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Ubuntu Works With GNOME To Improve HiDPI Support On Linux Desktop (omgubuntu.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the working-together dept.

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.

6 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Give up, Linux losers by postmortem · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. "Little less flexible" my ass by Lisandro · · Score: 4, Informative

    GTK is still unable to properly scale bitmap icons, which means that some UI elements stay tiny while windows and fonts scale properly.

  3. Dual monitor, 4K and 1080p by MeNeXT · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...
  4. GNOME had this by Zan+Lynx · · Score: 4, Informative

    They had this in 2005. It was called DPI. It scaled really well. Then some IDIOTS decided it should be force set to 92.

    1. Re:GNOME had this by jbernardo · · Score: 3, Informative

      This was broken on purpose on gtk+ by a gnome developer called Matthias Clasen.

      You can see a description of this in this reddit discussion, and the bug and the amazing answers by Mr. Clasen are here.

      It did not only break gnome support of HiDPI, but also broke any app using gtk+, like Firefox or libreoffice..

    2. Re:GNOME had this by jbernardo · · Score: 4, Informative

      Doh, it seems that the URLs didn't survive the submit, so here they are again:

      - reddit comments on gtk+ breaking HiDPI - https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6cf1dq/what_was_the_most_baffling_problem_in_linux_youve/dhuhuk4/

      -bugzilla report - https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=757142