This week in KDE: Wayland fractional scaling | Hacker News Reader

This week in KDE: Wayland fractional scaling

pointieststick.com

97 pointssz4kerto23 comments

I'm using 27-inch 4K monitors with Gnome. I found it more practical to use no scaling but 1.25x text size (settings in gnome-tweaks). The problem for me with 2x scaling or fractional scaling is that it scales UI (icons, margins) as well. As someone who appreciates functionality (i.e., displaying text) over overdesigned white spacing, scaling the whole UI is just wasting my workspace size whereas scaling text-only is a perfect balance between good-looking text and workspace size.

But anyway, good to see that Linux desktop is gaining fractional scaling support!

There is a way to toggle experimental fractional scaling in GNOME.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI -> 1.1.1 Fractional Scaling

It's done by upscaling and downscaling by integer amounts, so it's not quite the same as true fractional scaling.

It works ok, Apple does it the same way. However, I find Microsoft's approach better.

>It works ok

...if you're OK with blur and wasted performance. I like my text crisp, rendered exactly to the desired size, with subpixel antialiasing, and knowing my hardware is not wasting cycles in rendering to a higher-than-needed resolution and then throwing some of that away with raster resampling.

What does overdesigned mean? I suppose you mean relying on scientifically proven design practices such as improving readability through use of whitespace and font sizes.

Do you have an example of this being overdone?

You beauties! This is like the final architectural niggle with Wayland, I'm so pleased to see it being addressed.

> What about GTK apps? They’ll reap the same benefit once GTK also gains fractional scaling support and implements the protocol. Until then, GTK apps will continue to use the less efficient upscale+downscale method for fractional scale factors.

Except GTK developers do not intend on ever implementing proper fractional scaling.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4345#note_134462...

(also a nice demonstration of the typical attitude of GNOME/GTK developers, for those looking for drama or that still aren't aware of it)

This is one of the more important aspects of Linux desktop usage for me. I am currently on Gnome but would switch in a literal heartbeat to KDE if fractional scaling dropped for it first.

Next up: better handling of screen sharing under Wayland. If that's done then I have no problem using Linux in a professional environment since I deliver presentations and collaborate virtually quite a bit.

Screen sharing in Wayland has been pretty painless for me with the exception of Zoom. The native app refuses to believe that I'm running one of the "approved" distros and won't even try, so if I need to share my screen, I just pop out of the meeting in the native app and rejoin from chrome.

This has been my experience as well: no problems screensharing except w/ Zoom native client due to their distro whitelist preventing screensharing under Wayland. A little irksome. Just let us try! Browser mode until then.

I do not trust the Zoom native app. What am I missing?

The UI is a bit different, and if you're just joining a meeting as a fairly passive participant, not a whole lot.

There's a long and extensive list of features here that compares capabilities of the various clients (including the web client) here: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360027397692-Deskt...

Does Screen Sharing on Wayland work in Teams now?

Not sure, last I used Teams was on a mac. A quick google search seems to indicate that, as with zoom, you'll want to join via a browser and have pipewire enabled. If you're using chrome, go to chrome://flags and enable WebRTC PipeWire support. Firefox is a mixed bag.

If you haven't already, you'll want to install xdg-desktop-portal-wlr as well, I think.

Not in the "official" application. And microsoft deprecated it. You have to use the web version.

You can launch Zoom with a flag to make your desktop environment appear to be GNOME and it'll work.

What's the flag?

env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=gnome /usr/bin/zoom %U

KDE already has fractional scaling. This is for fractional scaling with Wayland. If you don't need Wayland, fractional scale away.

Since a lot of people here are commenting on how important fractional scaling is; what am I missing out on by running 1200p instead of 2160p with scaling?

Hmm nice. I'm on X because I run freebsd. But nice for when Wayland comes to it.

Apparently Wayland already works on FreeBSD but support for KDE is currently broken.

Wow it sounds like they’ve improved quite a lot.

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