Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu Works With GNOME To Improve HiDPI Support On Linux Desktop (omgubuntu.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares an article: Canonical is playing host to a 'fractional scaling hackfest' in its Taipei offices this week. Both GNOME developers and Ubuntu developers are in attendance, ready to wrestle with the aim: improve GNOME HiDPI support. Ubuntu's Unity desktop (I'm told, anyhow) plays fairly nice with high DPI monitors because the shell supports fractional scaling (though most apps, I believe, do not). Furthermore, users can tweak some high DPI settings to better suit their display(s). GNOME Shell also supports HiDPI monitors, but has, until now, been a little less flexible about it. "Currently, we only allow to scale windows by integral factors (typically 2). This proves somewhat limiting as there are many systems that are just in between the dpi ranges that are good for scale factor 2, or unscaled," the hackfest page explains.
It's good news that they are moving to address things like this that are standard in other operating systems and to hopefully standardize on a way of doing it so we don't end up with everybody coming up with their own incompatible way of doing it. The issue will really come down to application support though, with so many different application frameworks on Linux they all need to support it, do so in the same way as GNOME and also then make sure that applications are written to support it. Application support for it in Windows is still mixed and that doesn't have the range of GUI frameworks and toolkits that Linux does, on macOS it's better but still not perfect.
It will be a long time for it to become commonly available and just an expected thing rather than a special feature but you have to start somewhere. I really just hope we don't end up with 10 different ways to do it though.
Except Windows has its own set of problems with DPI scaling. They were resolved mostly with windows 10, but still old apps that are not "DPI aware" look terrible.
Sounds like a problem with the apps, not the OS.
And Linux has ZERO presence on tablets. All those distros that purport to be for regular users should just close up shop.
GTK is still unable to properly scale bitmap icons, which means that some UI elements stay tiny while windows and fonts scale properly.
Only if they're skinned.. Otherwise, the OS should scale them properly.
how about they work with KDE instead since it doesn't suck
I don't know, last time i tried running 4k on windows (9mo ago?) EVERYTHING looked like ass. Especially control panel, for some odd reason. It was super blurry.
OSX is about 20x better.
OSX is about 20x better.
it really goddamned ought to be, considering that NeXTStep was resolution-independent.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This thing is really an issue, I'm glad that they are trying to sort things out. If you are looking to buy a notebook to run Linux, check if your monitor is proportional to its resolution because you will be disappointed to see that half of the applications don't have/poorly support HiDPI.
First of all, the 2 biggest widgets engines, GTK and QT are really unpair. QT is 50 years ahead of GTK in terms of support, but unfortunately this doesn't help much because 70% of the big applications are written using GTK. Sure, you can keep using the defaults from KDE and never download anything else, but just remember that you won't be able to use GIMP, LibreOffice, Eclipse, Audacity, just to name a few.
GTK3, the current version of gtk, has some support out of the box, but you can't customize much and multi-monitor setups are still fucked up [Unless you have some weird fetish to keep using xrandr scripts] ( See: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI#GNOME )
GTK2 doesn't support HiDPI and it is not compatible with GTK3. There are a bunch of apps that rely on it and still haven't been ported. These applications do run on HiDPI monitors, the problem is that their icons/menus get very small, fucking up the application layout and even crashing. Again, you can use them, but you'll have to keep squinting to see the icons/use the menus.
GIMP, Eclipse, Deluge, Audacity are just some of those GTK2 apps. Eclipse has a 2013 on this issue, and someday it will be solved, who knows.
The second most anoying thing is the uneven desktop layout, you'll have applications that run with your current resolution, applications that will be super small and applications that need to be tweaked to even open up and applications that are completely broken. If you are trying to use multi-monitor setup on top of that, just don't even consider Linux for it.
Nice to hear that they are working on simplifying this.
After setting 2:1 scaling in Gnome I found that my 1080p monitor was almost useless and while my 4K looked great everything was too large. So I used xrandr to set things to a more comfortable level by scaling the 1080p monitor by 2x2 and the 4K by 1.6x1.6 with the following xrandr commands which run at start up.
xrandr --output DP-0 --pos 0x0 --scale 1.6x1.6
xrandr --output HDMI-0 --mode 1920x1080 --pos 6144x0 --scale 2x2
I'm using Fedora 25 but this should work for other Linux versions too. The tricky part is finding the right setting for your comfort level. So far I haven't found any issues with it. You can customize the resolution for each user if you cared.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
This is a joke, right?
Fonts on Mac OS look like crap even at high DPI, the icons are usually inflated way beyond what they should be and don't get me started on any legacy applications you might want to run on that HDPI display.
I'll keep using XFCE thanks.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Is a display system that is resolution independent still a distant dream? Seems like this HiDPI stuff is just a hack, though I'll agree it's not the worst hack I've ever seen.
Years ago we thought eventually we'd have desktop where everything was displayed in actual units like centimetres or points, and since everything was to be scalable, you could zoom it anyway you want and it would remain nice and sharp. Although we have scalable fonts that HiDPI relies on, seems like we gave up on vector graphics for drawing with (too slow?), and now we just bitmap scale the whole GUI (except the fonts). Is there no better way?
Says someone who clearly doesn't use macOS.
They had this in 2005. It was called DPI. It scaled really well. Then some IDIOTS decided it should be force set to 92.
You should see what Java's default GUI elements do in high DPI. I had to break out the Magnifier.
Applications can get the DPI settings directly from X.
It's what that value is for FFS.
Including some of the software Microsoft itself packages with Windows, like the disk management tool.
Who cares? Loonix on the desktop is deader than an old geezer's limp dick.
Sorry I wanted to mod you but I could not find "Idiot" from the drop down list.
Yes, Windows 10 (and this has changed a little bit with the latest version of Windows 10) tends to let older programs think they are running on a low-res screen and then scale up the resulting bitmap. This works OK, if a bit blocky, for a 2x scaling factor, but will probably be terrible for non-integer scaling. Sometimes the older program actually works fine with scaled text, if only Windows would let it. (Different font sizes and scalings have been there since Windows 3.0 at least, so all programs *ought* to support it, but of course many of them never tested it and are buggy.) You can right-click on the executable and set the scaling mode to 'application does the scaling' and that often fixes it.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
What is the problem? Higher resolution is countered with a bigger font. For the command line, the menus, the web pages - and so on. I don't use Gnome though - they have stuppid icons or something sized to a fixed number of pixels?
Resolution has gone up steadily ever since the first displays. Devs are no longer allowed to pretend surprise when a new higher resolution appear on the market. 4K will give way to 8K. 8K will be the low-end budget option someday too. There may not be a reason to go beyond retina resolution, but we can still get bigger panels. Floor to ceiling anyone - programmable wallpaper?
I think Ubuntu is moving away from Unity and to Gnome is because its the future of innovation for Ubuntu and Linux. They certainly need to get some focus on getting ahead or at least keeping up with Mac OS and Windows in the DPI game and others. Nobody will want to install Linux on a high resolution notebook or device and deal with bad scaling. My own limited experience does show Ubuntu to be better already then Mint with scaling. But applications are way behind in scaling and HiDPI. Its why I stick with Windows because at least most stuff looks good and only legacy apps struggle, but even they are getting help from Win 10 development.
Nice try. I have to support it on a regular basis.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Cool story, snowflake.
The real test of HiDPI support on an OS is to use two screens, one regular (e.g. 1080p) and one higher DPI screen. Then try dragging windows between screens and see what happens.
MacOS handles this fine.
On Windows 10 it's shockingly bad - you can see the dirty hacks taking effect as the window partially appears on each screen.
Give Windows some credit here. If you set scaling to 200% even non-DPI aware apps look at least as good as they do on low DPI monitors because they get perfect pixel doubling. That's actually better than most scalers manage to do - both AMD and Nvidia's, and the scalers built in to most displays, use blurry bi-linear scaling that looks crap.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Apps don't need to be DPI aware. As long as they don't declare "I will handle the scaling myself", Windows handles it and everything is fine. But more and more apps are saying they will handle it themselves, but then they don't actually handle it, or handle it well. Like Chrome.
That is mostly because it just does not work on tablets. Neither the hardware drivers nor the GUI is suitable for tablets.
I tried a number of Ubuntu flavours, and none of them handle HiDPI in a reasonable way. Some are worse than others, of course, so there is hope.
I agree that Windows had too many unsuccessful attempts at HiDPI. The problem goes back to high resolution (VGA+) monitors under Windows 3.1.
However, Windows 10 has finally delivered a reasonable solution. Yes, some legacy apps look blurry, but that is a problem with the app, not with Windows.
Linux on the other hand used to be excellent for HiDPI, certainly back in the days of Windows 3.1. But it has since lost that ability under many toolkits.
Banging one's head repeatedly against the wall should be painful. And yet Canonical insists on doing it. When the decision was made to abandon Unity, they chose the inferior solution among the GNU/Linux desktops. Plasma 5 (KDE) is HiDPI-ready. But no, they stubbornly chose GNOME and now they have to throw resources and manpower to hack at the GNOME codebase to fix something that was already fixed in Plasma.
They should have gone with Plasma which is IMHO much better.
OK, I get that it's their project and their choices, all right... but they certainly like to bang their heads against the wall, time after time...
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
True, the actual density depends on the screen dimensions and pixel count. But an uncooperative chipset maker can hide the screen dimensions from X.
In addition, effective density depends on the viewing distance. If the monitor is twice as far away, it takes twice as many pixels in each direction to make the same size image on the viewer's retina, giving it twice the effective density. This is why CSS defines the px unit as 1/2688 of the viewing distance, which represents a 96 dpi display at 28 inches, rounded to the nearest hardware-friendly unit. Because a laptop or tablet is viewed closer than a desktop monitor, the effective density of a physically 120 DPI display might actually be 96 DPI. Television monitors, on the other hand, have a larger effective density than their physical density because they are viewed from farther away than a desktop PC monitor.
If you doubt that effective density matters, consider this: What is the DPI of a projector?