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Ancient X11 scaling technology

(flak.tedunangst.com)
283 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.228s | source
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wmf ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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. ChocolateGod ◴[] No.44374657[source]
> you have monitors with differing pixel densities. At the moment only Windows handles that use case perfectly

I have a mixed DPI setup and Windows falls flat (on latest Win 11), the jank when you move a application from one monitor to another as it tells the application to redraw is horrible, and even then it sometimes fails and I end up with a cut oversized application or the app crashes.

Where as on GNOME Wayland I can resize an application to cover all my monitors and it 'just works' in making them it the same physical size on all even when one monitor is 4K and the others 1440p. There's no jank, no redraw. Yes, there's sometimes artifacting from it downscaling as the app targets the highest DPI and gets downsized by the compositor, but that's okay to me.