My lower res, lower DPI display from my old Dell laptop looks much more sharp and crisp than the fancy pants Framework 13 high res display.
My lower res, lower DPI display from my old Dell laptop looks much more sharp and crisp than the fancy pants Framework 13 high res display.
Let me guess… You’re running an X.Org based WM/DE?
X11 Doesn’t support fractional scaling properly . So some DEs will simulate it by scaling the apps the same way you scale a rasterized image like a PNG or JPEG, and as a result everything looks blurry. You’ll generally also have the same issue with XWayland apps on a Wayland display.
The best way to combat this? Try to use Wayland native apps as much as possible.
2nd best? Use non fractional values for scaling (x1 or x2 instead of x1.25)
You can also adjust the x dpi with .xresources, but switching to wayland is the better solution
Doesn’t Gnome ignore dpi in .Xresources in favor of its own hardcoded dpi?
Idk, I don’t use gnome
Probably, since GNOME is a poorly written piece of shit
So in the end they DO fractional scaling
Na, using Wayland with Gnome 45. 1.25x scale actually looks less blurry than 2x. (Putting aside that 2x is ridiculously large.)
Is to buy a laptop with a regular DPI display and avoid this class of bugs altogether. This way I can keep using Discord and 1Password.
Also kde is way better about this than gnome. Especially kde 6.
Discord is blurry because it’s an electron app, and electron isn’t native Wayland. You can make it work with
--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=waylandTIL
KDE and Qt have much better fractional scaling right now. GTK won’t implement it until a much farther release
Man, I just installed debian 12 with wayland (Gnome or KDE can’t remember) to play around and get instant headache from blurry fonts with my 1440p display with no scaling (Firefox and settings window are blurry af). No clue how to fix it, tried out few of the things I found online and none of them works.
Next plan is to try another distro and hope for the best.
Just a shot in the dark, but have you logged out and back in at any point?
Some settings can’t be applied in a running session.
Yeah and rebooted but it didn’t help. The settings window did state that some settings require reboot / relogging.
If I keep having the issue after reinstall I’ll make a new thread about it and maybe get some new ideas.
Probably GNOME. The new font rendering is dog shit although it’s supposedly getting better.
Could be, I’ll try out something else (KDE probably) next time!
Interesting, if it’s a native Wayland app, I’d guess the issue is just gnome problems then - from what I hear gnome is one of the poorest DEs for Wayland use, mainly because they refuse to support things the same way that everyone else agrees to, if at all. And they take a fair amount longer to deliberate and agree how to implement anything they do decide to support.
I’d think of looking at KDE, which is very functional at this point, or a wlroots based Compositor/WM, - hyprland seems like one of the more well supported window managers out of the ones using wlroots.
Gnome was the first popular DE to have reasonable Wayland support and Fedora has switched to it by default for literal years now. I don’t know where you get your info from, that Gnome is “one of the poorest DEs for Wayland use”, but it certainly isn’t from me (and I’ve actually used Gnome on Wayland since before it was the default in Fedora Workstation).
I am using Gnome with Wayland and a 1440p display, and it seems to work surprisingly well. Or maybe I jut got used to dealing with the problems, and would be surprised at how well things work under a different DE.
Do you remember making any tweaks? I had Debian 12 with Gnome and could not figure out how to fix blurred fonts with 1440p display.
Xwayland apps (running in legacy xorg) are extremely blurry under fractional scaling, native wayland apps can have worse rendering but not very noticeable.
The easiest way of checking if you have doubts is install xeyes and launch it. if xeyes follows the cursor inside the app you are tesing is in xwayland, if not is pure wayland.
Electron apps have to be configured to use wayland, whereas If you are in Debian check Firefox (ESR) is using wayland or install it through the offical deb repo of mozilla the latest. I think in the archwiki are the envronment variables to check.
And, for 125% maybe is just worth to you to just scale text to 1.20 using gnome-tweaks and leave it at 100% the scaling. It is not fancy, but it works. I have to use 150% so is too obvious/ugly to just scale the fonts…
Yeah I’ve heard that xwayland is not great. But I did not have any factorial scaling, just normal 100%, nevertheless I did test esr and the standard one, though the standard is definitely a flatpack. Also just the text on the settings window was blurry so I don’t think that was the issue.
I’m on opensuse tumbleweed. It might just be that all the apps I use are Wayland. I’ll take a look when I’m back home, currently I’m on a trip visiting family.
Thanks!
Try setting scaling back to 1x but then set font scaling to 1.25 using Gnome Tweaks. I’m running two 4k monitors this way and it’s as good as true scaling with no blur
2x being “ridiculously large” is the same as as 1080p display genius.