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PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

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Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#51

Post by bkor »

andromedavision wrote: post #48
jitl wrote: post #18

Great! I recently set up desktop Linux, and was disappointed to find poor support for fractional scaling on HiDPI screens, which I’m used to coming from retina MacBook Pro. Gnome under X11 only has 1x, 2x and 3x scaling. In Wayland, Gnome has experimental support for fractional scaling - including 1.75x, the size I’m used to. However, Xwayland apps like Firefox stable (and chrome) render blurry with fractional scalin…

Wayland has been a nightmare for me since upgrading to ubuntu 18.04 I had to disable it because videos would not play for long without freezing either on the browser or vlc. Only a hard restart of the machine would resolve this.

I'm using mpv to play videos. It has a very minimal OSD, not all distributions enable this OSD. Mpv works good enough under Wayland. It also makes use of hardware acceleration, this I need because my CPU is too slow to play most things without it (Intel nuc5ppyh).

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#52

Post by ktpsns »

jitl wrote: post #18

Great! I recently set up desktop Linux, and was disappointed to find poor support for fractional scaling on HiDPI screens, which I’m used to coming from retina MacBook Pro. Gnome under X11 only has 1x, 2x and 3x scaling. In Wayland, Gnome has experimental support for fractional scaling - including 1.75x, the size I’m used to. However, Xwayland apps like Firefox stable (and chrome) render blurry with fractional scalin…

To be honest, I just turn the resolution down at the graphics card level. Gives me slightly more blurry pixels at my Thinkpad X1 13" HiDPI display, but I am not able to tell apart pixels at that insane resolution anyway. Side effect: It is computationally cheap and of course no compatibility problems with GTK/Qt/X11 to expect.

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#53

Post by fyfy18 »

mbrumlow wrote: post #8
Jonnax wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that laptop from like 6 years ago? I'd imagine your GPU is very much considered legacy.

I am running webrender under xwayland, and it is super smooth. This system is damn near the best laptop I have ever had. I have replaced the bios with core boot and have a fully encrypted luks disk. I get near 15 hours battery life. All that for the price of $150 + plus a few premium upgrades (ssd, and ips panel). My T450s cost me ~$2700 new, and it is faster in some cases, but the cost/performance ratio just does no…

Do you not feel limited by the CPU? I had a Macbook Air with a 4th gen Core i5 and at times it was really slow just for day to day browsing. Maybe that was just thermal throttling though.

Now I've switched to a T470s which seems a good trade off between size, connectivity and performance. It's roughly the same size as my Macbook Air (13", 2014) but a little lighter, and has ports for HDMI, Ethernet, USB 3.0 x3, audio, USB-C/TB3 and dock connector. I only get maybe 6 hours on the battery which is a bit disappointing though...

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#54

Post by eptcyka »

andrewaylett wrote: post #49
jitl wrote: post #18

Great! I recently set up desktop Linux, and was disappointed to find poor support for fractional scaling on HiDPI screens, which I’m used to coming from retina MacBook Pro. Gnome under X11 only has 1x, 2x and 3x scaling. In Wayland, Gnome has experimental support for fractional scaling - including 1.75x, the size I’m used to. However, Xwayland apps like Firefox stable (and chrome) render blurry with fractional scalin…

My FHD screen is just a touch too small to be comfortable at native resolution, while 1.5x makes things too big. Also, I find Firefox's built-in scaling to be much better quality than scaling using Gnome. It could be better exposed; the `layout.css.devPixelsPerPx` property in about:config is what you need to tweak. So I keep Gnome at 1.0x, and Firefox at 1.25x, which as an extra bonus means that "80%" scaling takes F…

In these cases, what I've found to work quite well is to not bother with scaling at all for Gnome, but rather up the font sizes in the tweak tool and scale Firefox individually :) Seems to work out rather well.

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#55

Post by pimeys »

jitl wrote: post #21
mbrumlow wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

master branch of wlroots + sway (I update nearly ever hour). Sway is the most exciting thing going on right now. Sway is really fast, I don't think the slowness is a problem with sway. I am wondering if my x220's Intel card is just too slow. I will try shortly on a much faster system.

Are you on Arch? I’ve been struggling to build sway 1.0-beta.1 on Ubuntu 18.04 - need to build libwayland 1.16 but then all transitive deps on Wayland are sad.

I'm running Ubuntu 18.10 and basically only needed to install sway, wlroots and json-c from source. Additionally Ubuntu's system version of meson is too old, but you get the latest with pip.

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#56

Post by AsyncAwait »

andromedavision wrote: post #48
jitl wrote: post #18

Great! I recently set up desktop Linux, and was disappointed to find poor support for fractional scaling on HiDPI screens, which I’m used to coming from retina MacBook Pro. Gnome under X11 only has 1x, 2x and 3x scaling. In Wayland, Gnome has experimental support for fractional scaling - including 1.75x, the size I’m used to. However, Xwayland apps like Firefox stable (and chrome) render blurry with fractional scalin…

Wayland has been a nightmare for me since upgrading to ubuntu 18.04 I had to disable it because videos would not play for long without freezing either on the browser or vlc. Only a hard restart of the machine would resolve this.

I have exactly the opposite experience. Whereas with Xorg, transitions would be choppy, not so with Wayland.

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#57

Post by anticensor »

CyberShadow wrote: post #38
JonathonW wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Gnome under X11 allow you to set the desktop's size higher than the screen resolution and scale that down? Because that's all Apple's "fractional" scaling does-- macOS only supports integer scaling (specifically, 1x and 2x; iOS does 3x but not macOS); the "more space" scaling settings just render the screen at a resolution higher than the physical size of the panel and scale it to fit (for example, current 15" M…

> Does Gnome under X11 allow you to set the desktop's size higher than the screen resolution and scale that down? FWIW, this is possible under X11 directly. Try running: xrandr --scale 2x2

I tried that and it said you need to specify an output.

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#58

Post by lima »

denormalfloat wrote: post #47
lima wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSA: there's fractional scaling for text even with Xorg, and most applications scale their UI accordingly. I like to set Gnome's full scaling to 1 and text scaling to 1.5. gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 1 gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor 1.5 Some applications also depend on Xft and X root window DPI. .Xresources: Xft.dpi: 144 Xft.hinting: 1 Xft.hintstyle: hintsli…

Do you happen to know by chance what scaling algorithm is used?

The GPU does the downscaling, I think it's bicubic by default. Looks decent enough.

With the latest xrandr master, you can set nearest-neighbor using "--filter nearest", which should provide better results.

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#59

Post by gnomewascool »

anticensor wrote: post #57
CyberShadow wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does Gnome under X11 allow you to set the desktop's size higher than the screen resolution and scale that down? FWIW, this is possible under X11 directly. Try running: xrandr --scale 2x2

I tried that and it said you need to specify an output.

    xrandr --scale 2x2 --output OUTPUT
where OUTPUT will vary depending on what screens you actually have, but will usually be something like LVDS1 or VGA1. You can get the possible values with auto-completion in Bash (on Debian at least) or by running just xrandr.

Re: PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support

#60

Post by vetinari »

lima wrote: post #58
denormalfloat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you happen to know by chance what scaling algorithm is used?

The GPU does the downscaling, I think it's bicubic by default. Looks decent enough. With the latest xrandr master, you can set nearest-neighbor using "--filter nearest", which should provide better results.

At least on macOS and X11/xrandr --scale, the output encoder does the scaling, not the GPU. It need less energy to do that, than spinning up the GPU, and the all GPU resources are available to the applications (scaling entire framebuffer at 60 Hz would take significant memory bandwidth from GPU at least).
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