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steve.pike

Member

Registered: 2011-03-20

Posts: 3

XWayland fonts blurry in KDE

I am trying to switch to running KDE on Wayland so I can get per-display scaling (I have two 4k screens, one 27" and one 24"). Everything works great except that programs which are running through XWayland (emacs, firefox, and chrome are the three that are bugging me the most) have blurry fonts. Fonts in dolphin / KDE settings / the panel are all nice and sharp.

I found https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=389191, which makes me think this might be a known bug with KDE + Wayland, but there are some comments on that post from a KDE developer who doesn't have this problem.

I've tried various scaling settings, including having both screens on 100% scale and on 200% scale (so not fractional, and not different per-screen scaling) and the problems exist on all scales / combinations I've tried.

Gnome on Wayland does not have this problem.

I have an AMD 5700XT with the open source drivers.

I'm hoping to hear some testimonials from KDE+Wayland users who have HiDPI screens and have nice looking fonts about how they set that up, or to learn that this is actually a known problem that I shouldn't expect to fix.

Last edited by steve.pike (2020-09-24 14:51:17)

Brocellous

Member

Registered: 2017-11-27

Posts: 145

Re: XWayland fonts blurry in KDE

Yes, this is a known issue with XWayland. This is the relevant PR: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xse … quests/432 (at least, which approach I believe will eventually be merged). XWayland currently lacks any feature that would allow the compositor to set scaling.

There have been multiple suggested approaches held up in discussion because the design of X11 makes it impossible to support multi-dpi X 100% reliably. You might consider enabling firefox's Wayland backend to get the correct scaling in firefox, at least.

steve.pike

Member

Registered: 2011-03-20

Posts: 3

Re: XWayland fonts blurry in KDE

Thanks, that's what I needed to know. FWIW I did try firefox on wayland but had graphical bugs when resizing the window that were a showstopper. I'll file a bug when I get some more time to test it out, for now I'm back on X.

Also this is off topic but I found my only other post on this forum, from 2011, also about AMD drivers (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=115397)! Ironically that experience led me to switching to a Nvidia 980TI, and now here we are in 2020 with me switching to AMD to use the open source ones. Wonder where we'll be in 2029

Last edited by steve.pike (2020-09-25 21:25:05)

whites11

Member

Registered: 2010-03-23

Posts: 31

Re: XWayland fonts blurry in KDE

Sorry I don't get the outcome here.
Isn't there a solution to get a decently rendered chromium window in a HiDPI monitor with wayland/plasma?