My lower res, lower DPI display from my old Dell laptop looks much more sharp and crisp than the fancy pants Framework 13 high res display.
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Let me guess… You’re running an X.Org based WM/DE?
X11 Doesn’t support fractional scaling properly . So some DEs will simulate it by scaling the apps the same way you scale a rasterized image like a PNG or JPEG, and as a result everything looks blurry. You’ll generally also have the same issue with XWayland apps on a Wayland display.
The best way to combat this? Try to use Wayland native apps as much as possible.
2nd best? Use non fractional values for scaling (x1 or x2 instead of x1.25)
You can also adjust the x dpi with .xresources, but switching to wayland is the better solution
Doesn’t Gnome ignore dpi in .Xresources in favor of its own hardcoded dpi?
Idk, I don’t use gnome
So some DEs will simulate it by scaling the apps the same way you scale a rasterized image like a PNG or JPEG
So in the end they DO fractional scaling
Let me guess… You’re running an X.Org based WM/DE?
Na, using Wayland with Gnome 45. 1.25x scale actually looks less blurry than 2x. (Putting aside that 2x is ridiculously large.)
The best way to combat this?
Is to buy a laptop with a regular DPI display and avoid this class of bugs altogether. This way I can keep using Discord and 1Password.
Also kde is way better about this than gnome. Especially kde 6.
Discord is blurry because it’s an electron app, and electron isn’t native Wayland. You can make it work with
--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=waylandTIL
Yeah totally the customer’s fault for wanting a nice display in friggin 2024, certainly not the software’s which still has no proper support for it.
Exactly! All I want is a nice display in 2024—and Framework chooses a garbage display with known issues.
No, YOU chose the software with known issues.
Discord, Spotify and other electron applications will work fine in a browser. Rather than installing packages that are causing you issues just run them in Firefox.
It’s not a hardware issue but a combination of software issues.
Mac OS has has this nailed down basically perfectly for over 10 years now, even windows has been great in the last 5+ years. Not having scaling done right in the age of 4k displays being cheap is a sin.
Fractional scaling in Windows is still eh, largely because they can’t do a whole lot about icons not designed for that scale. For example in Rhino a bunch of the icons get weird pixel doubling when running 150% because they were designed for 100% and use a lot of 1 pixel wide elements.
It’s honestly the main reason I keep hanging on to my now 10 and 15 year old displays. I’m hoping for a 6k 32" display so I can run true 200%. Dell makes one but they put a stupid webcam forehead on it.
KDE does fractional scaling really well, GNOME has big issues though.
I see scaling problems on Windows 11 (work PC) almost everywhere, in new dialogs and the older stuff. My own Linux box with Gnome has no issues; only webkit-gtk produces blurry fonts on some pages when my minimal font size conflicts with font-size of the page. This is a problem of the specific web page, I guess.
No HiDPI display here, btw. My old monitor is still good enough and fonts look awesome.
Disclaimer: I wear glasses and cannot see pixels where others might notice them. I increase font sizes everywhere, so font hinting has more to work with and everything looks sharp to me.
Only Windows manages to make it worse. ^^
framework 16 over here, running hyprland, the only blurry fonts have been in Darktable, everything else is fine (telegram, discord, vscode, thunderbird, firefox, waybar, quodlibet, thunar, alacritty, seahorse, synology drive client…)
2K + KDE + Wayland works like a charm
How dare you use standard display tech on any commercial laptop bought within the last 5+ years. You should be like me, vastly superior in every human way, with my old tech. I am very smart.
This is what gets me every damn time I see some post saying Linux desktop isn’t a mess. Absurd shit like this.
I mean MacOS has the reverse problem. They dropped support for sub pixel rendering once they switched to HDPI screens so now text looks blurry as fuck on all normal dpi monitors.
Windows and some Linux distros are the only OSs that nicely handles resolution scaling across both high and low dpi screens.
Yeah but most customers buying a MacBook don’t give a shit about running 10 year old 1080p monitors. Linux users high s much higher chance of running old hardware.
I mean, I do and I have to use a Macbook for work. There’s not much difference between 4k and 1080p at under 24", on top of the fact that I should be testing my software on 1080p screens and not just exclusively high res screens.
Apple’s attitude towards technology as disposable and garbage the instant it ages is horrendous and has knock on effects for everyone.
Your personal preference aside Linux DE (in general) pisses off more of it’s users as a % over stuff like this than apple does. The general populations preferences don’t line up to the Linux community ethos or practices. This is an example of that.
I mean, Windows supports both
Your failure to provide a reliable source for your claims is not my problem.
If you cannot provide a reliable source of your claims, your claim will be dismissed.
You see. If you have this exact hardware with this exact software it’s going to work flawlessly. Pinky promise.
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A lot of apps still have issues and it just takes one personally important one to make the whole thing not worth it.
My laptop is at 150%, my external display is at native resolution, like god intended.
Guess it’s time to create an issue on your display manager’s github. And pray to the penguin gods they resolve it.
i don’t get it, my screen and 4k ultrawide display both look lovely (framework 13 + ubuntu), check your settings
5k display and you’ll never have to deal with fractional pixels again.
Just like the teacher at school who kept turning all computers’ screen resolutions to 640x480 because the text was too small.
Fun fact: Instead of implementing scaling settings for RDP, Microsoft just uses lower resolution on its Android RDP client and then upscales that to fit the whole screen.
Which is why the official client is so blurry compared to e.g. aFreeRDP by default.This is my boss, except he uses 1024*768…
Use KDE, especially Plasma 6. Hasn’t been an issue for me FW13 12Gen Intel since the last few Plasma 5 releases. I tried GNOME for a while but it can go pound sand.
Been using KDE + HiDPI + X11 for close to 5 years now, not a blurry font to be found.
So, does Linux just not support those displays?
No, electron, xwayland, GNOME cause problems.
KDE with fractional scaling on Wayland works well.
Not sure about GNOME today, but they hid it away in the past and forcing 120%/150% made everything blurry
Meanwhile, macOS has been handling high-dpi displays with zero issues since 2012.
This is just a theory but I assume they just dont scale, they have their UI sized to a set size and thats it.
You assume incorrectly.
The way it works on macOS is that you select the ‘looks like’ resolution to determine the size. For example if you have a 4k monitor you can set a ‘looks like’ resolution of 2560x1440. Internally it always renders at 2x, so in this case it will render to 5120x2880. That image is then scaled down to the actual display resolution, e.g. 3480x2160. It’s basically supersampling.
