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Ancient X11 scaling technology

(flak.tedunangst.com)
283 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 24 Jun 25 18:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | 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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akdor1154 ◴[24 Jun 25 21:35 UTC] No.44371327[source]▶
This is exactly right.

There is no mechanism for the user to specify a per-screen text DPI in X11.

(Or maybe there secretly is, and i should wait for the author to show us?)

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1. somat ◴[25 Jun 25 01:00 UTC] No.44372697[source]▶
X11 has had this since day one. However the trade offs to actually employing it are... unfortunate. It leans real hard on the application to actually cross screen boundaries and very few applications were willing to put the work in. so xrandr was invented. which does more of what people want with multiple screens by treating them as parts of one large virtual screen but you loose the per screen dpi.

http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/