←back to thread

Ancient X11 scaling technology

(flak.tedunangst.com)
283 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
pedrocr ◴[] No.44369891[source]
That's probably better than most scaling done on Wayland today because it's doing the rendering directly at the target resolution instead of doing the "draw at 2x scale and then scale down" dance that was popularized by OSX and copied by Linux. If you do it that way you both lose performance and get blurry output. The only corner case a compositor needs to cover is when a client is straddling two outputs. And even in that case you can render at the higher size and get perfect output in one output and the same downside in blurryness in the other, so it's still strictly better.

It's strange that Wayland didn't do it this way from the start given its philosophy of delegating most things to the clients. All you really need to do arbitrary scaling is tell apps "you're rendering to a MxN pixel buffer and as a hint the scaling factor of the output you'll be composited to is X.Y". After that the client can handle events in real coordinates and scale in the best way possible for its particular context. For a browser, PDF viewer or image processing app that can render at arbitrary resolutions not being able to do that is very frustrating if you want good quality and performance. Hopefully we'll be finally getting that in Wayland now.

replies(12): >>44370069 #>>44370123 #>>44370577 #>>44370717 #>>44370769 #>>44371423 #>>44371694 #>>44372948 #>>44373092 #>>44376209 #>>44378050 #>>44381061 #
wmf ◴[] No.44370069[source]
None of the toolkits (Motif, Tk, Gtk, Qt, etc.) could handle fractional scaling so if Wayland had taken the easy way out it would break every app.
replies(2): >>44370526 #>>44370536 #
lostmsu ◴[] No.44370526[source]
Why is Wayland trying to monkey patch something that's broken elsewhere?
replies(1): >>44370660 #
wmf ◴[] No.44370660{3}[source]
Do you want to be right or do you want to display apps.
replies(2): >>44373271 #>>44375814 #
1. lostmsu ◴[] No.44373271{4}[source]
How many apps will you display if you don't display them right? Are you ready to tell me poor graphics is not one of the reasons people not use Linux? You won't display apps to the users you lost. Instead Windows will.