[arch-general] Fractional HiDPI

[Jonathan Behrens]

On Mon, Jul 29, 2019 at 12:07 PM Yurii Kolesnykov <root at yurikoles.com>
wrote:

> Hello archers,
>
> I’m looking to buy "24 4K monitor, the resolution is seems to be as twice
> as FullHD, but I don’t wan’t to use it as 2x, since I have bad eyes and do
> scaling of fonts across all desktops on my current "24 FullHD monitor
> anyway. But I didn’t tried a factorial DPI yet on the old one, since it
> definitely will look blurry.
>
> So I want to get some suggestions from community. Does Factorial screen
> DPI works good now across KDE and GNOME? On Arch Wiki I found only
> information on factorial DPI in GNOME. I know that macOS supports it well
> since last fall.
>
> Had anyone tried a factorial whole screen DPI? Or it will be better to
> stay as I’m now, just set 2x DPI for whole screen, and manually adjust font
> in every desktop/app/os?


I've experimented some with display scaling for HiDPI monitors on GNOME.
For good looking fractional scaling, I found that l needed to use native
wayland applications and that things using XWayland were blurry. This was
fine for all the main GNOME applications (I didn't try KDE), but I had
problems with Firefox and Emacs. Now I just set everything to 2x scaling
and then zoom out when I want to fit more text on the screen. Another point
to consider is that regardless of whether you do fractional scaling, you'll
have to run wayland if you have multiple monitors and want to use the
different scaling factors on them.

I also didn't quite understand your comment about not wanting 2x scaling.
If normal 1080p is hard to see, do you plan to run with 1.5x scaling and
use even more font scaling or are you thinking of picking something like
2.5x scaling? Personally it sounds like you'd be better off trying to get a
larger monitor than one with super high DPI.

Jonathan