop market share, and their drivers haven't adequately supported it. It's rather difficult to flip the switch when a big chunk of your userbase can't make the move. I finally switched off of nVidia, in part because of the Wayland situation, but the majority of users aren't likely to do so.