3 ms·

I feel like I'm somehow an anomaly with all of this. For years I've used two screens, either with a MacBook of some sort or with an iMac, and it's almost always

I feel like I'm somehow an anomaly with all of this. For years I've used two screens, either with a MacBook of some sort or with an iMac, and it's almost always worked fine regardless of if the second monitor is an old Thunderbolt Display running through a TB2 → TB3 adapter or a third party 1440p monitor (have tried a couple different ASUS models as well as an Alienware model). Maybe once a month I'll see the two screens scrambled when waking up (which is promptly fixed with a replug) but that's the worst of it. The exception was with a 2016 15" MBP. That thing is flaky to say the least. But a 2014 MacBook Air, 2015 (pre-touchbar) 15" MBP, iMac Pro, and 16" M1 MBP have all been solid. Heck even the Haswell hackintosh tower I was using for a while handled multiple monitors well, and it was even running with two separate discrete GPUs. I've had much worse luck with monitors with Windows and especially Linux, the first of which is rocky at best if Thunderbolt is involved and the latter of which is fragile with anything but a super simple FOSS supported setup (e.g. Intel iGPU or a single recent AMD GPU). Linux fractional DPI scaling is still a mess even on near-cutting-edge distros like Fedora under both Xorg and Wayland, which is super disappointing for me because I have a ThinkPad that would love to be running Linux instead of Windows but is unusable with integer scaling.

jeroenhd 4y ago
For what it's worth, Ubuntu 22.04 (and anything similarly up to date using GNOME) supports fractional scaling by default. Because it's inherently less performant than integer scaling you need to check a box underneath the scaling factor but that's it. Works fine here with a GTX1080 on Wayland with three screens. Earlier GNOME versions had the option hidden behind a flag you could enable in the "Tweaks" application.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I'll have to try Ubuntu 22.04. The flags I have tried already, but even with those turned on things are spotty. The DE looks great, but it starts to fall apart with third party apps. Some work fine, others kinda (or blurry if it's XWayland), others yet totally broken. It'll be a good day when Linux HiDPI support is as solid as it is under macOS or even Windows.
zumu 4y ago
Fractional scaling is solid on Wayland in my experience. The main issue is not all desktop software has been updated to be friendly with Wayland yet—Electron being a notable offender. For these apps, there's often configuration options via env vars you can pass to the process to force Wayland or XWayland mode. Eventually, this will be unnecessary as the apps get updated, so things should only get better from here on out. I run Fedora 36 and use a TB3 dock for a 1440p laptop I run at 175% scaling.

jeroenhd 4y ago

For what it's worth, Ubuntu 22.04 (and anything similarly up to date using GNOME) supports fractional scaling by default. Because it's inherently less performant than integer scaling you need to check a box underneath the scaling factor but that's it. Works fine here with a GTX1080 on Wayland with three screens. Earlier GNOME versions had the option hidden behind a flag you could enable in the "Tweaks" application.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
I'll have to try Ubuntu 22.04. The flags I have tried already, but even with those turned on things are spotty. The DE looks great, but it starts to fall apart with third party apps. Some work fine, others kinda (or blurry if it's XWayland), others yet totally broken. It'll be a good day when Linux HiDPI support is as solid as it is under macOS or even Windows.

zumu 4y ago

Fractional scaling is solid on Wayland in my experience. The main issue is not all desktop software has been updated to be friendly with Wayland yet—Electron being a notable offender. For these apps, there's often configuration options via env vars you can pass to the process to force Wayland or XWayland mode. Eventually, this will be unnecessary as the apps get updated, so things should only get better from here on out. I run Fedora 36 and use a TB3 dock for a 1440p laptop I run at 175% scaling.