A few HiDPI tricks for Linux
blog.yossarian.net
A few HiDPI tricks for Linux
1–10 of 192 posts
Re: A few HiDPI tricks for Linux
#2I tried ubuntu + i3 on a Lenovo x1 carbon. The fonts, the settings, the software, the differences, incompatibilities everyday just killed me. I went back to Mac + Magnet window manager. I could never know if I was actually seeing the actual setting I included/desired or the font was being displayed correctly. It Was a constant study of web searches and esoteric knowledge such as evident in this blog of what to do to get whatever you wanted that just worked on a Mac or even windows.
Re: A few HiDPI tricks for Linux
#3I tried ubuntu + i3 on a Lenovo x1 carbon. The fonts, the settings, the software, the differences, incompatibilities everyday just killed me. I went back to Mac + Magnet window manager. I could never know if I was actually seeing the actual setting I included/desired or the font was being displayed correctly. It Was a constant study of web searches and esoteric knowledge such as evident in this blog of what to do to…
Same opinion here. Whereas with Mac you’re setting things in one place across all of your apps, and it accounts for different scaling factors for different displays, this just seems like a huge pain to have to set things on an almost per-app basis.
Re: A few HiDPI tricks for Linux
#4I set up Linux on a Dell XPS 13 with the HiDPI screen. With both Ubuntu and Manjaro it was relatively painless, especially using GNOME via Wayland. i3 and sway also worked well too. I had heard a lot of issues with Linux and HiDPI, and was worried I would have to return/swap for a FHD screen, but everything has worked almost flawlessly.
Re: A few HiDPI tricks for Linux
#5I tried ubuntu + i3 on a Lenovo x1 carbon. The fonts, the settings, the software, the differences, incompatibilities everyday just killed me. I went back to Mac + Magnet window manager. I could never know if I was actually seeing the actual setting I included/desired or the font was being displayed correctly. It Was a constant study of web searches and esoteric knowledge such as evident in this blog of what to do to…
To provide some counter-anecdata, if you are in the lucky position to have screens that work at exactly 200% (4K at 24", 5K at 27"), then Ubuntu and its derivatives will Just Work out of the box. At least that was my experience around 2017-2019. Fractional scaling factors like 150% are tricky, but macOS does not properly support them either.
The only app that didn't pick up my DPI settings on Linux was Spotify, but all web-ish apps support ctrl +/-...which honestly strikes me as a big usability win over native toolkits.
I actually found my 5K screen more enjoyable under Linux than macOS, because the performance of JetBrains IDEs on Retina Macs seems to flip-flop between okay and abysmal every year.
Mixed-DPI setups are where macOS is truly superior.
Re: A few HiDPI tricks for Linux
#6what an incredible waste of time. messing with dpi, crappy apps taking from here and there in 2021. linux desktop userspace is a dumpster fire
Re: A few HiDPI tricks for Linux
#7what an incredible waste of time. messing with dpi, crappy apps taking from here and there in 2021. linux desktop userspace is a dumpster fire
Author here: as they say, Linux is free if your time is worthless.
In my case, my time isn’t worthless but I do enjoy configuring my system. The tweaks shown in those blog post took me maybe half a day; I haven’t needed to make any significant changes since.
Re: A few HiDPI tricks for Linux
#8what an incredible waste of time. messing with dpi, crappy apps taking from here and there in 2021. linux desktop userspace is a dumpster fire
Author here: as they say, Linux is free if your time is worthless. In my case, my time isn’t worthless but I do enjoy configuring my system. The tweaks shown in those blog post took me maybe half a day; I haven’t needed to make any significant changes since.
well that is good that it holds up. i also have to make this tradeoff but am less enthusiastic about it obviously. switching to a single hidpi display has made it more tolerable with bigger DMs
Re: A few HiDPI tricks for Linux
#9I tried ubuntu + i3 on a Lenovo x1 carbon. The fonts, the settings, the software, the differences, incompatibilities everyday just killed me. I went back to Mac + Magnet window manager. I could never know if I was actually seeing the actual setting I included/desired or the font was being displayed correctly. It Was a constant study of web searches and esoteric knowledge such as evident in this blog of what to do to…
To provide some counter-anecdata, if you are in the lucky position to have screens that work at exactly 200% (4K at 24", 5K at 27"), then Ubuntu and its derivatives will Just Work out of the box. At least that was my experience around 2017-2019. Fractional scaling factors like 150% are tricky, but macOS does not properly support them either. The only app that didn't pick up my DPI settings on Linux was Spotify, but a…
macOS supports fractional scaling just fine, by rounding up and then downscaling. Sure it's not pixel-perfect to the display, but at such high ppi it's not really noticeable, and certainly much better than trying to get actual fractional resolutions working.
Apple tried true resolution independence in the early 2000s and it didn't work out. 2x and 3x scaling proved to be a much better solution.
Re: A few HiDPI tricks for Linux
#10I set up Linux on a Dell XPS 13 with the HiDPI screen. With both Ubuntu and Manjaro it was relatively painless, especially using GNOME via Wayland. i3 and sway also worked well too. I had heard a lot of issues with Linux and HiDPI, and was worried I would have to return/swap for a FHD screen, but everything has worked almost flawlessly.
I have used a 4k screen for several years now without any issues on GNOME with 200% scaling.
However, I recently bought a ThinkPad T14 with a 1080p screen. With 100% scaling, the fonts and widgets are too small. The ideal scaling seems to be 125% or 150%. GNOME has experimental support for fractional scaling. This works generally ok for Wayland applications, but windows of X11 applications are incredibly blurry both on the laptop display with 150% scaling and the external screen with 200% screen. I think they are rendered at 100% and then scaled up. There are various workarounds for X11 applications, but it seems that e.g. none of the workaround really works with e.g. JetBrains IDEs (there are some bug reports about it).
Windows 10, on the other hand, handles fractional scaling and per-screen scaling just fine. It's frustrating, because I highly prefer GNOME and Linux and if all applications supported Wayland, there wouldn't be any major problems.