Arch Linux

no_time

Member

Registered: 2021-07-10

Posts: 9

GTK proportions accidentally better under X?

I always knew GTK applications are supposed to be "chonky" with a lot of excess padding. But  when I installed my current arch setup some time ago I was very pleasantly surprised to find everything looking good.
Unfortunately this is no longer the case now that I switched to wayland with plasma6.

Some pics:
Xorg (good)

Wayland (bad?):

As you can see I have the same display settings, the only difference is the windowing backend.
This is obviously some kind of bug with how GTK detects scaling on my system under X, but it happens to fail in just the right way that all the fonts and UI elements look correct, just more compact.
Notice how "Window scaling" is 1,00 in both screenshots in the GTK Inspector.

Is there a way to preserve this happy accident under wayland without messing with the global window scale in the plasma display settings? Perhaps applying 100% scaling just to GTK4 with some kind of trick?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,766

Re: GTK proportions accidentally better under X?

Xorg server by default will use 96 DPI, most wayland compositor will use the correct DPI according to display/monitor geometrics.

You can test around with GDK_DPI env values: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI#GDK_3_(GTK_3) or see the notes https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI#KDE_Plasma and make sure xsettingsd is installed.

Last edited by V1del (2024-03-26 16:17:31)