4 ms·

How is the HDPI experience? I am using KDE with a lot of hacks [1] currently, would love to try something that is more native. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.c

How is the HDPI experience? I am using KDE with a lot of hacks [1] currently, would love to try something that is more native. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30752499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30752499

mijoharas 5y ago
I can't speak about KDE, but properly working HDPI (4k monitor, and a couple of 1080p monitors) is what brought me to wayland (sway) and has required almost no setup (I think I enabled a setting for chrome, and might have installed a different emacs with wayland compatibility). It's been absolutely fantastic, and it's the primary reason I can't go back to X.
dathinab 5y ago
Hm, I have to look into this (HDPI, >>fractional scaling<<) again. - Last time I looked into it, there was no Wayland protocol for clients being able to handle the scaling themself (if they want to) and as such do it "properly" (e.g. for font rendering). Through I think now there is, I think Gnome supports it, KDE and Sway might but I'm not sure either way. - This still needs to be supported by the client, which it should be for modern Qt,GTK applications. - If not supported by the client it will render at a non-fractional scaling and then scale the image. - Here the quality can change depending on the algorithm used (e.g. downscaling vs. upscaling and if downscaling how much "bigger" the image is rendered before downscaling and what algorithm is used there). Last time I checked (very long ago) the algorithm sway used on my laptop (could be GPU dependent) was bad, like really bad, but this was also very long ago. So there is a high chance this improved. Given that I'm going to setup a new HDPI laptop soon, I guess I have to check this points again soon ;) As a side note: Non-fractional scaling works perfectly fine on at least sway since years.

4 ms·

How is the HDPI experience? I am using KDE with a lot of hacks [1] currently, would love to try something that is more native. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.c

by yathaid 5y ago

mijoharas 5y ago
I can't speak about KDE, but properly working HDPI (4k monitor, and a couple of 1080p monitors) is what brought me to wayland (sway) and has required almost no setup (I think I enabled a setting for chrome, and might have installed a different emacs with wayland compatibility). It's been absolutely fantastic, and it's the primary reason I can't go back to X.
dathinab 5y ago
Hm, I have to look into this (HDPI, >>fractional scaling<<) again. - Last time I looked into it, there was no Wayland protocol for clients being able to handle the scaling themself (if they want to) and as such do it "properly" (e.g. for font rendering). Through I think now there is, I think Gnome supports it, KDE and Sway might but I'm not sure either way. - This still needs to be supported by the client, which it should be for modern Qt,GTK applications. - If not supported by the client it will render at a non-fractional scaling and then scale the image. - Here the quality can change depending on the algorithm used (e.g. downscaling vs. upscaling and if downscaling how much "bigger" the image is rendered before downscaling and what algorithm is used there). Last time I checked (very long ago) the algorithm sway used on my laptop (could be GPU dependent) was bad, like really bad, but this was also very long ago. So there is a high chance this improved. Given that I'm going to setup a new HDPI laptop soon, I guess I have to check this points again soon ;) As a side note: Non-fractional scaling works perfectly fine on at least sway since years.