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.
I’d love to switch back to Linux but this is why I moved back to macOS for good several years ago. Once I got a taste of reading code at 4k/retina (faux-4k) – not to mention the better font support – there was no going back, for me at least.
If it’s considered user error for someone to want a high DPI display in 2024, then I can only surmise that people who share that sentiment have convinced themselves that more eye strain is a worthwhile tradeoff for FOSS. Commendable but a tough sell.
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.
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. ^^
Legacy apps have problems in windows also, I guess in MacOS now basically you are not able to run them, but 3 years ago I remember same issues with old apps, blurry or pixelated…
The main issue is gnome not letting apps to scale themselves, whereas kde has just a toggle for that. So in gnome you have consistent size across monitors (cool) but blurry apps when running in xwayland (horrible)
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.
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)
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=wayland
Interesting, if it’s a native Wayland app, I’d guess the issue is just gnome problems then - from what I hear gnome is one of the poorest DEs for Wayland use, mainly because they refuse to support things the same way that everyone else agrees to, if at all. And they take a fair amount longer to deliberate and agree how to implement anything they do decide to support.
I’d think of looking at KDE, which is very functional at this point, or a wlroots based Compositor/WM, - hyprland seems like one of the more well supported window managers out of the ones using wlroots.
I am using Gnome with Wayland and a 1440p display, and it seems to work surprisingly well. Or maybe I jut got used to dealing with the problems, and would be surprised at how well things work under a different DE.
Gnome was the first popular DE to have reasonable Wayland support and Fedora has switched to it by default for literal years now. I don’t know where you get your info from, that Gnome is “one of the poorest DEs for Wayland use”, but it certainly isn’t from me (and I’ve actually used Gnome on Wayland since before it was the default in Fedora Workstation).
KDE and Qt have much better fractional scaling right now. GTK won’t implement it until a much farther release
Man, I just installed debian 12 with wayland (Gnome or KDE can’t remember) to play around and get instant headache from blurry fonts with my 1440p display with no scaling (Firefox and settings window are blurry af). No clue how to fix it, tried out few of the things I found online and none of them works.
Next plan is to try another distro and hope for the best.
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?
your fault for using a DE/distro which can’t even handle fractional scaling
The known issue with HiDPI displays, like the one Framework chose, is that apps are blurry. Other laptops, like Thinkpad or XPS, offer low DPI displays which avoid this issue altogether. The irony is that a HiDPI display is supposed to look better than a low DPI display, but the scaling issues actually make it look worse.
In addition, the experimental flags required to “fix” the scaling issues with apps can also break these apps.
Discord window decorations missing: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/o24560/spotify_and_discord_missing_window/
1Password not launching: https://1password.community/discussion/141663/i-cant-start-wayland-native-version-of-1password
Spotify window decorations wrong: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/16xhm21/spotify_window_decorations_on_wayland/
In summary, HiDPI displays have a long history of making your display look worse and limiting the apps you can use. Thinkpad or XPS with low DPI don’t require you to only use Ubuntu or Fedora or only KDE. Linux support on the Framework is held back by the poor choice of display.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk. 🙏
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.
