Hi guys, I’m a beginner. when i download some flatpacks from Software store I sometime encounter software that are blurry. How to fix them. I’m using wayland on fedora 40. screen resolution 2560x1600 @ 200% scale.
Do you have examples of apps that are blurry on your system?
One thing you can check is to open the journal in a terminal:
$ journalctl -f
then open an app that you know is blurry, and see if there are any messages displayed in the terminal that could be related to the window drawing.
This is most likely not about Flatpaks but rather a side effect of running X11 applications under Gnome on Wayland. On Gnome (up to Gnome 46 at least), Wayland applications render with proper scaling, 200% in your case, and appear sharp. X11 applications (via XWayland) render at 100% scaling and are then upscaled, which leads to the blurry image you noticed.
In KDE Plasma, there is a choice to have X11 applications scale themselves (for which an application needs to be HiDPI-aware, not all are) or have the system scale them (the Gnome implementation, which results in blurry UIs). The drawback of X11 applications scaling themselves is that an application that is not HiDPI-aware would then render effectively at 100% and nothing scales it. As a result, its UI is tiny and practically unusable. I guess the Gnome developers have decided that having a blurry UI that can be used without a microscope is preferable to one that is sharp but tiny/unusable.
Depending on the applications, there may be ways to enable a Wayland backend. You can then use Flatseal to modify the Flatpak, e.g., by passing a command line argument like --ozone-platform-hint=auto (for some Electron based applications) or an environment variable like MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 (for Thunderbird, though this seems to be no longer needed in version 128). But these are highly specific and you will need to research (read “Google”) to figure them out for each application.
I’m not seeing any blurriness with the X clients that i currently have running on my 200% scaled Gnome, i wonder if there are other mitigations that could be in place to prevent X scaling blurriness?
Do you have fractional scaling enabled? The behaviour I described happened on my systems with fractional scaling enabled. This was one of the reasons why I switched from Gnome 46 to KDE Plasma 6.
Maybe if you use Gnome’s default integer scaling, this is not the case. But since most desktop monitors I regularly connect to require 125% or 150% scaling, I enabled Gnome’s fractional scaling even on my current laptop with a 242ppi screen and its 200% scaling.
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Fractional scaling may indeed make things blurry on Gnome, i don’t have that enabled since it’s kind of a hacky workaround that will also hurt performance.
Since the OP was using 200% scaling i was assuming he has not enabled fractional scaling on his system, but if he has that could be a clue.
I see. Fractional scaling isn’t as bad as people make it out to be, but yes, if you can stick to 100%/200%/300%, that is probably the better solution. But unless monitor makers get their act together and build affordable monitors with ~220ppi panels, you will either need to limit yourself to 27" 1440p panels at 100% or enable fractional scaling.
I think it’s pretty bad, the experimental Mutter workaround on Gnome at least, since it will do an additional lossy scaling operation for everything on screen. When 125% is selected, everything will be internally rendered at 500% and then scaled back to 100%, since the scaling itself always needs to be integer-based on Gnome. It will use more resources and make things blurry in the process, i don’t intend to use it myself for those reasons.
While you are right about the implementation, keep in mind that supersampling (i.e., rendering at higher resolutions than your display) has been used for years, to achieve things like antialiasing. I for one, with my eyesight, which also doesn’t improve with age, cannot really see any quality loss with 150% fractional scaling (at least on a display that is high enough resolution to need the 150% scaling).
But if you feel strongly about it and can stick to integer scaling, good for you. I, unfortunately, have had to use it as I don’t want to tolerate ~110ppi/60Hz monitors for a longer time anymore and have not found any ~220ppi/90+Hz monitors I am willing to afford.
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for example vscodium