I see this complaint a lot but on the flip side, I’ve found Xorg high DPI support to be fantastic; better than windows. I recall only touching ~/.Xdefaults and setting Xft.dpi and had great results. I don’t use a desktop environment so that could be the kicker.

HiDPI aka 2x scaling is a button in several desktops.

And usually set to “auto.”

2x is too big for me. Then adjusting the secondary magnifier to bring it down is still butt ugly. I suppose I've been conditioned by using MacOS for the past 15 years.

Linux Mint's Cinnamon desktop has beta support for 1.25x 1.5x scaling... it's on the right track but has ways to go - the menus don't adjust, there's work to be done for sure.

I wish I had the skills and time to help out, but for now, all I can do is point out the irregularities, I'm afraid.

The root problem is the mismatch between the resolution and physical size of your monitor.

Try a smaller 4k monitor, no bigger than 24":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35876743

Thanks! Yeah, I have a 24". I tried to scale it down some more with an xrandr setting, but the result is somewhat janky.

Cinnamon has a more gradual setting in beta, but the implementation isn't complete yet - the menus don't adjust well - I'm guessing there are some other GTK related quirks to iron out.

There is already a mostly functional way to do it, which is to ask X to render at a higher resolution which is integer factor of your desired one, like if you want 2560x1440, you ask X to render 5120x2880. It looks much better than directly using 2560x1440, and does not get too blurry. Wayland still works better, though.

I tried to do this via xrandr + selecting 2× scaling from the UI, with limited success for three reasons:

1) The display preferences panel did not know about my custom backing framebuffer and kept re-setting it to match the native resolution on each click (could be resolved by careful ordering of operations)

2) The mouse cursor became tiny (could be set to bigger sizes, although it looked like you are picking an unreasonably huge mouse size on the control panel)

3) Couldn't break out of the original 4k bounds with the mouse

...and that's were I left it last time.

Yup! Thats exactly what I experienced. Things sorta work, but not really.

I doubt much effort will go into X. Wayland scaling is getting better.

Been doing that since 2015ish on two Dell 4k monitors. Supported natively by gnome, mate, kde.

Every month I read here that it can’t be done.

I guess people (like me -- or maybe just me) are after the macOS-like way of 150% scaling on a 4k display, which uses a 5k buffer with 200% scaling, then scales down the entire image to fit the screen.

This results in a 2560×1440 effective resolution with a bit of blurriness that is acceptable, compared to "native 200%" scaling that makes the controls a bit too large to my liking, or "native 150%" scaling that is hidden behind some "trust me, you don't want to see this" language/button in GNOME.

Things do seem to be slower when it is switched on, which is not the case with the 200% and 100% settings.

The size mentioned, 4k@24” is properly sized for 200% with perfect quality. So no shenanigans needed.

This size is very difficult to find these days, presumably because people don’t understand this. Or hardware co. mgmt didn’t.

TL;DR A 4k monitor should be the same size as HD, with 200% scaling. 22” aka 56cm is about right.

> Next, if someone fixed font / display scaling in X for high DPI (24" 4k monitor) displays, it would allow more people to use Desktop linux.

What is the problem? AFAIK a friend of mine has been using an X-based setup (IIRC with FVWM) in his 4K laptop for years and when i asked him he told me the only thing he had to do was to use ImageMagick to scale at 2x the images his theme used.

I set it to 2x, which was too big.

Then I brought it down with some xrandr setting... the size is right but a bunch of other things are incorrect.

I wish it were one incremental setting like it is in MacOS? Very easy to use; very easy to adjust for each monitor.