Arch Linux

ainmosni

Member

Registered: 2017-10-22

Posts: 6

GNOME on Wayland not scaling non-wayland applications properly

Hey all,

So, I have a Dell XPS 13 with an external screen hooked up, running GNOME on Wayland. My laptop screen is a HiDPI screen (3200x1800 on 13") that I instructed GNOME to scale the UI 200% on and my external screen is a normal DPI screen (2560x1440 on 27") that I instructed GNOME to not scale on.

Now this works great with applications that support Wayland but it doesn't work at all for non-wayland applications (Chromium, Firefox, PyCharm, VSCode, etc) which only take the scale of the HiDPI screen and not the normal DPI screen so they look huge when I move them to the 27" monitor. Now, I've played around with other WMs/DEs, all of them still a bit too buggy to use in Wayland but a few of them seem to handle the scaling of these non-wayland apps quite well. Is there a way to fix this on GNOME, so that these apps will not look ridiculously big on the 27" screen?

Thanks in advance!

ainmosni

Member

Registered: 2017-10-22

Posts: 6

Re: GNOME on Wayland not scaling non-wayland applications properly

Bumping in case this just flew under the radar.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,736

Re: GNOME on Wayland not scaling non-wayland applications properly

Since Xorg -- and by extension XWayland -- do not support runtime DPI/per monitor DPI I don't think this is feasably fixable. However I don't have any hands on experience and my information on that might be outdated, so take this with a grain of salt.

Does it work correctly if you simply start the application on the desired screen? I'd assume the XWayland client will then be properly intialized.

That said, please don't make a habit of bumping your threads

Slithery

Administrator

From: Norfolk, UK

Registered: 2013-12-01

Posts: 5,776

Re: GNOME on Wayland not scaling non-wayland applications properly

Don't do that.

CoC - Bumping

---

No, it didn't "fix" anything. It just shifted the brokeness one space to the right. - jasonwryan
Closing -- for deletion; Banning -- for muppetry. - jasonwryan

aur - dotfiles

ainmosni

Member

Registered: 2017-10-22

Posts: 6

Re: GNOME on Wayland not scaling non-wayland applications properly

Since Xorg -- and by extension XWayland -- do not support runtime DPI/per monitor DPI I don't think this is feasably fixable. However I don't have any hands on experience and my information on that might be outdated, so take this with a grain of salt.

Does it work correctly if you simply start the application on the desired screen? I'd assume the XWayland client will then be properly intialized.

That said, please don't make a habit of bumping your threads

Apologies for the bumping, it won't happen again.

Thanks for the information, and no, starting it on the desired screen doesn't seem to have any effect. Also, the thing that confuses me is that Sway does scale chromium and firefox properly, so I was wondering if they did something special (or maybe GNOME always starts stuff on the HiDPI monitor while Sway does what you described).