Fedora dev: “HN feedback on what they want from their Desktop – We got it”

Pretty cool to see some acknowledgement from the Fedora crowd, but almost everything listed here is "maybe in a future release" rather than being present now.

That doesn't load for me. The text-only version does though. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hy9yBE3...

I'm using a 4k screen and a HiDPI thinkpad (T460p) for my workstation and it works amazingly well even today.

Was a wild ride since Skylake + 4k + docking station became stable only recently with Linux 4.9, but scaling always worked.

Here's what it takes:

Xft DPI and hinting settings (font rendering):

    # .Xresources

    Xft.dpi:        144
    Xft.hinting:    1
    Xft.hintstyle:  hintslight
    Xft.antialias:  1
    Xcursor.size:   48
    Xcursor.theme:  Adwaita

xrandr DPI setting (important for IntelliJ, i3 and the like):

    xrandr --dpi 144

Put it into .xinitrc, Gnome autostart, i3 config or wherever your DE runs stuff at session startup. I also run it after resuming since it sometimes resets itself.

Now, the most important part - the Gnome scaling settings. Instead of increasing the scaling factor, I leave it at 1x and only increase the text scaling. It's a fractional value and applications still resize appropriately (bonus: reduces the amount of whitespace):

    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor 1.5
    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 1

Worked well with everything I use (Evolution, virt-manager, LibreOffice, Terminal...).

IntelliJ works fine out of the box with java-1.8.0-openjdk. I recommend the Iosevka font, but any font will work.

Latest Chromium respects the settings and support scaling by a fractional value.

When I'm using a low-res screen, I simply render at a high resolution and then scale it down:

    xrandr --output eDP-1 --off
    xrandr --output DP-2-1 --left-of eDP-1
    xrandr --output DP-2-1 --right-of DP-2-2
    xrandr --output DP-2-2 --scale 1.5x1.5 --pos 0x0
    xrandr --output DP-2-1 --scale 1.5x1.5 --pos 2880x0

While it looks slightly off, you get used to it quickly and I spend most of my workday looking at a downscaled screen without any discomfort.

The result is pretty much perfect and comparable (if not better) to macOS with a recent distro. I'm happy to help anyone who is struggling to get this working!

On a more general note, the recent changes in Fedora are amazing! Out-of-box experience went from "a lot worse than Ubuntu" to best-in-class.

The Fedora crowd/Red Hat also happens to be where lots of (most?) Gnome development work takes place.

They have been the driving force behind many recent kernel/power management and graphics stack improvements.

Latest Fedora ships Wayland by default and screens with multiple DPI already work for native Wayland applications.

The article talks about a laptop team and only mentions a "power management guy" who builds better benchmarking tools, so not sure where you've got that from.