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Comment by tony | Hacker News Reader

Wanted to chime in and say Pop!_OS is the leader when it comes to HiDPI on Linux I believe.

Especially if you have 4K monitors or a 3K/4K mix where the monitors need a different DPI set.

PopOS uses a system to manage the scaling very well. https://support.system76.com/articles/hidpi-multi-monitor/

The closest comparison I've seen elsewhere is fractional scaling in Gnome 3.32+: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/FracionalScaling

If you have a configuration / workflow for HiDPI on Linux, it'd be nice to see if there were other options / any other things out there.

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Thanks for that info. If the OS is pleasent otherwise, I'll switch immediately from elementary OS. Their position on fractional scaling is:

- it's bad because pixel perfectness!

- you're wrong for wanting it

- we don't care that MacOS does it well

So annoying.

You can enable fractional scaling in the elementary settings:

https://elementaryos.stackexchange.com/questions/15057/can-i...

That's just fractional scaling of text. It does make a useful difference, but its not full fractional scaling.

> - we don't care that MacOS does it well

At least in 2017 they claimed MacOS didn't do it well[1].

Do you have a link to something more recent where they changed their position?

1: https://medium.com/elementaryos/top-3-misconceptions-about-h...

Oh yes, that's my opinion. They are biased because they see only the defects, I'm biased because it works well enough for me (and many people I have spoken to about this who run MacOS) on MacOS.

Add to that the implicit assumption that it's good enough which is encoded in Apple's decision to include it at all.

Ymmv

one of the founders of Elementary worked at System76 until recently, and worked on designing Pop!. Pop! shares some components with Elementary including the "app store." (his blog about it: https://medium.com/@cassidyjames/a-new-chapter-af85f4e64179)

Typing this from Pop! now. I like it.

System76 engineers wrote a song about their work on HiDPI. If this isn't the right audience for it, I don't know what is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZFGG18c6As

Can you touch on what features, if any, Pop has added that don't exist in Gnome 3? Genuine question from an observer.

Well, beauty I believe

I think one (small) difference is they fixed the default keyboard shortcuts. Several small things like that and it makes a big difference.

Fractional scaling has been available in Ubuntu on both Xorg and Wayland since 19.04.

For Wayland run

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"

For Xorg run

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['x11-randr-fractional-scaling']"

I've tried it (ubuntu 19.10 / Xorg / Dell Latitude 5491 + 4K Samsung monitor) and it is useless:

  - the scaling applies to BOTH monitors
  - even the 125% mode looks ridiculously big (like 200%)

I was not able to enable Wayland on my system so don't know if it is better :/

I run 125% and I agree it does look closer to 150% over 125% on Xorg. On wayland, 125 is definitely 125.

The typical GNU/Linux UI/UX friendliness.

I agree with other posters that Fractional Scaling in 19.04 is useless. It is useless in particular if you want to have one (bigger) monitor at 100% and the laptop monitor at 125%, a configuration that works particularly well in Windows.

But my argument is that FS is not hardware accelerated, it overheats the laptop and even then makes everything run extremely slowly. You can't watch a Youtube video in any of the screens, it becomes a PowerPoint slideshow.

Just played around with it temporarily on Linux, to see if it'd work: use the next integer step for scaling UI, then downsample the result to match the display's actual resolution.

This worked by enabling Virtual Super Resolution for an AMD card on Windows, and an equivalent looking result could be achieved with xrandr incantations. Sadly, the mouse ended up being confined to a subsection of the screen, which was a bug, but that should be fixed now: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/8...

The multiple-DPI monitor support has been holding me back from Linux for a long time. Is it possible to install this on other distributions?

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