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Comment by okasaki | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I always found Fedora to be awful - it used to be the selinux crashes on a vanilla install on first login and the disgusting font rendering, and now it's the unusable default gnome interface (so bad Red Hat made a shitty gnome 2 clone for enterprize customers).

I guess on some level we just prefer what we're used to.

But I seriously wonder about people who run Fedora desktops though. I installed Fedora 36 two days ago to try it again, and it's unusable. The scaling options are 100%, 200%, 300%, and 400%. I have a 43" 4k screen, so around 120dpi. 100% is too small, 200% is way too big. And gnome settings doesn't even have font size options. What the fuck.

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That's fair. More scaling options would be nice. I've never had Fedora crash, but I buy hardware with Linux compatibility in mind. It even worked well with a weird Thunderbolt 3 external display setup I have, the same setup makes macOS crash consistently if I connect it under certain conditions.

Fractional scaling is a thing. It is also per-monitor. Just have to enable it via gsettings.

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

The problem with it is that X11 doesn't handle the scaling well. Tend to get blurry fonts with X apps.

Now that most applications are supporting Wayland this is less of an issue than it used to be.

X11 handles font scaling just fine. It has since the 1990's.

It's not suprising if some level of indirection on top of it broke it in some environments though. Perhaps it has something to do with gnome 3? It works with gnome 2, kde, and all the minimalist window managers I've tried.

None of those try to "scale framebuffer" though, whatever that means. If it means what it sounds like, whoever implemented it is incompetent.

per display scaling? Mixed DPI works pretty well with wayland.

Yeah, the default scaling options are unacceptable. I was able to work around it by installing GNOME Tweaks (absolutely bonkers that this isn't installed by default) and changing the font scaling factor, but until I did that my 4k monitor was really hard to use.

The font size setting is hidden under the "GNOME Tweak Tool". The good news is that over the last couple releases, the GNOME settings have improved bit by bit and now also include some things that also used to be hidden in the Tweak Tool.

Fedora 36 is still in beta. Wayland fractional scaling is an experimental feature. Have you tried the "large text" option in Settings -> Accessibility?

Some of us just run KDE instead. Fractional scaling has been here for quite a while.

The trick is to use KDE

> But I seriously wonder about people who run Fedora desktops though.

And I wonder about people who can't figure this part out.

> and now it's the unusable default gnome interface (so bad Red Hat made a shitty gnome 2 clone for enterprize customers).

Kinda odd how it's the most popular Linux desktop and you are the one that can't figure it out and also the one calling it shit and unusable.

Seems more like a personal problem than a Gnome problem.

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