Comment by resonious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by resonious | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Wayland for about 10 years now, mainly because of superior hi-DPI support. If you have multiple monitors with different scale factors, X11 is just awful. Not to mention I usually have laptops with not-quite-4k displays that need to be scaled 1.25x or 1.5x in order to look reasonable.

That kind of stuff basically all works fine on Windows, and yet a lot of core Linux desktop devs seem to have an ideological distaste for fractional scaling. Sway supports fractional scaling, but it's not recommended because "your display does not have fractional pixels". I realize that is literally true, but Windows and Mac support it and it looks good. Feels like Linux is full of this kind of stuff, and the result is the mess you see today. Sad part is that Windows is starting to degrade so bad that Linux is starting to look better just due to that. Hopefully Valve and friends can apply some competitive pressure on Windows, and in the process make Linux much nicer.

Try using KDE, instead of Sway? If you look trough issues and discussion on https://gitlab.freedesktop.org, you get the distinct impression that the Sway/wlroots lead devs have very firm ideological commitments about absolutely everything. From non-open source drivers, to "every frame is perfect", to, as you point out, fractional scaling.

If you don't fit into their ideological commitments, you shouldn't expect to receive any support.

>Sway supports fractional scaling, but it's not recommended because "your display does not have fractional pixels".

Sway's reasoning is completely wrong and ignorant.

The characters (glyphs) and other elements on this page (e.g., the reply button, the rounded corners of the TEXTAREA) are stored as mathematical descriptions of curves (cubic Bezier curves usually for the text). There is never anywhere where a framebuffer or grid of pixels is scaled up or down from one size to another to introduce blurriness into the final image. The Y logo in the top right corner of this page used to be an exception because a PNG file is a grid of pixels, but about 2 years ago the PNG was replaced with an SVG file, so now when you pinch-zoom this page in mobile Safari, everything always looks non-blurry.

Well, when an app is using the Wayland protocol (i.e., when XWayand is not in between the app and the display server), the same thing applies.

Actually, pinch-zoom is the wrong analogy. Both Firefox and Chrome have in their "hamburger menu" a line named "Zoom that has "+" and "-" buttons. If you use those buttons to change the scaling factor, most things reflow (adapt so that nothing "falls off" (is partially obscured by) the right edge of the viewport). Fractional UI scaling in Gnome (when XWayland is not in the picture) works like that more than it works like pinch-zoom in mobile Safari where nothing ever reflows.

Note that in order to be able to use (the "Displays" pane of) the Settings app in Gnome to change the scaling factor to a value other than 1 or 2 (i.e., to a fractional value) you have to say

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

As Microsoft lost the grip on Desktop, and Desktop became less important, and they moved more and more into cloud and services biz, etc. you can expect Windows to atrophy even more.

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