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I'm split with this. If it helps other people, then I'm all for it. But speaking as someone who is legally blind and makes extensive use of these settings, Wind

I'm split with this. If it helps other people, then I'm all for it. But speaking as someone who is legally blind and makes extensive use of these settings, Windows 10 accessibility drives me mad. I'm waiting for fractional scaling to improve for Linux so I can make the switch. The problem with Make text bigger and Make everything bigger is they apply to every single application that supports them. Let's say I have two applications: A is comfortable enough to see and B isn't. If I change either of these settings to help me use B, A could now be a problem because it can take up too much screen real estate, which makes it unusable for a different reason. This doesn't sound like much of a problem until you have 5 or more applications you're trying to balance via these two settings. In reality, it's more complex than I'm describing because I may need to change both settings to help with a new application, which then means I have to continuously test every other application I use to make sure they're all somewhat comfortable enough to use. If an application I use updates to include support for these settings, I have to go through all this unplanned work again to try and make everything usable once more. It's frustrating. I know people make fun of Electron, but one major plus point for me is I have per application scaling when using it, and so it gives me better accessibility than Windows does by far. > (Failing that, adding basic support for scaling text or UI via ctrl+plus/minus would be a huge improvement!) I'd consider this to be a better option.

BatteryMountain 1y ago
Try Fedora with KDE. It has fractional scaling, per display. I set my laptop (1920x1080) to 120%, effectively making it 1600x900 but with very good physical size of things. I set my external panel (2560x1440) to 160%, effectively making it 1600x900 also. KDE even visualizes the two panels to be the same size. Ontop of these basic DPI settings, you can then tweak font/text even further. Its quite amazing. Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors. If you do go down the fractional scaling rabit hole, make sure whatever values you pick, both the height and width ends without any fractions after applying your custom dpi... that elimnates all blurs. In my example above, 2560/1.6 and 1440/1.6 gives nice round numbers, even though the operating systems typically only offer 100/125/150/175/200 etc. I built a small console app for myself that takes the resolution and tests all increments of 1% to see which resolution combinations gives values that don't end with fractions at the end. So it tells me which effective resolutions I will get at which % settings. Its awesome and made it so that I can easily make so that my laptop and external display has the same amount of space (or line of code) on the screen, even though they are different physical sizes.
- johnh-hn 1y ago
  Thanks for detailed response. Do you happen to know if this is a recent change in Fedora/KDE? I tried somewhat recently, although I can't remember quite when that was. Gnome had experimental support for fractional scaling at the time but it wasn't good enough to switch to. > Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors. Yeah, support for custom DPI in general isn't great. I've been using https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/windows_10_dpi_fix.html https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/windows_10_dpi_fix.... for years to at least partially help. Edit: I think I answered my own question about how recent the change might have been: https://blogs.kde.org/2024/12/14/this-week-in-plasma-better-fractional-scaling/ https://blogs.kde.org/2024/12/14/this-week-in-plasma-better-... This seems to be just after I last tried. I'll give it another go, thanks BatteryMountain!
  - yndoendo 1y ago
    Curious about GNOME fractal scaling issues you experience. I currently have the experimental feature enable at 150% scale for a laptop screen at 2560x1600 resolution. Have not had any issues by itself nor with an external 3440x1400 at 100% scale with GNOME 48.
    - johnh-hn 1y ago
      I wish I could give you a better answer here, but I honestly don't remember. I only remember that something I needed was missing from it for me to make the switch.
  - jchw 1y ago
    As a word of warning, it is still not 100% perfect. I've noticed that on my laptop, when the Zed editor is maximized, there is a tiny gap between it and the panel at the bottom. I think this happens when an app, even if it supports fractional scaling in general, can't handle a logical window size that is not a whole number. To be fair, this is one of the only apps I've really had any scaling issues with lately, and it is just a minor visual annoyance. The Linux DPI scaling story is finally pretty solid. Also, many apps (including Electron/Chromium apps) will still run under XWayland when using a Wayland session by default, because there are still a handful of small issues and omissions in their Wayland drivers. (It's pretty minor for Electron/Chromium so you can opt to force it to use native Wayland if you want.) In case of XWayland apps, you'll have to choose between allowing X11 apps to scale themselves (like the old days) or having the compositor scale them (the scaling will be right, even across displays, but it will appear blurry at scales higher than 1x.) I still recommend the Wayland session overall; it gives a much more solid scaling experience, especially with multiple monitors.
layer8 1y ago
Ideally, applications should use the Windows settings by default, but allow configuring a different scaling. Even more ideally, Windows should allow per-application settings, but until it does it’s the applications’ job.
- johnh-hn 1y ago
  Part of my wonders if this is what Microsoft hoped would happen when they implemented the settings in the manner they did. But it hasn't played out that way.
  - Xss3 1y ago
    It is. Any app implementation of the windows setting could expose a multiplier of it somewhere. They already did the hard part of building a dynamic UI...
lhamil64 1y ago
What are your thoughts on screen magnifiers? Personally I tend to increase scaling a bit and use Magnifier for anything that's too small (or increase the font size in the application if possible)
- johnh-hn 1y ago
  I try to avoid using them. If I can, I prefer to configure my environment to not need them, but that does take a fair amount of work. I get by because of my technical knowledge. I don't know how other people cope.

BatteryMountain 1y ago

Try Fedora with KDE. It has fractional scaling, per display. I set my laptop (1920x1080) to 120%, effectively making it 1600x900 but with very good physical size of things. I set my external panel (2560x1440) to 160%, effectively making it 1600x900 also. KDE even visualizes the two panels to be the same size. Ontop of these basic DPI settings, you can then tweak font/text even further. Its quite amazing. Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors. If you do go down the fractional scaling rabit hole, make sure whatever values you pick, both the height and width ends without any fractions after applying your custom dpi... that elimnates all blurs. In my example above, 2560/1.6 and 1440/1.6 gives nice round numbers, even though the operating systems typically only offer 100/125/150/175/200 etc. I built a small console app for myself that takes the resolution and tests all increments of 1% to see which resolution combinations gives values that don't end with fractions at the end. So it tells me which effective resolutions I will get at which % settings. Its awesome and made it so that I can easily make so that my laptop and external display has the same amount of space (or line of code) on the screen, even though they are different physical sizes.

johnh-hn 1y ago
Thanks for detailed response. Do you happen to know if this is a recent change in Fedora/KDE? I tried somewhat recently, although I can't remember quite when that was. Gnome had experimental support for fractional scaling at the time but it wasn't good enough to switch to. > Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors. Yeah, support for custom DPI in general isn't great. I've been using https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/windows_10_dpi_fix.html https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/windows_10_dpi_fix.... for years to at least partially help. Edit: I think I answered my own question about how recent the change might have been: https://blogs.kde.org/2024/12/14/this-week-in-plasma-better-fractional-scaling/ https://blogs.kde.org/2024/12/14/this-week-in-plasma-better-... This seems to be just after I last tried. I'll give it another go, thanks BatteryMountain!
- yndoendo 1y ago
  Curious about GNOME fractal scaling issues you experience. I currently have the experimental feature enable at 150% scale for a laptop screen at 2560x1600 resolution. Have not had any issues by itself nor with an external 3440x1400 at 100% scale with GNOME 48.
  - johnh-hn 1y ago
    I wish I could give you a better answer here, but I honestly don't remember. I only remember that something I needed was missing from it for me to make the switch.
- jchw 1y ago
  As a word of warning, it is still not 100% perfect. I've noticed that on my laptop, when the Zed editor is maximized, there is a tiny gap between it and the panel at the bottom. I think this happens when an app, even if it supports fractional scaling in general, can't handle a logical window size that is not a whole number. To be fair, this is one of the only apps I've really had any scaling issues with lately, and it is just a minor visual annoyance. The Linux DPI scaling story is finally pretty solid. Also, many apps (including Electron/Chromium apps) will still run under XWayland when using a Wayland session by default, because there are still a handful of small issues and omissions in their Wayland drivers. (It's pretty minor for Electron/Chromium so you can opt to force it to use native Wayland if you want.) In case of XWayland apps, you'll have to choose between allowing X11 apps to scale themselves (like the old days) or having the compositor scale them (the scaling will be right, even across displays, but it will appear blurry at scales higher than 1x.) I still recommend the Wayland session overall; it gives a much more solid scaling experience, especially with multiple monitors.

layer8 1y ago

Ideally, applications should use the Windows settings by default, but allow configuring a different scaling. Even more ideally, Windows should allow per-application settings, but until it does it’s the applications’ job.

johnh-hn 1y ago
Part of my wonders if this is what Microsoft hoped would happen when they implemented the settings in the manner they did. But it hasn't played out that way.
- Xss3 1y ago
  It is. Any app implementation of the windows setting could expose a multiplier of it somewhere. They already did the hard part of building a dynamic UI...

lhamil64 1y ago

What are your thoughts on screen magnifiers? Personally I tend to increase scaling a bit and use Magnifier for anything that's too small (or increase the font size in the application if possible)

johnh-hn 1y ago
I try to avoid using them. If I can, I prefer to configure my environment to not need them, but that does take a fair amount of work. I get by because of my technical knowledge. I don't know how other people cope.