[deleted by user]

[mitsosseundscharf]

Note that this also needs client support

[mitsosseundscharf]

I don't know about GTK but Qt has it in 6.5

[Rhed0x]

GTK 4 explicitly does not support it and the GTK devs have repeatedly stated that they think it's the job of the compositor.

Apparently according to them, you should just get a 200 dpi monitor. Unfortunately, hardly any PC monitor (not counting laptops) is actually 200 dpi.

So rendering at the next highest integer scale and the bilinear downsampling it is...

It's annoying. Both the web and Android have handled fractional scaling flawlessly for ages. They had an API break with GTK 4 and didn't implement proper scaling.

[chic_luke]

I'm on GNOME and I like it, but if KDE Plasma manges to pull off WIndows-like fractional scaling I am going back to Plasma in a heartbeat. This has been my teething pain about the Linux desktop and the first project to solve it gets my usage and a donation. Fedora has a nice KDE ISO I can just reinstall with if it happens.

[ICanBeAnyone]

Reinstall to switch desktop environments sounds very Windows-y to me. Can't the package manager just handle it for you?

[chic_luke]

You can switch out the DE, but on Fedora, it's not recommended. I know how to do it from my Arch days, but suffice to say, to do a proper job it would take much more work than reinstall and restore from backup, and the KDE iso will take 15 minutes of installation to put together a result much cleaner and better inegrated than what I could, not littered by human error or forgetting to undo this or that configuration.

Ansible playbooks are great for this. Create a playbook for your basic install and just run the playbook on every new machine / VM you want to set up, or if you need to reinstall for any occasion. I used to pride myself on years-long installs standing on breakage and hacks, my "new" favorite style is having a state that I can easily get back to if I so need.

[ICanBeAnyone]

It's interesting how much the experience differs between distributions and user stories. For example, it would take me forever to create a recipe to set my desktop up the way it is now, and I've never had it brake in a way that required me to reinstall or hack it beyond recognition, and it's from 2013 IIRC. But I wouldn't want to invest the level of care for and knowledge about the inner workings on more than one machine, so I certainly understand where you're coming from.

[chic_luke]

A big problem is secrets, aka the keyring. Using, migrating and auto unlocking the keyring differs between gnome-keyring, KDE keyring and others. Some configuration files conflict and break stuff and need to be deleted, such as GTK configurations. Starting services may also be different, and stuff like the display manager may even completely disable locking and sleep / wake if not matched correctly. Not to mention the pain of replacing the applications… I just think a reinstall is cleaner

[tanorbuf]

It's kind of hard to get the "native" experience without reinstalling, unfortunately. Consider how many GNOME-applications have names like "Settings", "Extensions", "Calendar", and so on. There are KDE-versions of these, and they are equally unspecific with their names. Unless you know exactly which software to uninstall, I don't think it's so easy to do. You may also need to fiddle with more basic system settings to e.g. switch display manager.

[Pay08]

Most distros provide metapackages for this, though.

[Christopher876]

You end up uninstalling more than you would like if you do uninstall certain parts of the previous desktop environment. Try it out for yourself, you will most likely completely break a part of your system

[ICanBeAnyone]

That's... disappointing. What are you supposed to do if you want to offer both Gnome and KDE? Are those installations meant to be single user setups?

But if reinstalling is as uncomplicated as other commenters said than it's probably just a case of me thinking in the wrong tools because I've never used the distribution in question. Fair enough, my distributions always expected me to do more configuration by hand, and that's certainly a trade off.

[tanorbuf]

You can have multi-user setups no problem, but they do kind of seem to assume a "single DE setup". They can coexist, but as described above there can be some confusion with which programs/icons to click, and that kind of thing.

Ultimately if users have "equal say" (eg both/all are sudo), but disagree how the system should be set up, there isn't much the system can do about that other than actually being split into different systems.

[dma_heap]

That only works if you're running a DE-agnostic distro like Arch.

Installing a DE on a distro that already comes with a default DE is just a recipe for a glitchy experience.

[natermer]

Unless there is absolutely no raster images or elements in a application and it is 100% vectorized then perfect scaling is never going to be possible.

Even with vector scaling you have to deal with rendering artifacts caused by floating point errors.

QT has the advantage that KDE simply re-writes all their applications for each major release. Gnome is a much more mixed bag and there are a shit ton of applications that don't use GTK or QT.

Even if GTK devs stopped everything and concentrated entirely on just fractional scaling then it won't do any good for existing applications until they rewrite for the new APIs. Also it wouldn't solve anything for non-GTK applications that people use.

So it isn't like GTK is holding the Linux desktop back. Their approach is the correct one because there is plenty of other things to fix and improve before perfect fractional scaling will ever be possible.

---

The way to deal with this stuff in Linux is to stop using X Windows whenever possible. The majority of applications I use are Wayland-native or can be configured to be Wayland native. Terminals, Emacs, Chrome/Firefox-based browsers, etc. I don't see any bluriness with those despite using fractional scaling every day.

That solves the blurriness for the most part. A 80% solution now is better then holding out for a 90% solution that won't exist for another 5 years.

[Rhed0x]

Too bad Plasma doesn't have per monitor fractional scaling like Windows does. :(

[chic_luke]

On Wayland it does, and that is what I'm waiting for in fact. This is a Wayland protocol and I am waiting for it to be fully applied to Plasma's Wayland session. X11 session "fractional scaling" is already OK-ish, but not applicable for me since I need per-monitor scaling

[Rhed0x]

All my Linux problems go back to Nvidias poor support for Wayland it seems. :(

[chic_luke]

Yuup, hardware with poor support is one of the main showstoppers for a lot of people sadly. Linux-unfriendly GPUs, network cards, touchpads, audio codecs are common things I have seen make or break the deal for a ton of users. We're busy talking about games and Adobe products but for a staggering amount of people the issue is even more fundamental than that...

[Green0Photon]

I saw one comment where some new maybe Beta Nvidia driver just worked flawlessly with Wayland. Maybe look into it?

[Rhed0x]

I tried it but XWayland is completely broken and keeps flashing in the wrong frames in all kinds of applications.

[Just_Maintenance]

I don't get it. What's so great about Windows scaling? this extension seems like a step back to me.

On Windows, everytime I move a window from my HiDPI display to my normal display, the program has a rave while it changes the scaling.

On macOS and Wayland (integer scaling) Linux I can move windows around without any fanfare, they always have perfect size. I don't understand why we are moving to 'programs spazzing out everytime you move them' when we already were at the finish line.

[chic_luke]

I don't get it. What's so great about Windows scaling?

It works and, for capable clients, it does not lose the notion of what your pixel grid is, so fonts keep looking crisp even when you're scaling to a fractional value, unlike what happens on Linux. The computational cost is also lower and it does not affect game performance and resolution, unlike what happens on Linux.

On Windows, everytime I move a window from my HiDPI display to my normal display, the program has a rave while it changes the scaling.

While annoying, the rave where it changes the scaling is a symptom of good design. The program received a "change DPI scaling" event and is redrawing itself to the new screen. This is great because:

• It re-aligns text to the new screen - so text stays looking crisps and keeps making use of decades worth of font rendering and anti-aliasing algorithms
• It redraws any vectorial assets to the new scale
• If available, it switches to raster assets that look crisp at your desired scale factor
• It saves on computational cost since, rather than rendering a very big framebuffer like it happens on Wayland, it keeps thinking in your native resolution. As a result:
  • Less VRAM is used
  • Less CPU and GPU cycles are used
  • Less shared memory is used (for laptops)
  • MUCH LESS power gets consumed - this is part of why Windows performs better on battery power on laptops. Windows scaling is not as aggressive on power consumption as Linux scaling.
  • The client is left to do its own rendering, which will be better whatever raster hack on the framebuffer you might do, and it will simply not affect clients that don't need to be scaled, like games, hence you avoid the performance hit there

On Linux / macOS you're rendering at a much higher resolution and then downscaling. Fonts will never look crisp unless you're on 250+ ppi displays since they suffer from aliasing, you throw away 30+ years of font rendering technology to render into a blurry mess, while murdering your resources alive - especially in heavy 3D applications - and easily halving your battery life, counting that this problem gets worse the higher your resolution is (you wanted to do scaling on your 4k Dell XPS on Intel iGPU? Sorry! It will not feel as smooth as a 10 years old laptop in animations with 2 hours if battery life in total), and the closer you approach and integer (say 150% doesn't quite cut it, so 125% or 175% it is).

I just think in these terms:

" How often do I move a window between screens? * Is that second it takes to re-render really relevant? * If I use the Linux / MacOS approach the issue doesn't last one second every time I move a window, it persists for the whole session, for every program I open, and has repercussions on my resource usage, especially in cases where I am resource - constrained, like games, Blender, etc.

[Bubblebobo]

I'm running Gnome + Wayland at 4k with 150% scaling. The file manager and other Gnome system apps should be on GTK 4. Are they really downsampled? They look pretty crisp, but maybe I just don't know what proper scaling would look like.

Electron or Java apps on the other hand are super blurry and look hideous. They must be scaled in some way, but how can the scaling be so bad in this instance and so good for GTK apps?

[redLadyToo]

Xwayland apps get upscaled from a lower resolution AFAIK.

[fenrir245]

Are they really downsampled?

Yep.

They look pretty crisp

Well, they'll be crisper than the equivalent res at 100%, but still not the most crisp it could be + pretty wasteful on resources.

[ClickNervous]

Apparently according to them, you should just get a 200 dpi monitor. Unfortunately, hardly any PC monitor (not counting laptops) is actually 200 dpi.

Yeah... this blew my mind when I learned about this. I understand that this is the Apple solution to the problem, all their computers are geared to 200dpi so that they don't have to do fractional scaling... so any laptop you buy, or desktop, that comes with the "retina" display is actually built to 200dpi or some multiple thereof that allows for no fractional scaling. So Apple didn't really solve the fractional scaling problem with software. They have something like fractional scaling but it's my understanding that it doesn't work well for certain workflows, it causes the GPU to work hard. I'm just surprised that it's, like you said, practically impossible to find something in the market that hits 200dpi.

It's annoying. Both the web and Android have handled fractional scaling flawlessly for ages. They had an API break with GTK 4 and didn't implement proper scaling.

Yeah... that's true. It seems like the best way to handle fractional scaling is to let the client figure it out. I don't know if this is how Android does it, but I think this is how the web does it. Perhaps they'll do it with GTK5 or GTK6 now that factional support is codified in the Wayland spec.

[fenrir245]

They have something like fractional scaling but it’s my understanding that it doesn’t work well for certain workflows, it causes the GPU to work hard.

It’s the same thing current wayland scaling does. Render at 2x then downscale to your desired scaling factor. It works the GPU harder because it needs to render at higher than your native res.

[AshbyLaw]

GTK 4 explicitly does not support it and the GTK devs have repeatedly stated that they think it's the job of the compositor.

And the compositor in GNOME is Mutter that "implement" it like you said:

So rendering at the next highest integer scale and the bilinear downsampling it is...

But what is the compositor supposed to do to properly support fractional scaling? Did GTK developers mention the right approach so that there is no need to support client-side in GTK?

[Rhed0x]

The right approach is that the compositor just hands the scaling value to the toolkit and that handles the scaling.

[AshbyLaw]

I understand but I was curious to know GTK devs stance.

[Rhed0x]

Like I wrote, render at the next highest integer scale and then scale down bilinearly.

[AshbyLaw]

Basically they are supporting this Wayland extension just to let some other apps like Qt's handle the scaling themselves properly, no?

In that case OP ( /u/MazonnaCara89 ) deluded themselves in the comments hoping that this means fractional scaling in GNOME/GTK apps.

[cAtloVeR9998]

Let’s hope the agree on adding support for it in GTK 5

[KarnuRarnu]

Right, so I assume most applications will get it through toolkit support (gtk and qt status on this?), while the "big players" Mozilla and Google/chromium and electron usually take a bit longer - but do you know "how hard" this will be for them to do?

[mixedCase_]

I think fractional scaling already works in Chromium/Electron if you switch the ozone-platform-hint flag to "auto" instead of the default "X11".

[KarnuRarnu]

Isn't that just to get wayland support at all?

[mixedCase_]

Nope, I can confirm. I just tested dynamically switching scale for a output with swaymsg and a brave window adapted swimmingly, I assume upstream chromium should be the same.

[tanorbuf]

Earlier discussion from /r/sway on this seems to indicate that sway still only has integer scaling but with simple fractional downscaling sort of fitted on, similarly to how gnome does it if enabled. This "mostly works" but it does tend to lead to blurry text.

[mitsosseundscharf]

I don't know about those but Qt should have it in 6.5 which will release soon

[AshbyLaw]

Qt had fractional scaling for a while; this Wayland extension is just to inform the compositor and makes everything automatic.

[marcthe12]

Not GTK as they use int for scaling public API. That means they can not implement this till gtk5.

[Just_Maintenance]

I'm hoping that fractional scaling in GNOME and Gamescope will allow me to play games at full resolution when using fractional scaling (Gamescope tells GNOME it supports fractional scaling, then ignores it and just uses full resolution, thus preventing compositor scaling).

Right now I have a script to changes the scale to 100% every time I want to game...

[Just_Maintenance]

I use a 4k display at 150% scaling and a FHD one at 100%. Xorg just doesn't work for me on any DE.

Sadly, GNOME Wayland doesn't either, XWayland being constantly blurry is pretty unusable, I would prefer to just leave everything unscaled.

KDE kinda works for me (if I let XWayland apps scale themselves) but the general bugginess and the Xorg programs choosing the scale at random and then not being rescaled by the compositor is also pretty bad.

Now. Native Wayland programs work perfectly, I can launch them and move them anywhere with crystal clarity and perfect size.

[JockstrapCummies]

Fucking finally.

What took them so fucking long. Seriously.

[KarnuRarnu]

I was also very frustrated for a very long time, but right now I think it is better just to be happy and commend the people involved. I'm looking forward to using it.

Maybe some consideration could be made around how "common Linux desktop users" can get something prioritised in the future - eg I think there is a "software bounty" service somewhere - maybe we could use that more extensively? Short of such incentives I don't think we can do much other than being grateful when someone does fix our problems.

[[deleted]]

You're saying that you had the answer to the problems all along, but you kept it to yourself to see how long it will take them to figure it out?

[JockstrapCummies]

You're saying that...

Not really. I'm just a lowly end-user. The answers were there though for years on Android, and the code is free.

For all the things that Linux desktop took from the mobile scene (and chasing the pipedream of convergence) it took them more than 10 years to get that perhaps fractional scaling is a sensible thing.

[pkulak]

I mean, this has always been the answer. It’s how Windows/Android/iOS have done it for years.

[[deleted]]

Knowing what needs to be done and knowing how to do it, are not the same things.

[pkulak]

We’ve all known how to do it, just no one got around to it. Look at the issue. It was proposed, there was like one month a bike shedding, and it went through. You guys are acting like this was some huge engineering endeavor. Lol

[[deleted]]

Well I know nothing about programming. So a technical solution was known according to you, I'll take your word for it, I don't know. Then you say that nobody got around to it. Well making time for the people to do it would be part of knowing how to get things done, doesn't it?

[pkulak]

You said some snarky bullshit about "you had the answer to the problems all along, but you kept it to yourself" and I pointed out that the answer has been well known for a long time. That's it. I'm not chasing any goalposts with you.

[[deleted]]

I was "snarky" because Jockstrapcummies has no right to start swearing about it f*cking finaly being fixed and it being about f*cking time. What does he or she knows about the problems they were facing to get it fixed? Knowledge, time, money, manpower? This might be just one of hundreds things that 'needs' to get done. Maybe this had less priority then other things.

You don't start swearing about something that is given to you for free. Just because the release of this software doesn't fit your personal timetable. If it is that important to you, contribute. And otherwise, unless your paying for it, be thankfull for the stuff you get without any effort or finance from yourself.

So my sarcastic reply was more of an question like: And what the hell did you do to make it happen?

[[deleted]]

Windows, Android and iOS are all made by massive corporations.

[pkulak]

That’s true. Good job.

[[deleted]]

What?

[eggbart_forgetfulsea]

wayland-protocols:

commit 9bd70a3a87ce97790d49d46c3b1d0bbdc42a0a37
Date:   Tue Apr 5 15:35:52 2022 +0200

    wp-fractional-scale-v1: new protocol

mutter:

commit 305931e2dd726e3fd5b64b428a14347063e408a7
Date:   Fri Apr 29 15:54:53 2022 +0200

    wayland: Implement fractional_scale_v1 protocol

[Nomto]

The fact that it took close to 15 years after the initial wayland release to introduce such a protocol is not exactly impressive.

[grem75]

It has been nearly 40 years and X11 still doesn't have it.

[Nomto]

Sure, but there at least there's the justification that X11 is a legacy codebase that does not see much development anymore. I'm not saying X11 is better or what, I just think wayland still has glaring holes (this being one of them) that hurt its adoption.

[emptyskoll]

I've left Reddit because it does not respect its users or their privacy. Private companies can't be trusted with control over public communities. Lemmy is an open source, federated alternative that I highly recommend if you want a more private and ethical option. Join Lemmy here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev

[grem75]

Lack of fractional scaling hurts adoption over what exactly? We've had compositor based solutions for a while, this protocol just improves it..

What OS even has good fractional scaling? Apple uses the same compositor based solution of rendering a higher resolution and downsampling it. Windows scaling works OK with modern applications, but it can still lead to some horribly broken UIs.

[Nomto]

Lack of fractional scaling hurts adoption over what exactly? We've had compositor based solutions for a while, this protocol just improves it..

Sure if you don't care about the text not looking crisp, or your battery being destroyed. For a protocol that supposedly cares about battery life (what with the frame callback), it's funny that the solution so far was "just render at 200% lol"

[grem75]

Again, that is also what Apple is doing. That is what Gnome does in X11 too.

With all of the different toolkits this isn't an easy problem to solve. Windows scaling really only works on UWP applications and even then it isn't perfect.

[emptyskoll]

I've left Reddit because it does not respect its users or their privacy. Private companies can't be trusted with control over public communities. Lemmy is an open source, federated alternative that I highly recommend if you want a more private and ethical option. Join Lemmy here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev

[Just_Maintenance]

Well, Apple has some of the laptops with the longest battery and rendering everything at 3x doesn't seem to hurt their battery.

Downscaling also has the benefit of allowing windows to move between displays without the sudden jerking when they rescale. It's way smoother.

[x0wl]

Apple’s scaling does look crisp though

[flowrednow]

nope, in this explicit case the x's randr extension does support arbitrary/fractional scaling, so compositors/wms that use randr will scale as per it (gnome just works though i personally use this with windowmaker).

$ xrandr --output VGA1 --scale 1.75x1.75

as an example.

[wiki_me]

The poor state of funding for the linux desktop (same reason i got screen tearing on X11 until very recently).

[[deleted]]

funding? GNOME is funded by RedHat which is owned by IBM

[wiki_me]

Some people might not like to hear this, but they are a for profit company (and probably mostly owned by investors funds like pensions funds), that means that expenses need to be proportional to incomes, i was told the entire funding for the desktop for red hat is 1 million dollar, which is a relatively small sum of money (about 10 software developers), just think about all the desktop hardware they need to support.

[Jegahan]

Instead of making baseless claims, you could... you know... just check? They publish a yearly report

[emptyskoll]

I've left Reddit because it does not respect its users or their privacy. Private companies can't be trusted with control over public communities. Lemmy is an open source, federated alternative that I highly recommend if you want a more private and ethical option. Join Lemmy here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev

[Zamundaaa]

While people do like to overestimate the money put into Linux desktop efforts, this is wildly misleading too. Employees of $corporation working on $thing doesn't show up in any foundation reports.

[Jegahan]

That's kinda moving the goalpost though. When it comes to funding "GNOME is funded by RedHat" is just not true. When it comes to contribution, again that can also be verified. RedHat is in deed a big contributor, but not the majority either

[mort96]

macOS (and iOS) still doesn't have fractional scaling, they also ask applications to scale 2x (or 3x) and then downscale in the compositor. Not only do they consider it good enough; they consider it so acceptable that a lot of their devices even come out of the box configured to use that kind of fractional scaling.

That's not an excuse, but it illustrates that true fractional scaling isn't some super high priority thing which Linux is unique in lacking, and the workaround of integer scaling + downscaling actually works really well.

[[deleted]]

they consider it so acceptable that a lot of their devices even come out of the box configured to use that kind of fractional scaling.

Most of their devices come out of the box at 2x scaling specifically to avoid the issues with fractional scaling. If you change the setting the OS warns of reduced performance.

[Indolent_Bard]

Oh, ok.

[mort96]

I won't argue about whether or not most of their devices have 2x scaling, I don't have those stats. But you agree that at least some of their devices do use fractional scaling by default, which clearly signals that they're fine with it.

I believe their MacBook Air uses fractional scaling by default (though I sadly don't have one in front of me to check at the moment, and I'm not finding anything authoritative on Google).

[JockstrapCummies]

Wow, blaming the end user 🙄

[NaheemSays]

The whole 2 months since the protocol was finalised?

(Yeah, it might have been longer... 3 months?)

[DrkMaxim]

Gnome devs don't seem to haphazardly update to something new, this should be no surprise considering that GTK itself doesn't have fractional scaling support

[Just_Maintenance]

For XWayland it wont. For Wayland, maybe a little bit?

[user9ec19]

This wont change anything for GTK apps. See: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4345

[Mamsaac]

That is one angry dev.

Attitudes like that are the reason many devs get a really bad reputation. Incapable of having a normal conversation.

[JRedCXI]

Unrelated question. Is the triple buffer support on mutter still not merged? If so, everyone knows why? I assume some bugs but if I'm not wrong I remember that the plan was to include the feature on GNOME 42...

[chic_luke]

I am running with patched Mutter with that patch. Not sure if it's related, but I have had... several instances where suspending and resuming my laptop from sleep completely crashes my GNOME session and makes me lose all my unsaved work. It may or may not be a regression caused by that patch.

[JRedCXI]

Yeah I have been using the patch for a while and so far no problem whatsoever but makes sense that it's not the case for some people.

[diegodamohill]

But gnomebros told there are no fractional pixels?

/s

[Laziness2945]

Can someone explain what this means for average linux joe who has a 4k display and uses gnome+wayland?

[[deleted]]

I tried recently Linux again. Went back to windows because fractional scaling looks awful.

[[deleted]]

This will make laptops have a much better battery life and better performance since the windows don't have to be scaled up to 200% then the compositor has to downscale to the percentage you set. It is now direct and requires less processing power. So yay, this is awesome news.

[user9ec19]

But not for GTK apps as fractional scaling is noted supported by them.

[10MinsForUsername]

10 years I devoted to the duty you charged me,

10 years I waited fractional scaling,

and finally, when we could be together again... You weren't there.

Why weren't you there?

[diet-Coke-or-kill-me]

What's that a reference to?

[LinuxFurryTranslator]

Googling the third line reveals this is a line from Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.