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Comment by immnn | Hacker News Reader

I fully agree. And Wayland supports HiDPI with fractured scaling very well. Also tablet devices work better on Wayland. If you’re running Linux on a Surface, you should definitely switch to Wayland. It’s really time to ditch XServer and I wonder why Ubuntu and derivates still use it by default.

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> And Wayland supports HiDPI with fractured scaling very well

Very well only for the apps that cooperate well, e.g. GTK-based apps.

Non-native apps (eg IntelliJ Idea) on my Ubuntu desktop were blurry when I used any kind of scaling - not just fractional scaling but any scaling != 100%. Reducing the display resolution by 2x resulted in much crispier rendering than full resolution with 2x scaling for those apps.

I think that's because "non-native" apps run inside an X server running as a Wayland client. So you're basically getting the X experience :/

That's not the case, intellij text rendering looks perfect on X/Gnome with fractional scaling (at least for me)

But you are still using it as an X app, which uses X configs over wayland’s.

Yep. Gnome on Wayland has been the best HiDPI experience I had on a Linux system so far.

Also includes night mode out of the box.

"Night mode", but nothing else. The GTK devs promised a theming interface as consolation for their libadwaita rollout, but that's trapped in limbo afaict...

nVidia is the dominant discrete GPU vendor, as well as having a fair amount of laptop market share, and their drivers haven't adequately supported it. It's rather difficult to flip the switch when a big chunk of your userbase can't make the move. I finally switched off of nVidia, in part because of the Wayland situation, but the majority of users aren't likely to do so.

Isn't fractional scaling on Wayland done by integer upscaling followed by downscaling? Or is it just a Gnome thing?

Is that a problem? I think macOS works the same way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19052960

Afaik macos doesn’t even have fractional scaling anymore, they only do integer-scaling. But for that retina screens are a must.

I can certainly select fractional settings in the display settings right now (default is 2x). But as mentioned before, the fractional scaling factors are not exposed to any software.

https://imgur.com/a/w4PAipI

Yes; the quality of such upscaling is noticeably worse than just doing proper upscaling, especially when it comes to text rendering. IIRC macOS does it this way because it historically only had integer upscaling, and when apps depend on that, changing it can be a major break.

That’s only for Xwayland apps. Otherwise it is framework-dependent, but they can at least have a reliable way of reading out the requested zoom level.

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