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To be fair, I have the same problem with Windows 10 and the Surface Pro, MS's flagship product. The SP4 has a 13" screen and a 3200x1800 resolution, which is quite dense. Windows 10 helpfully suggests turning on the scaling to 200-300% when on the native screen to help things scale up a bit. Plug it into an external monitor, however, and that scaling is no longer tenable. I then have to adjust it back down to 100%. However, W10 then informs me that some of the applications won't re-scale themselves properly until I logout and log back in. So I'm more or less resigned to the fact that every time I disconnect my Surface from its dock, I'll have to restart the thing.

It's little UI things like this that keep me on Mac OSX. Everything just works, doesn't crash or freak out, and always looks great.

I still get my bash shell and unix experience and tooling easily as well so there is very little context switching when I jump into a linux container or remote host. There's tiny differences in some of the commands but largely a consistent experience.

Does MacOS support in between scaling factors like 150% the way Windows does? It didn't a year or two ago, and based on this[0] StackExchange answer from January 2019 it still doesn't.

[0] https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/349549

I'm in the same camp as you: client is OSX, and server is Linux through a terminal window (or drive share, or whatever sql-tool for the DB).

I love linux, but the desktop is hard to get all the little things done right. On server, Linux just kicks ass, and all the tooling is built for it.

You can set a different scale for each monitor, and it will remember it every time you connect it. Windows has improved a lot in the past few years in this regard, and I rarely notice any scaling errors anymore.

I have a Surface Pro 3 that works best at 175% scaling, and every day I connect it to a 27" 1080p monitor at 100% scaling. When dragging a window between the two, it will switch to the other scaling factor when it's halfway across. It works very well, so I'm not sure why it doesn't work for you. Maybe take another look at it?

I have also experienced the pain of trying to setup Ubuntu on my SP3, and eventually gave up and went back to Windows because it was such a nightmare. Which is weird, because I seem to remember that Ubuntu used to support non-integer scaling factors in the past.

Try Fedora. GNOME 3 has fractional scaling (you have to enable it in 29, it's out of the box in 30)

The problem then becomes, if you don't have a 200dpi display, the scaling is noticeable.. Just like if you scale the display on a non-Retina monitor on a Mac.

You shouldn't really need to scale 2560x1440 @ 25" unless you have bad eyesight. Go up to a 27 or 30" display.

The GNOME fractional scaling support is part of the 3.32 release so it should also have landed in Ubuntu 19.04. You can enable it in F29/Ubuntu 18.10 but the reason it's not enabled by default is that it doesn't quite work properly.

edit: I just installed Ubuntu 19.04 and it has GNOME 3.32 but there is no fractional scaling available in settings, in either Xorg or Wayland. The old experimental option can still be enabled but continues to make non-GTK3 apps blurry.

I just got a 4K 27inch monitor and it worked great on windows 10 125% scaling, using hdmi. Then, I actually had to use the macbook for work, and it didn't get past your step 1. There is no way to alter the sizes of things, its either 1080p on 27in or full 4k. But, I decided to try one more thing, and got the usb-c to displayport cable. Behold, it allowed me to have 1440p HiDPI scaling, which HDMI didn't. And, I thought it was an HDMI 2 cable. So, that's something to try, but probably just on Mac.

I ran into a similar problem with an older 30" 1080 Viewsonic TV/monitor which featured both HDMI and DVI inputs. I wanted to hook my Intel Nuc to it which was running Linux mint 18-something. The Nuc has VGA and HDMI so I naturally hook it to the TV using an HDMI cable. For some reason, the desktop resolution of 1920x1080 was somehow being scaled larger than the screen cutting off the edges. No amount of playing with the TV scaling settings would get the damn picture to fit on the screen.

I didn't know if it was Linux, the TV or the Nuc. So I spent the next two hours trying to figure it out to no avail. About to give up, I then had what I thought was a dumb idea, hook it to the TV using an HDMI-DVI cable. It worked. the 1920x1080 desktop filled the screen as it should. The only thing I can think of is the HDMI port is only setup to look for TV video profiles. The DVI port expects a PC so it can figure out the signal and get the picture right.

That's common behaviour for a TV signal called "overscan". As you thought, it seems to be disabled if it knows a computer is connected. You can sometimes disable it in TV menus and most HTPC software has something to resize the UI to cope.

Unity has fractional scaling for many years now that I never had a single problem with - no blur, nothing like that. I've used it on multiple monitors from 12 to 27 inch, resolutions ranging from 1920x1080 to 4K. Gnome is a massive disappointment in this regard - feels like a serious downgrade. I'm still using Unity on Ubuntu 18.04 and waiting for a DE that will at least have a matching feature set, but it looks like it's gonna be a long wait.

Try Plasma/KDE

I did, but to me personally it wasn't nearly as polished as Unity and I also didn't like the absence of that unified UI look across all the base apps that Unity has. I also like the global menu and abundance of themes that exist for Unity/Gnome.

KDE has the global menu as an option, and you can get a pretty unified UI with it too.

Unfortunatey, in my experience Gnome is simply by far the most "modern" DE regarding this kind of features, basically the only one able to compete with Windows and macOS (For example, the touchpad behaves like I would expect in 2019). I haven't used KDE in a while so I have no idea about their Wayland situation (at this point, I simply refuse to mess with Xorg config files, so it's Wayland or nothing for me, at least on laptops). I really don't want to be a Gnome evangelist, but it's really the only option for some kind of features

My experience is the same. I mostly use macOS on the desktop, so I am used to Lo/HiDPI screens to work together. On my Linux workstation, I tried several desktop environments, but GNOME on Wayland was the only environment to nail it 6-12 months ago (there may be improvements in other desktops now). HiDPI worked with Wayland and X11 applications and I could just use both screens with different DPIs, drag windows between them without oddities, etc.

It's a shame that they nailed this, but decided to remove menus, desktop icons, system tray icons, etc. GNOME could have been a great competitor to macOS and Windows, if they actually talked to real-world users. I wish that they had an UX steward like Sun Microsystems back in the days.

Yes, GNOME is horrible. So many hacks to get it usable. It's as if they designed it for a tablet or something.

It seems like they're just completely discarding the desktop metaphor like Windows 8 did. Everything in Gnome discourages you from using multiple windows, and there isn't even a desktop anymore without running hacky plugins.

I do like things like window snapping, and miss it in MacOS, but the actual desktop experience is so much better in MacOS than pretty much anything else.

Did you encounter any issues with Wayland? I've heard that it's not production-ready and that's why ubuntu decided to go with Xorg in 18.04.

Fedora has had Wayland as the default since Fedora 25 (2016). In my experience, it has been stable since Fedora 26/27. I am not sure what the situation is now, but Wayland pretty much excluded NVIDIA. The proprietary drivers did not have support and Nouveau is buggy [1]. In my experience, it works great with both AMD (amdgpu) and Intel GPUs.

[1] The developers are doing great work, but it is a uphill battle without support from NVIDIA.

Fortunately, Nvidia has finally decided to get their act together. They contributed the wayland backend for KWin/KDE that got merged just last week.

If I am not wrong gnome 3.32 also has the nvidia wayland backend

KDE and GNOME both have sort-of-working EGLStreams backends. XWayland remains completely broken on EGLStreams so it's not very useful considering how many applications still lack native Wayland support.

That's not "getting their act together". That would be supporting GBM instead of pushing their EGLStreams thing.

What is the point of sharing your modern experience, then admitting that you haven't used the largest competing system "in a while"?

> I simply refuse to mess with Xorg config files

Messing with Xorg config files is something you do not have to do since Xorg was forked from XFree86, especially when it comes to monitors. Personally the only time i had to do that was to force 1:1 mapping for mouse (ie. disable mouse acceleration), but that is not monitor stuff.

KDE is a bit better with high resolution displays, try it with a live Kubuntu image and see if it works for your setup.

Yeah with KDE i have no problems. I plug my laptop into a tv regularly, it auto connects and scales properly and gives me the option of mirroring or extending the screen from any side to the tv. I didn't have to configure anything.

Yes I went through this exact thing recently. I tried Gnome, then XFCE, then i3.

I settled with i3 reacting to my connecting/disconnecting my laptop from my monitor, but even then the resolutions never looked correct.

I ended up selling my Lenovo Carbon x6 and bought a macbook pro. I was so bitter about the experience, but on the other hand I'm no longer worrying about things that should just work.

/rant

Never had this problem with KDE. New KDE actually seems to work OK without killing off the file system indexer.

I'm currently using XFCE on 3x4k monitors on a desktop. You can control almost everything with the DPI setting in Settings > Appearance > Fonts and use the Display menu to adjust your screen resolution. (The font sizes do reflect correctly into Firefox, though - no tweaks needed there at all. One thing that I've noticed is that you have to completely quit or close some apps before the new DPI settings are used.)

I also frequently connect my XFCE laptop (only 1920x1080 native) running a totally different distribution to a 4K TV.

This requires a visit to the Appearance menu (as above) every time I plug/unplug in order to adjust font sizes. (Or, I could just run the 4k at 1080p, but either way it needs an adjustment.) This doesn't actually bother me, since it's just one step and I could script it if I did it all the time.

As far as using your laptop screen as a second screen, I've never really cared for that as a way to work anyway because of the size disparity (my 4k monitors/tv's are all much, much bigger than my little 13" laptop), but you could play with the resolution on each -- but you're right; the DPI settings in XFCE are for the whole desktop (and all apps, including Firefox), not per screen.

I would strongly advise not to rely on your DE and use xrandr instead, either via CLI or the graphical arandr tool. xrandr can scale to whatever you want.

The train has already gone but the whole "HiDPI scaling" is such a sad solution to the problem. Were the existing DPI APIs really such a dead end? They could have been extended to support on the fly DPI changes. The web "px" debacle is part of the same culture, I guess.

I have the same issue with Mate (which I love otherwise). I've settled for manually setting the font dpi when I switch from external monitor to my laptop screen. It's not ideal, but I couldn't find a way around it.

I'm using Compiz, fwiw.

The way to get the best results with gnome is to not scale the screen: keep it 100% (unscaled) then use gnome tweak tool to increase the font size to your liking.

Works great no matter what monitor I plug it into using an X1 Carbon with the hidpi screen.

That does not help my setup with 3 screens of different DPI, which works perfectly on Windows.

The thing I am yet to achieve is getting a configuration for my laptop that works fine both on the laptop screen and on one or several connected external displays.

No problem with KDE Plasma, but when running a tiling WM without a DE...

You can and should have a separate, optimal configuration for each monitor. This is pretty easy with xrandr, and it's DE-agnostic

I guess this is the way to go. Quite annoying as I am switching between different screen setups/resolutions/physical layouts frequently.

xrandr is your friend