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Ancient X11 scaling technology

(flak.tedunangst.com)
283 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 24 Jun 25 18:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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wmf ◴[24 Jun 25 19:29 UTC] No.44370040[source]▶
Drawing a circle is kind of cheating. The hard part of scaling is drawing UI elements like raster icons or 1px hairlines to look non-blurry.
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okanat ◴[24 Jun 25 20:49 UTC] No.44370877[source]▶
And also doing it for multiple monitors with differing scales. Nobody claims X11 doesn't support different DPIs. The problems occur when you have monitors with differing pixel densities.

At the moment only Windows handles that use case perfectly, not even macOS. Wayland comes second if the optional fractional scaling is implemented by the toolkit and the compositor. I am skeptical of the Linux desktop ecosystem to do correct thing there though. Both server-side decorations and fractional scaling being optional (i.e. requires runtime opt-in from compositor and the toolkit) are missteps for a desktop protocol. Both missing features are directly attributable to GNOME and their chokehold of GTK and other core libraries.

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1. axus ◴[24 Jun 25 21:44 UTC] No.44371399[source]▶
Speaking of X11 and Windows, any recommended Windows Xservers to add to this StackOverflow post? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61110603/how-to-set-up-w...

I hadn't heard of WSLg, vcxsrv was the best I could do for free.

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2. okanat ◴[24 Jun 25 22:50 UTC] No.44371889[source]▶
With WSLg, Windows runs a native Wayland server under Windows and it will use Xwayland to display X11 apps. You should be able to use any GUI app without any extra setup. You should double check the environment variables though. Sometimes .bashrc etc. or WSL's systemd support interferes with them.