Fractional Scaling Might Soon Be Accomplished For GNOME

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fractional Scaling Might Soon Be Accomplished For GNOME

It looks like support for fractional scaling might be working in time for GNOME 3.26 to help out HiDPI users where integer-based scaling may be less than ideal...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Fractional-Scaling-Plans

[microcode]

s/Clanse/Clasen/

[microcode]

Cool that something productive is already coming out of Canonical's abandonment of their last major NIH subsystem.

[davidfg4]

I've been using 160% font scaling for a year and it works great. (Available under "Fonts" in the Gnome Tweak Tool.) I didn't realize that Gnome didn't have fractional HiDPI support.

[carewolf]

The question is how good it looks. I know Qt can do it too, but usually it looks better to adjust logical DPI and then hit an integer scale. Is GNOME locked to 96 logical DPI?

[microcode]

Too bad Gnome tends to think of their users as retards. I'd pick Unity over Gnome any day.

I'm not really a fan of either Unity or GNOME; but honestly I think GNOME is getting better at being a workstation DE again. The default theme and applications are putting back functionality and making the buttons mouse-sized again. I would have agreed heartily over the last three years that Unity made a better choice for workstations, but GNOME is definitely fitting this niche better. The quality of the default applications is also rapidly improving, as is the performance and general sanity of the toolkit.

I don't use desktop environments, but I think for many people who have gotten used to them on their workstations will be very happy with GNOME, especially in the coming year or so. Consider that all three of the largest enterprise linux workstation distribution vendors are now using the same init system, the same sound system, the same compositor protocol, and the same default desktop environment. I think this is ultimately going to benefit the quality of every one of these components. GNOME is going to improve, as is NetworkManager, as is PulseAudio, as is systemd (and associated services).

[microcode]

The question is how good it looks. I know Qt can do it too, but usually it looks better to adjust logical DPI and then hit an integer scale. Is GNOME locked to 96 logical DPI?

Yeah, I think that visual quality will suffer at anything between 1x and 2x (probably fine above 2x though), and it'll probably make everything slower.

[GreatEmerald]

I've been using 160% font scaling for a year and it works great. (Available under "Fonts" in the Gnome Tweak Tool.) I didn't realize that Gnome didn't have fractional HiDPI support.

It doesn't work great for when you need things other than the text scaled up. Which is the case with my tablet, for instance. Hitting the close button can be an exercise in frustration... (And yes, the other extreme of 2x scaling with fonts scaled down doesn't work either because elements are too large and thus don't fit on screen. The DPI is 144, which is exactly 1.5x.)

[Geopirate]

I'm not really a fan of either Unity or GNOME; but honestly I think GNOME is getting better at being a workstation DE again. The default theme and applications are putting back functionality and making the buttons mouse-sized again. I would have agreed heartily over the last three years that Unity made a better choice for workstations, but GNOME is definitely fitting this niche better. The quality of the default applications is also rapidly improving, as is the performance and general sanity of the toolkit.

I don't use desktop environments, but I think for many people who have gotten used to them on their workstations will be very happy with GNOME, especially in the coming year or so. Consider that all three of the largest enterprise linux workstation distribution vendors are now using the same init system, the same sound system, the same compositor protocol, and the same default desktop environment. I think this is ultimately going to benefit the quality of every one of these components. GNOME is going to improve, as is NetworkManager, as is PulseAudio, as is systemd (and associated services).

I think this is the real convergence that people actually wanted! If only this packaging situation could be resolved with one solution...

[darkbasic]

I really hope that Plasma will follow soon.