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logothete

Member

Registered: 2022-01-06

Posts: 44

Plasma on Wayland with HiDPI: Scaling Woes

I have a HiDPI screen. Using X11 on 200 % scaling, everything works fine, but the lack of independent scaling means that external monitors that aren't also HiDPI aren't usable, so I'd hoped to give Wayland a shot.

On 100% scaling, most apps are okay -- especially ones that run in XWayland, it would seem. But several key apps are too small. Forcing font DPI up to 192 fixes, at the very least, Firefox and all text editors, but a few apps suffer from Extremely Tiny Syndrome. Some of them are GTK apps, like Nicotine, in which everything is small; others are QT apps, like audacious, in which everything except for buttons are scaled well. Naturally, Zoom is just way too small, being an awful app.

Sounds like the solution is to just use higher scaling, right?
God, no. This breaks all apps in some way; window aurorae don't extend the full length, text is blurry, latte-dock is a mess, the list goes on.

Has anyone been victorious in this struggle before? If I give up and switch to some other DE, will my problems go away?

Some images here:
The extremely tiny buttons on Audacious at 100% scaling
https://i.imgur.com/FBMCaWz.png
The broken aurorae (universal) and blurriness of text on Firefox, at 200%
https://i.imgur.com/akxlxEN.png

Mod Edit - Replaced oversized images with links.
CoC - Pasting pictures and code

Last edited by Slithery (2022-03-08 16:20:21)

BrianDMS

Member

From: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Registered: 2022-03-10

Posts: 25

Re: Plasma on Wayland with HiDPI: Scaling Woes

Scaling is still very much work in progress, I found no way to fix it on KDE unfortunately.
Since Wayland isn't a display server and just a protocol, its implementation relies purely on the DE, so yeah, switching to a different DE might just fix your issues.
In general Gnome's Wayland implementation (mutter) is much more mature so you can give it a try, scaling is not perfect but better than on KDE for me.
That said, you can only go to 200%, fractional scaling is still experimental (though can be enabled with some effort, it might cause similar issues as you had on KDE).

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alias ffs='sudo $(fc -ln -1)'