Fedora 44 and fractional scaling

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1

I have been running Fedora 43 for the last 6 months, but have just done a clean install of Fedora 44 on my Lenovo Yoga laptop. It has an odd resolution (3000x1876) which means that Gnome has always only offered me 133% or 200% options for scaling.

Perhaps I have misunderstood something, but since Gnome 50 now supports fractional scaling, I thought this meant that I would be offered a greater range of scaling options in the display settings. But I am still only offered the same 100/133/200% scaling options.

Is there a setting I need to change to enable fractional scaling? Or have I misunderstood what fractional scaling means? All of the release notes and articles I’ve read about Fedora 44 make it sound like this should just work out of the box.

Thanks.

3

Having 133% available means that fractional scaling is already on. Why you don’t have other steps between 100% and 200% besides the 133% might be related to the native resolution of the display.

If I play around on my current system in the display settings, for the native resolution I am offered the following steps: 100%, 125%, 133%, 166%, 175%, 200% and so on, whereas on a different resolution selected I only get 100%, 133% and 200%.

4

It could be that I have just misunderstood what this new “fractional scaling” feature actually is.

My unusual resolution means that the only scaling options that result in whole integer values are:

  • 100%: 3000x1876
  • 133%: 2250x1407
  • 200%: 1500x938

Any other scaling option would result in either the horizontal or vertical resolution needing a fraction instead of a whole integer. And this is what Gnome 49 has always offered me.

But in Windows, or in the KDE desktop, I have been able to change the scaling options to a much wider range of options, e.g. 125% or 150%, even if the resulting resolution has a fraction. I thought this was known as “fractional scaling”.

So what I thought would happen with Fedora 44 & Gnome 50, is that even with my unusual resolution, I would be offered a wider range of scaling options - something similar to what Windows or KDE shows me. But perhaps I have misunderstood this?

5

I’d still consider it fractional scaling, even if not as granular as in KDE Plasma. If you set the scaling to 133%, for instance, you’ll find the actual scaling factor in .config/monitors.xml (which for my resolution is 1.3333333730697632).

IIRC, GNOME 47 was the first release to ship with fractional scaling as experimental feature. Before that, one would only have the option to set multiple integers of 100% (so 100%, 200%, 300%).

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6

Fractional scaling relates to the scaling factor (1.25, 1.33, 1.5 etc.). mutter presents “only scales that divide perfectly into the screen” ( Client Challenge ) - which improves scaling options for most displays but does not work for all (Not enough scaling factors available for 2256x1504 (Framework 13) (#4311) · Issues · GNOME / mutter · GitLab).

But according to the comments in the reports you can still define custom values in .config/monitors.xml - but I think you must provide the correct decimal value & not a rounded value, i.e. 1.3333333730697632, not just 1.33).