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KeitIG

As always, kudos to Canonical to deliver one of the most mature distribution.

But. 2018. And still no fractional scaling. This drives me mad. (changing the text scaling is not a solution).

Ok, there was Mir, Wayland is late (again)... how can this problem not be solved in 10 years? (genuine question)

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Maybe it's because when you set fractional scaling you lose pixel perfect design (icons, images, and so).

https://icons8.com/articles/make-pixel-perfect-icons/

It dosen't happen that way on windows. I had scaling set to 1.25 and got no issues anywhere.

The issue with linux is that X wasn't designed for this and Wayland is still unstable/unusable (thanks nvidia)

I think it's an issue with SVG icons (this format doesn't support fractional scaling, but TTF fonts do).

>I think it's an issue with SVG icons

How so??? SVG is a vector format

The whole point of svg and (vector graphics) is that you can scale them to whatever you want.

If you do fractional scaling on a svg image, pixels will not align to the pixel grid and the image will look blury. You won't notice that on big svg images, but tiny ui icons will definitely look blurry.

There was even a (never implemented) proposal to allow svg files to handle this problem.

https://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/WG/wiki/Proposals/SVG_hintin...

That's why svg icons are often designed using a 24x24 pixel grid, so you can scale them at 48X48 (x2), 72x72 (x3), 96x96 (x4) and they remain pixel perfect and crisp at those sizes.

It's still better than scaling bitmaps, so it's weird to single out SVG as the culprit. It makes things better in general, not worse.

Wayland is actually pretty stable. Nvidia has problem with OpenGL in Xwayland (i.e. 3d accel for x11 apps), otherwise, it should work.

There are warts though, when using Wayland. When using scaling (doesn't have to be fractional, either), X11 apps are being upscaled, not downscaled, resulting in blurriness. Unfortunately, neither Firefox nor Chrome does support Wayland natively, and who wants to use their most used app on their computer in blurry mode?

Must admit I don't understand what Wayland is, or X server for that matter. Would someone mind explaining it, for someone a bit dull of mind as myself?

In short: X.org is a decade old display server that became the standard to display graphical window on the majority of Linux distribution. GNOME, KDE, XFCE and others are/were client to this display server.

Wayland is a new protocol where the window manager (ie GNOME, KDE,...) is responsible of directly managing the display. Each window manager must reimplement this protocol (or use a library already doing this work) which enable them to have more control over the windows.

Applications must also directly support Wayland like they did for X.org before (which was the default commonly used, so no problem) or the user just have XWayland installed on their computer to show X.org windows inside a Wayland WM but then the application may not display correctly (blur, artifcats,...)

It is perhaps worth noting that while X.org is about a decade old, it is an implementation of the X Window System protocol which dates back to the mid 80s.

Suffice to say, quite a lot has changed in computer graphics/interfaces since that time, and most modern *nix operating systems end up circumventing quite a lot of X to offer modern features. Thus X brings quite a lot of legacy debt to the table which can't be easily removed.

Also, even back in the day, X wasn't considered the best tech around, at least by some. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS was around.

However NeWS' licensing was proprietary and X won out.

Gopher and HTTP had a similar situation. Gopher had a lot going for it, but the future licensing situation was unclear. HTTP was free, clear, and widespread by the time Gopher became GPL.

After 10 years of work you still can't do much useful unless you run X and shim it with XWayland. "Stable" is a strange descriptor given this context.

"Stable" and "popular" are two different concepts. Yes, some apps and frameworks didn't bother yet with the switch. Some did, Qt5 or Gtk3 are fine.

Firefox has recently added wayland support, it isn’t enabled by default.

It doesn't play nice with OMTC, or 3d accel in general (see EGL bugs in bugzilla), and has problems with scaling and input. It is a work in progress, that's why it is disabled.

> It dosen't happen that way on windows. I had scaling set to 1.25 and got no issues anywhere.

You do get scaled (and hence somewhat blurry) icons if you do 1.25x on Windows as well. 1.5x usually works better, because icons scaled by that much tend to hit the next size tier that is often available prescaled to look good (16x16 -> 24x24, 32x24 -> 48x48).

Who on earth would prefer that to proper scaling?

I realllyyyyyyyyyy hate blurry pixmaps

Ahh Linux, you’ll catch up in a few decades maybe.

I use KDE with x1.3 scaling and it mostly works, but e.g. VirtualBox is unusable with scaling, pdf fonts in Okular look torn, some pixel maps scale poorly giving artefacts.

Still, I don't have better options: 13" FullHD doesn't play well with 2x scaling (and even 1.5x would usable, but too big for my taste).

I find this as a failing, at least partially, of desktop monitors. Once the DPS is high enough you kind of stop caring about individual pixels. However most laptops and desktops out in the wild have screens which are 1080p at best. Nota bene: I'm talking globally, developed countries are doing better int his regard.

It's 2018. We have had SVG icons for years on Linux, which scale beautifully. Bitmap icons shouldn't be used any longer.

On desktops/laptops, 1366x768 is still by far the most common resolution.

SVG or not, but on a 13" - 15" 1366x768 screens icons need to be pixel-perfect or they will look crap.

If you have a 1366x768 screen why would you need DPI scaling? You shouldn't be affected by this issue at all if your resolution is below a certain threshold.

Many commonly used apps do not support Wayland - yet. https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/102936/graphical-a...

It's available as an option at login, and mostly works without issues. The preference is sticky until you change it and I mostly boot into Wayland.

I have my Xubuntu desktop set to 1+3/16 if I'm not mistaken (which in 96dpi units is 114) and everything works well. I'm not sure what you mean.

I don't know much about the issue, but is this fractional scaling thing a problem only in Ubuntu, or Linux in general?

(If specific, I guess it should be easier to fix now, once they decided to use GNOME as their desktop environment, right?)

Canonical can only be blamed for this if you disagree with their decision to move to Wayland and Gnome. Fractional scaling has been planned in Gnome for some time now (it was originally supposed to be in 3.26).

Unity7 worked well enough with fractal scaling IIRC :(

It still does. 18.04 with Unity here, no problems whatsoever with existing fractional scaling on several screens ranging from 13 to 27 inch.

17.10 had fractal scaling setting on Wayland (not X.org). Not sure if you can enable it in 18.04, probably possible.

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