It works on iOS where Apple picks which screen resolutions exist, so it should work fine on Linux too!

More seriously, I dealt with this trying to run a Linux VM on a Surface Pro a couple of years ago. I don't remember which distro, but 100% and 200% were the only UI scale options.

Surface Pro's native scale in Windows is 150%, and the solution to match that in Linux ended up being to scale it to 200% and then set up xrandr to scale it back down to 75% of that.

Not exactly a clean way to handle it. I'm pretty sad to hear that's still the state of things.

Having multiple resolutions on a mobile device doesn't really make sense, but in iOS one can adjust the size of UI elements and text. There is a text size slider under display & brightness

I mean in terms of native hardware resolution, everything started with 1x assets, and eventually changed to 2x.

Though they did eventually do a fractional scaling thing with 3x scaled down, which still feels clunky to me but at least you don't have to configure it yourself in two different places one of which is a command line.

In Gnome Tweak you can adjust the text scaling to any factor you want, to the decimal. You can also choose whether or not you want sub-pixel hinting and if you want anti-aliasing. I'm using Fedora 29 right now for the record.

I know of Gnome Tweak. I am talking about the "Displays" tool which I believe is the default.

Yeah that's HiDPI scaling (for the whole screen) and I agree it's silly that the options are only 100% or 200%. In their defence, most screens are either 1080 or 4K, not a ton of resolutions in between for desktops or laptops.

1440p is getting pretty popular on desktop.

Here's a post on the GNOME blog aggregator about the issues of themes and adjustable sizing of elements: https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-a...

This is a self inflicted issue. Theming existed prior to CSS, and developers decided that CSS was the way to implement theming rather than support an explicit theming api. Now the argument is being made the CSS has too wide a surface area.

In my perspective? Arrogance by the devs that they know their users without knowing their users.

Like, okay, make an easy mode the default. But allow for that complexity to exist without completely writing full extensions for basic functionality.

In addition to themes they also want to get rid of extensions.