Hi, I’m new to Fedora. I’m using version 42 and I’ve been really enjoying it so far! There’s one thing that bugs me though and I couldn’t find much information on - what is the current state of fractional scaling?
Apparently, not a long time ago, many apps would appear blurry with fractional scaling enabled. I haven’t noticed any such issues, apps are nicely sharp. However, some apps are noticeably laggy when using fractional scaling, like Chromium-based browsers (forcing Wayland solved this issue), VS Code (again, forcing Wayland helped, but there are problems with keyboard shortcuts, all VSC fault, apparently) or Steam (haven’t solved that one - Steam is laggy and games offer resolutions only with 60 Hz and are terribly laggy - the only working workaround is to disable fractional scaling and log out/in, which is annoying).
Are the lags to be expected when apps are not running under Wayland?
I’m using a 4K 144 Hz monitor, attached via DisplayPort to a 6650XT GPU. VRR enabled (I also tried disabling VRR, but it had no effect).
The mentioned apps are either Electron-based apps, or it’s Chromium itself. Can you reproduce/narrow down the issue to Electron-based apps only?
This is not solving your problem, but at least could direct you where to search/report the issue.
On high resolution displays I prefer using non-fractional scaling, and only adjusting the font size (e.g. via GNOME Tweaks; see also gsettings list-recursively org.gnome.desktop.interface | grep font).
Hi, first of all, thanks for the answer and interesting observation!
Yes, it seems it’s related to Chromium and Electron-based apps (which is basically Chromium). What I don’t understand is why it would also impact a Steam game? Is it perhaps because it gets launched through Steam, which itself runs likely through XWayland? (I don’t really mind much, since I don’t play games, I was just curious to try it out and get a feel of what the state of Linux gaming looks like).
I’ve tried running at 100% scaling with large fonts enabled through accessibility options. Unfortunately, although things don’t look bad, they just don’t look the same as with 125% scaling, simply because not all the UI elements scale with the larger font size. Also, some apps, like Kdenlive, completely ignore the setting.
Unfortunately, I won’t be able to try setting larger font size directly, at least not in Fedora. My Fedora installation suddenly died (without me making any changes), and I get just black screen past the login screen every time. Logs are giving me zero hints on what might be going on and I wasn’t able to find any suggestion online that would work. 90% of fixes relate to Nvidia driver issues, but I’m running an AMD GPU. After two or three hours of trying to fix it, I’m ready to give up
I don’t play games, but apparently web games are easily ported to Steam as Electron apps.
If you’re still willing to search for solutions here on Discourse, you could open a new topic (giving details about your system, e.g. output of inxi -Fzxx, and what actions have you performed before the issue occurred).
It’s a game written in Unity, not Electron. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, I was interested in the state of fractional scaling, being it the default in latest Fedora, and I guess I’ve answered the question myself - it’s not ready for prime time, at least not yet.
I haven’t changed anything, that’s the thing… I simply woke up the computer from sleep, wanted to resume work, as I have done many times before, and all of a sudden, all I get is the black screen after I log in. It seems to me that Fedora is still more or less just a beta test for the next version of RHEL, as it always was in the past, unfortunately. For two weeks or so, it seemed it’s in much better state than in the past, and I was enjoying it. But because of issues like this, it’s not an OS I’d consider stable and reliable. I’ll be moving to Debian, which has always been rock solid. I’ll give Fedora another chance in 5 years or so.
Anyway, thank you for your answers and recommendations!
Well, in GNOME 47 it was still considered experimental.
In my experience, Fedora is pretty stable for most needs, but being cutting edge, it might receive regression bugs with package updates (incl. kernel).
!
