My ThinkPad similarly needs to run at 150% scale to be usable and I’ve also found that KDE still has issues even if it handles scaling better. The biggest one is that only C++ window decorations draw correctly under Wayland with fractional scaling enabled — the much more common Aurorae themes are blurry looking which is unfortunate, because only a handful of themes are C++ and mostly minor variants of Breeze.

Mine too- I was a bonehead and bought a "3k" display for my w541. I've found that 100% scaling w/ "large text" enabled in accessibility settings strikes a good balance.

> but since I'm on a Framework 13 with a weird screen resolution

Hold up, is this a reason to not buy a Framework?

The problem isn’t just with Framework laptops, an increasing number of x86 laptops are built with odd resolution panels that require fractional scaling. Very few offer panels that are conducive to 2x integer scaling, and while typical lower DPI panels that don’t require scaling are a config option on some models, that often also comes with other major tradeoffs like low brightness or bad color reproduction.

It's 2256x1504 and 3:2. It's a nice screen, but it's one that absolutely works best at 1.5x scale since 1 is unreadable and 2 wastes plenty of screen real estate.

As an idiot who's never used a screen with more than 1080p resolution, is there a reason why just increasing font size doesn't work?

Not all UI elements scale with font size.

Illustrations, nested element containers, navigation controls, etc. It looks very comical when you first see it.

Desktop apps scale their layout based on the number of pixels, not on text size. So (with the notable exception of browser apps and by consequence Electron apps) you will just end up having bigger text in a badly laid out window if you just increase text size.

Big fonts, small UI components. Looks bad and requires more accuracy with mouse movements.

Padding inside boxes/buttons looks all weird.

Since for me less is more I'm doing 200% non-fractional with a smaller font. The problem is that I need a different font size from my 1920x1200 laptop screen (usually secondary, far away from me, with documentation websites/slack/etc) and my primary 4k.

For browsers I can change the default font size and forget the controls, since I'm using vimium, but stuff like Skype/Slack/Zoom/etc needs more dancing whenever I change the display.

Most of the time that is actually much better than fractional scaling.

On a laptop you are severely constrained by the screen real estate, so minimizing the size of the clutter and focus on the content (text) is a great tradeoff in most circumstances.

No, though Gnome really isn't set up for it. Or being useful, really. But on my Framework 13 with KDE I have no issues. I prefer 1.25x when standalone and 1.5x when docked and used as a second screen (it's farther away) and KDE works fine with both and switches automatically. I don't even think about it, and can't think of anything I personally use that still gives me the blurry window in xwayland issue.

The real trouble is this idiotic concept of "scale" in the first place as if ancient assumptions about pixel density cannot change. It's nothing to draw vector elements or fonts larger, and it's next to nothing to have more than one size of display element (tiny) users could select from.

The only way to make Gnome usable is to use the accessability options

It's a good reason not to use GNOME.

"What makes you think sharpness is a metric?" https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787

> Maybe one day, everything will just work...

I've had the same hope since I started using Linux, back in 2004.

>> Maybe one day, everything will just work...

> I've had the same hope since I started using Linux, back in 2004.

I've had the same hope since I started using Linux, back in 1994.

Driver support is better, and no X11 Modelines, which is nice.

Since '95 here... I'm just happy I don't have to visit a library to get 0.1% as far as I can today with a simple search query. We've got it good now, all things considered. I'm sure others feel differently, but I cannot complain.

> We've got it good now, all things considered. I'm sure others feel differently, but I cannot complain.

/deadpan/

I can complain, and I do it all the time, especially on internet forums. It's not my fault other people haven't fixed my complaints, even though I've offered no assistance. That's their fault.

People say "you've got it good now", or "you're not helping", or "show us the source code", or "First world problems", or "I wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire".

These people think I'm some sort of an entitled, self-righteous, hypocritical, bleep-hole.

Jack Handey “Lowering my Standards” vibes (a very amusing short essay).

Thanks, I'll take that as a compliment :)

As a kid, I remember his Deep Thoughts SNL bits, as an adult, I bought a couple of Jack Handy's Deep Thoughts books.

In hind sight I'd say that was more The Onion "People Don't Like It When You Call Them Stupid"

https://www.theonion.com/people-dont-like-it-when-you-call-t...

Well you're in luck, because 2024 is the year of the Linux desktop.

Every year is the year of the Linux desktop.

Sure, emulating Windows games via Proton....

I guess Windows was never a real desktop OS either because no developer bothered porting the entire NES library to it.

They wrote new games for it, there was no need to emulate NES.

Finally!

I bought a Framework 13 when it first came out, with exactly this hope. I gave up after about one month of madness and ordered an M1 Max Macbook Pro. I also installed Windows on the Framework with WSL. Now it gets used very rarely (like for when I want to do Windows development, or for my parents to use when they visit) and mostly sits around gathering dust.

Desktop linux has burned me one too many times for me to trust it again.

I've run almost exclusively Linux for the past 7ish years. First with Dell and then System76. It's been an overall very smooth experience.

I decided I wanted to get a machine with a powerful video card recently, so now I'm running an Alienware with Windows for the first time since 2005 on my primary monitor and my Linux machine on a side monitor. The only real win for Windows is that it remembers my audio/video settings with a lot of peripherals plugged in. Linux seemed to forget every few hours and Zoom meetings were a nightmare. If WSL was more consistent it would get a stronger vote, but there are weird experiences in there.

Before buying the Framework, I used a MacBook Pro for ~11 years. I am perfectly comfortable with the command-line and ssh into a Linux VM every day at work (windows laptop). I use a tmux+neovim setup that mostly works without any problems (except for random LSP issues at times).

I can just get all of the advantages of a *nix shell but with a better UI, using macOS. I have zero regrets from switching back to a Mac after my month-long experiment. My only regret is that I didn't order the M1 Max as soon as it was out and couldn't get the amount of RAM I wanted (it had a long wait by the time I decided to buy).

Why isn't fractional scaling supported from day 1? I mean if you're going to do dpi scaling in the first place, why in the world would you restrict it to whole numbers only? Is it some insane hardcoded hack or something?

Scaling with changing dpi is the easiest thing in the world. Anyone who has written a program with some kind of 'zoom' feature (be it a game, image editor, image viewer, etc) knows how easy it is.

Fractional scaling was enabled briefly during beta but too many apps were blurry so they reverted and postponed it to Fedora 40

Are Signal and Steam apps from Fedora? Is this a problem specific to Fedora 39?

They are not, but that's not what users care about. See e.g. complains about old apps for Windows being blurry when DPI scaling was introduced.

What I don't get is why apps are still blurry on 4K screens last I tried it on Ubuntu, with 200% fractional scaling. If they're non-blurry on 1080p, shouldn't it be a perfectly linear 1:1 upscale?

How is 200% fractional scaling?

Fractional Scaling works pretty well on Ubuntu. It seems they apply patches to support it. As someone who just swapped from Fedora 38 to Ubuntu 23.10, Ubuntu definitely wins in terms of being a polished desktop experience.

I'm using the same setup and use 100% scaling and "Large Text" accessibility settings. Good enough for me, as a workaround so I thought it's worth mentioning.

Steam fractional scaling should work since their big UI update a few months ago. Try launching Steam with this environment variable: STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING=1.5

Awesome this fixes it!

For those using the Flatpak: sudo flatpak override com.valvesoftware.Steam --env=STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING=1.5

I tried using Wayland, but I forgot to write down the 7 esoteric GPU related options I had to pass to vscode to make it usable without visual glitches and eventually just gave up and went back to X11

Why not using Fedora KDE?

KDE seems to be much less stable for just about everything, but especially under Wayland.

But I've learned to understand that some peoples' experience is almost the exact opposite.

I speak for my own experience but KDE has been incredibly stable on my machines. For work, I use Plasma on Debian Bookworm and after putting in some work to set Plasma up the right way (set up my favorite fonts, scaling factor, etc.), everything works without issues/crashes. On my personal machine, I'm using Fedora Kinoite (immutable Fedora with KDE) and the experience has been similarly splendid. I do feel that Kinoite is a bit more polished than Debian but I guess that has more to do with Debian's opinionated principles rather than anything else.

I used to think like that between 1995 and 2009.

Nowadays, the Linux kernel is all over the place at my phones, TV, DVD player, and tablets, yet GNU/Linux only on a surving netbook, from the netbook glory days, Asus 1215B.

In case it helps anyone, you can fix blurry X11 apps in GNOME by disabling fractional scaling like this:

  settings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "[]"

Indeed it isn't the best experience and hopefully XWayland gets some better defaults, but fractional scaling cannot work well unless apps support it natively since text needs to be rendered at the correct DPI or exact 2x/3x multiples.