Comment by iamjackg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamjackg | Hacker News Reader

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I just got a Framework 16, installed Ubuntu 24.04 on it, and have been going through this exact struggle after avoiding it for many years. The screen DPI is just high enough that it's uncomfortable for me to use at 100% scale, so I set it to 125%, but any non-Wayland application would get artificially resized and look blurry.

There's a pending Mutter MR[1] to allow XWayland applications to handle the scaling themselves (which IntelliJ IDEs can do) but it hasn't been merged yet, and I'm probably never gonna see it on 24.04 anyway. Apparently KDE already supports this, but the Gnome folks have been reluctant to adopt the same approach.

I ended up going back to 100% scaling, increasing the system font size, and then setting `GDK_DPI_SCALE=1.25` in `/etc/environment` to tell all GTK programs to increase their scale. It's not perfect, but most things are the right size. I definitely would not have wanted to switch to Wayland any sooner than this though. Transitional periods are such a pain.

[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3567

Here you can see the work being done on IntelliJ Wayland:

https://github.com/JetBrains/JetBrainsRuntime/issues/242

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-3206/Native-Wayland...

I saw that, very excited for it and hope it lands soon!

The new 13 laptop has a resolution that allows for 200% scale exactly!

Dang, now I want one! I already have two of the 13s (11th and 13th gen Intel), plus a new 16 with GPU (which I absolutely adore btw) though and can't possibly justify such extravagance.

Love that they're fixing the screen though. It's fine for me since I solved it the first time, but it's hard for most people at first. I just enabled "Large Text" in Gnome's accessibility menu and that gets it pretty good. If you want to really hone it in though, enable fractional scaling[1] and then tweak the scaling factor.

What I do after a fresh install (with Fedora but should work with most any new-ish Gnome):

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

You can buy just the screen :)

You can set an environment variable for electron applications: https://git.sr.ht/~tristan957/dotfiles/tree/master/item/syst...

I'd hate to tell you to switch DEs, but I ran into this same issue with my Framework 13. After using GNOME for almost 20 years it got me to try KDE which supports that feature natively. Now none of my applications are blurry or require tweaking.

I hadn't really used KDE much before that, but KDE 6 is a solid release.

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