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At the risk of sounding negative I have to dissent. Linux on the Framework is great if you use GNOME or KDE. Those two DE's specifically support Fractional sc

At the risk of sounding negative I have to dissent. Linux on the Framework is great *if* you use GNOME or KDE. Those two DE's specifically support Fractional scaling in Wayland the best I've been using XFCE for the better part of 15 years meanwhile. Its Wayland support is a permanent unfortunate "work-in-progress" (apparently they only have two full-time developers for the whole project?) and I'd assume many other less popular desktop environments are in a similar bucket The Framework is a fantastic laptop and a joy to use even under Windows 11. I don't hold its XFCE issues against Framework, but it's worth remembering that "Linux on the Desktop" isn't a single monolith

binkHN 3y ago
For better or worse, I think Wayland is here to stay and that's where all the development is going.
burntsushi 3y ago
I've been using X11 on my Framework laptop for years. No desktop environment at all. Just my regular old school window manager[1]. No KDE or GNOME. But also no XFCE. The only thing I had to do to get scaling working for me was set two environment variables[2]. I was indeed worried about this when I bought the laptop. Prior to this, I avoided anything with resolutions higher than 1920x1200. But it turned out that everything mostly worked with a couple tweaks. I think the only real issue I've run into is `git gui`. As I understand it, the GUI toolkit it uses doesn't support scaling? Not sure. I ended up working around it by just increasing font sizes. I suppose this exposes the weakness that is probably impacting you: the scaling on my laptop is being done by the GUI toolkits, not the display server or compositor. (I don't always run a compositor, but when I do, I use `picom`. Mostly just to avoid tearing.) [1]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo [2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/ea3a88e6160f4244abe43fe9833ee4537436880f/.envrc#L33-L52 https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/ea3a88e6160f4244...
- RealStickman_ 3y ago
  I'm using i3wm and maybe I've been doing scaling wrong, but I've only needed to set Xft.dpi and one setting in Polybar (because it doesn't read Xft.dpi) to scale everything toba comfortable size. https://gitea.exu.li/exu/configs/src/branch/main/arch-config/per-device/lupusregina/xresources-dpi-override https://gitea.exu.li/exu/configs/src/branch/main/arch-config...
warner25 3y ago
Agreed. I struggled a bit with XFCE on my Framework for a few months before switching to GNOME, largely because Framework's display size is best with fractional scaling. 100% made everything too small, and I could work with 200% and some tweaks (although some applications didn't play nicely at all), but 175% or 150% is perfect. Their choice of display size is one reason (among several) why Framework is really not Linux-first.
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  Cinnamon works great on it, has fractional scaling and is more traditional like xfce.
ollien 3y ago
I admittedly just got my Framework a couple of days ago, but I found scaling the text size to be sufficient in quite a lot of cases, at least for me, in XFCE.
kelnos 3y ago
> I've been using XFCE for the better part of 15 years meanwhile. Nice, nearly 20 years for me. > (apparently they only have two full-time developers for the whole project?) We actually have zero full time developers. I'm probably the closest thing to a full-time developer as I have a lot of free time on my hands these days, but even then I don't work on Xfce enough to call it full time. And we only have two people working on Wayland support, and so that's even less than the non-full-time each of us put in. > Its Wayland support is a permanent unfortunate "work-in-progress" We've probably made more progress in the past 6 months than all the time prior, combined. Things are coming along, but it'll probably be another 1-2 years before it's usable, and only "stable" in time for the 4.22.0 release at the end of 2026. And that's still all aspirational; it may not materialize in that time. It turns out that the Wayland protocol is super limited, and a lot of things that you could do easily on X11 you essentially have to re-invent from scratch. And that's before we even talk about turning xfwm4 into a Wayland compositor. (Some rando has forked xfwm4 and is building a Wayland compositor with it, but has chosen not to collaborate with us at all, so it's unclear if their work will ever be mergeable.) But that's what happens when you're a developer for a software project that has no corporate sponsorship or people hired specifically to work on it. Feel free to contribute; we could definitely use the help! Anyhow: I run Xfce on a Framework 13, and it's fine. I've set UI scaling to 2x, and I've added a custom modeline to X11 for 2712x1805 (1.2x native). Big downside is apparently this turns off the iGPU's ability to eliminate tearing. I suspect there's a way to fix that, but I haven't had the motivation to dig into it (I wonder if simply using a more-even scaling factor like 1.25 would do it, even if things would appear a little smaller than I'd like).
- DigitalGoose 3y ago
  > I'm probably the closest thing to a full-time developer... I just want to say thanks, your work is very much appreciated! > I run Xfce on a Framework 13 Do you do much gaming or 3D stuff? I have a Framework 13 AMD running NixOS (Kernel 6.6 and BIOS 3.03) and its performance is great in desktop apps, but simple games seem to really work it. And by "simple" I'm talking about Everquest Titanium that runs smooth as butter via PoL on an i3-7100U (Xubuntu 18.04), and also Wobbly Life that runs happily on a Lenovo with Ryzen 4500U (Windows 11). Both of those games cause my FW 13 to spin fans up like crazy after a couple mins and sound like it's going to take-off. I'm trying to figure out if I'm missing something from my NixOS setup, because I feel like its performance should be better.
zerocrates 3y ago
The solution I've been pretty happy with instead of Wayland fractional scaling is to have scaling set at 1:1 and use GDK_DPI_SCALE (I think that's the one) at 1.5 or 1.25 or whatever. Things like Firefox, Chrome, the standard GTK system apps will scale nicely, and stuff that doesn't support it will just be small instead of doing a blurry zoom.

At the risk of sounding negative I have to dissent. Linux on the Framework is great *if* you use GNOME or KDE. Those two DE's specifically support Fractional sc

binkHN 3y ago

For better or worse, I think Wayland is here to stay and that's where all the development is going.

burntsushi 3y ago

I've been using X11 on my Framework laptop for years. No desktop environment at all. Just my regular old school window manager[1]. No KDE or GNOME. But also no XFCE. The only thing I had to do to get scaling working for me was set two environment variables[2]. I was indeed worried about this when I bought the laptop. Prior to this, I avoided anything with resolutions higher than 1920x1200. But it turned out that everything mostly worked with a couple tweaks. I think the only real issue I've run into is `git gui`. As I understand it, the GUI toolkit it uses doesn't support scaling? Not sure. I ended up working around it by just increasing font sizes. I suppose this exposes the weakness that is probably impacting you: the scaling on my laptop is being done by the GUI toolkits, not the display server or compositor. (I don't always run a compositor, but when I do, I use `picom`. Mostly just to avoid tearing.) [1]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo [2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/ea3a88e6160f4244abe43fe9833ee4537436880f/.envrc#L33-L52 https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/ea3a88e6160f4244...

RealStickman_ 3y ago
I'm using i3wm and maybe I've been doing scaling wrong, but I've only needed to set Xft.dpi and one setting in Polybar (because it doesn't read Xft.dpi) to scale everything toba comfortable size. https://gitea.exu.li/exu/configs/src/branch/main/arch-config/per-device/lupusregina/xresources-dpi-override https://gitea.exu.li/exu/configs/src/branch/main/arch-config...

warner25 3y ago

Agreed. I struggled a bit with XFCE on my Framework for a few months before switching to GNOME, largely because Framework's display size is best with fractional scaling. 100% made everything too small, and I could work with 200% and some tweaks (although some applications didn't play nicely at all), but 175% or 150% is perfect. Their choice of display size is one reason (among several) why Framework is really not Linux-first.

mixmastamyk 3y ago
Cinnamon works great on it, has fractional scaling and is more traditional like xfce.

ollien 3y ago

I admittedly just got my Framework a couple of days ago, but I found scaling the text size to be sufficient in quite a lot of cases, at least for me, in XFCE.

kelnos 3y ago

> I've been using XFCE for the better part of 15 years meanwhile. Nice, nearly 20 years for me. > (apparently they only have two full-time developers for the whole project?) We actually have zero full time developers. I'm probably the closest thing to a full-time developer as I have a lot of free time on my hands these days, but even then I don't work on Xfce enough to call it full time. And we only have two people working on Wayland support, and so that's even less than the non-full-time each of us put in. > Its Wayland support is a permanent unfortunate "work-in-progress" We've probably made more progress in the past 6 months than all the time prior, combined. Things are coming along, but it'll probably be another 1-2 years before it's usable, and only "stable" in time for the 4.22.0 release at the end of 2026. And that's still all aspirational; it may not materialize in that time. It turns out that the Wayland protocol is super limited, and a lot of things that you could do easily on X11 you essentially have to re-invent from scratch. And that's before we even talk about turning xfwm4 into a Wayland compositor. (Some rando has forked xfwm4 and is building a Wayland compositor with it, but has chosen not to collaborate with us at all, so it's unclear if their work will ever be mergeable.) But that's what happens when you're a developer for a software project that has no corporate sponsorship or people hired specifically to work on it. Feel free to contribute; we could definitely use the help! Anyhow: I run Xfce on a Framework 13, and it's fine. I've set UI scaling to 2x, and I've added a custom modeline to X11 for 2712x1805 (1.2x native). Big downside is apparently this turns off the iGPU's ability to eliminate tearing. I suspect there's a way to fix that, but I haven't had the motivation to dig into it (I wonder if simply using a more-even scaling factor like 1.25 would do it, even if things would appear a little smaller than I'd like).

DigitalGoose 3y ago
> I'm probably the closest thing to a full-time developer... I just want to say thanks, your work is very much appreciated! > I run Xfce on a Framework 13 Do you do much gaming or 3D stuff? I have a Framework 13 AMD running NixOS (Kernel 6.6 and BIOS 3.03) and its performance is great in desktop apps, but simple games seem to really work it. And by "simple" I'm talking about Everquest Titanium that runs smooth as butter via PoL on an i3-7100U (Xubuntu 18.04), and also Wobbly Life that runs happily on a Lenovo with Ryzen 4500U (Windows 11). Both of those games cause my FW 13 to spin fans up like crazy after a couple mins and sound like it's going to take-off. I'm trying to figure out if I'm missing something from my NixOS setup, because I feel like its performance should be better.

zerocrates 3y ago

The solution I've been pretty happy with instead of Wayland fractional scaling is to have scaling set at 1:1 and use GDK_DPI_SCALE (I think that's the one) at 1.5 or 1.25 or whatever. Things like Firefox, Chrome, the standard GTK system apps will scale nicely, and stuff that doesn't support it will just be small instead of doing a blurry zoom.