There is already a mostly functional way to do it, which is to ask X to render at a higher resolution which is integer factor of your desired one, like if you want 2560x1440, you ask X to render 5120x2880. It looks much better than directly using 2560x1440, and does not get too blurry. Wayland still works better, though.
I tried to do this via xrandr + selecting 2× scaling from the UI, with limited success for three reasons:
1) The display preferences panel did not know about my custom backing framebuffer and kept re-setting it to match the native resolution on each click (could be resolved by careful ordering of operations)
2) The mouse cursor became tiny (could be set to bigger sizes, although it looked like you are picking an unreasonably huge mouse size on the control panel)
3) Couldn't break out of the original 4k bounds with the mouse
I see this complaint a lot but on the flip side, I’ve found Xorg high DPI support to be fantastic; better than windows. I recall only touching ~/.Xdefaults and setting Xft.dpi and had great results. I don’t use a desktop environment so that could be the kicker.
2x is too big for me. Then adjusting the secondary magnifier to bring it down is still butt ugly. I suppose I've been conditioned by using MacOS for the past 15 years.
Linux Mint's Cinnamon desktop has beta support for 1.25x 1.5x scaling... it's on the right track but has ways to go - the menus don't adjust, there's work to be done for sure.
I wish I had the skills and time to help out, but for now, all I can do is point out the irregularities, I'm afraid.
Thanks! Yeah, I have a 24". I tried to scale it down some more with an xrandr setting, but the result is somewhat janky.
Cinnamon has a more gradual setting in beta, but the implementation isn't complete yet - the menus don't adjust well - I'm guessing there are some other GTK related quirks to iron out.
I guess people (like me -- or maybe just me) are after the macOS-like way of 150% scaling on a 4k display, which uses a 5k buffer with 200% scaling, then scales down the entire image to fit the screen.
This results in a 2560×1440 effective resolution with a bit of blurriness that is acceptable, compared to "native 200%" scaling that makes the controls a bit too large to my liking, or "native 150%" scaling that is hidden behind some "trust me, you don't want to see this" language/button in GNOME.
Things do seem to be slower when it is switched on, which is not the case with the 200% and 100% settings.
> Next, if someone fixed font / display scaling in X for high DPI (24" 4k monitor) displays, it would allow more people to use Desktop linux.
What is the problem? AFAIK a friend of mine has been using an X-based setup (IIRC with FVWM) in his 4K laptop for years and when i asked him he told me the only thing he had to do was to use ImageMagick to scale at 2x the images his theme used.
I wonder if this will fix some issue i have with Linux 6.2 in openSUSE Tumbleweed: whenever i try to update, after the update all OpenGL programs behave with a lot of input lag as if there is some forced vsync, except there is no vsync (tearing is visible) and running some games using DXVK have graphics flickering, not updating at all for several frames, etc.
Fortunately thanks to btrfs i can quickly downgrade back to the 6.1-based setup that works, but i'm ~3 months behind on updates and my lastversionitis is itching :-P.
I tried with live USB setup with latest openSUSE and with other OSes running 6.2 and couldn't replicate the issue so it probably is some configuration problem (though i can't think of what), but since i have this installation for a couple of years now i'd rather not nuke it and spend time reinstalling things again. So i'm just attempting an update every few weeks or so to see if something magically fixes the issue.
As another aside: has anyone used the Intel arc graphics cards on Linux? I saw the passive Matrix a310, which looks amazing for my use case (driving two or three acreens, occasional AV1 acceleration).
I have an A380. You need kernel 6.2 or higher for it work out of the box. Kernel 6 can be done but you need to force the driver as it was still considered experimental. Intel's backported driver for Ubuntu 22.04 is awful, I would see hard freezes within an hour and it could just not do X11 without garbled colors.
Overall it works pretty well as a display adapter with 6.2+, currently games using DirectX 12 don't work under Linux because of some missing driver features.
I've got an A770 16GB LE and A770M/A780 from a 13700K, purchased at launch for OpenVINO, OneAPI, and Intel-specific ML/GAN research.
Just switched back to Linux to try the i915 driver and kernel 6.2 updates, and it works really well. AV1 and VP9 encoding is killer.
There's an Arc bug where displays either don't initialize on boot or after sleep, but it's common to Windows, as well. There are some other quirks, but the painpoints at least aren't driver related, like fglrx or proprietary nvidia.
Honestly, it's a good arch that's steadily improving to very little fanfare.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 74.6 ms ] threadNext, if someone fixed font / display scaling in X for high DPI (24" 4k monitor) displays, it would allow more people to use Desktop linux.
1) The display preferences panel did not know about my custom backing framebuffer and kept re-setting it to match the native resolution on each click (could be resolved by careful ordering of operations)
2) The mouse cursor became tiny (could be set to bigger sizes, although it looked like you are picking an unreasonably huge mouse size on the control panel)
3) Couldn't break out of the original 4k bounds with the mouse
...and that's were I left it last time.
Linux Mint's Cinnamon desktop has beta support for 1.25x 1.5x scaling... it's on the right track but has ways to go - the menus don't adjust, there's work to be done for sure.
I wish I had the skills and time to help out, but for now, all I can do is point out the irregularities, I'm afraid.
Try a smaller 4k monitor, no bigger than 24". Then, it's not "too big."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35876743
Cinnamon has a more gradual setting in beta, but the implementation isn't complete yet - the menus don't adjust well - I'm guessing there are some other GTK related quirks to iron out.
Every month I read here that it can’t be done.
This results in a 2560×1440 effective resolution with a bit of blurriness that is acceptable, compared to "native 200%" scaling that makes the controls a bit too large to my liking, or "native 150%" scaling that is hidden behind some "trust me, you don't want to see this" language/button in GNOME.
Things do seem to be slower when it is switched on, which is not the case with the 200% and 100% settings.
This size is very difficult to find these days, presumably because people don’t understand this. Or hardware co. mgmt didn’t.
TL;DR A 4k monitor should be the same size as HD, with 200% scaling. 22” aka 56cm is about right.
What is the problem? AFAIK a friend of mine has been using an X-based setup (IIRC with FVWM) in his 4K laptop for years and when i asked him he told me the only thing he had to do was to use ImageMagick to scale at 2x the images his theme used.
Then I brought it down with some xrandr setting... the size is right but a bunch of other things are incorrect.
I wish it were one incremental setting like it is in MacOS? Very easy to use; very easy to adjust for each monitor.
We need still need a mechanism that would allow to automatically distribute less trivial amounts of money without requiring a recurrent subscription.
Fortunately thanks to btrfs i can quickly downgrade back to the 6.1-based setup that works, but i'm ~3 months behind on updates and my lastversionitis is itching :-P.
I tried with live USB setup with latest openSUSE and with other OSes running 6.2 and couldn't replicate the issue so it probably is some configuration problem (though i can't think of what), but since i have this installation for a couple of years now i'd rather not nuke it and spend time reinstalling things again. So i'm just attempting an update every few weeks or so to see if something magically fixes the issue.
That was unexpected to read in a kernel change log but I sure do appreciate the fix.
Overall it works pretty well as a display adapter with 6.2+, currently games using DirectX 12 don't work under Linux because of some missing driver features.
Just switched back to Linux to try the i915 driver and kernel 6.2 updates, and it works really well. AV1 and VP9 encoding is killer.
There's an Arc bug where displays either don't initialize on boot or after sleep, but it's common to Windows, as well. There are some other quirks, but the painpoints at least aren't driver related, like fglrx or proprietary nvidia.
Honestly, it's a good arch that's steadily improving to very little fanfare.