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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 th

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.
- johnh-hn 1y ago
  > 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. I'm wondering if this was the problem I was running into before – it sounds eerily familiar. I never got far enough to explore individual apps outside of preinstalled ones because I couldn't get comfortable enough. I appreciate your response as I wasn't aware of the different session types.
  - jchw 1y ago
    Yeah, it probably has something to do with this. In X11 sessions, the display server does not typically handle scaling. Instead, the desktop environments provide scaling preferences to UI toolkits that then do the scaling themselves. In Wayland, the display server does handle scaling. In both X11 and Wayland, you should usually see most applications following your scaling preferences nowadays. In Wayland sessions, you can ensure that applications always appear at the correct size, though at the cost of "legacy" applications appearing blurry. This behavior is configured in the Display Settings in KDE Plasma. Also possibly useful: if you like the KDE Plasma session, it has a built-in magnifier; just hold Ctrl+Meta and use the scroll wheel.
    - johnh-hn 1y ago
      > Yeah, it probably has something to do with this. In X11 sessions, the display server does not typically handle scaling. Instead, the desktop environments provide scaling preferences to UI toolkits that then do the scaling themselves. In Wayland, the display server does handle scaling. Presumably this leads to a more unified scaling experience. This was one thing I was concerned about before, as it didn't seem that way. That's a solid improvement on its own. > Also possibly useful: if you like the KDE Plasma session, it has a built-in magnifier; just hold Ctrl+Meta and use the scroll wheel. This is useful yes, along with the rest of your comments. Thanks for your help.
- 1y ago
BatteryMountain 1y ago
So Gnome does support it, but it is terrible. Last I tried it, it also applied the custom scaling value to all the displays like Windows. KDE does it perfectly.

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.

johnh-hn 1y ago
> 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. I'm wondering if this was the problem I was running into before – it sounds eerily familiar. I never got far enough to explore individual apps outside of preinstalled ones because I couldn't get comfortable enough. I appreciate your response as I wasn't aware of the different session types.
- jchw 1y ago
  Yeah, it probably has something to do with this. In X11 sessions, the display server does not typically handle scaling. Instead, the desktop environments provide scaling preferences to UI toolkits that then do the scaling themselves. In Wayland, the display server does handle scaling. In both X11 and Wayland, you should usually see most applications following your scaling preferences nowadays. In Wayland sessions, you can ensure that applications always appear at the correct size, though at the cost of "legacy" applications appearing blurry. This behavior is configured in the Display Settings in KDE Plasma. Also possibly useful: if you like the KDE Plasma session, it has a built-in magnifier; just hold Ctrl+Meta and use the scroll wheel.
  - johnh-hn 1y ago
    > Yeah, it probably has something to do with this. In X11 sessions, the display server does not typically handle scaling. Instead, the desktop environments provide scaling preferences to UI toolkits that then do the scaling themselves. In Wayland, the display server does handle scaling. Presumably this leads to a more unified scaling experience. This was one thing I was concerned about before, as it didn't seem that way. That's a solid improvement on its own. > Also possibly useful: if you like the KDE Plasma session, it has a built-in magnifier; just hold Ctrl+Meta and use the scroll wheel. This is useful yes, along with the rest of your comments. Thanks for your help.
1y ago

BatteryMountain 1y ago

So Gnome does support it, but it is terrible. Last I tried it, it also applied the custom scaling value to all the displays like Windows. KDE does it perfectly.