Is there a way to scale a window?

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I often use old software written with 720p 70 PPI monitors in mind (e.g. Dasher) that has not been (actively) updated ever since. Font and icon heights are specified in pixels, that makes them very hard to use on a modern monitor. Is there a piece of software/GNOME extention that would allow 1.5x/2x a window on my screen? Like “Double Size” option built-in to Audacious?

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I think if you install Gnome Tweaks, it will give you a setting to scale display.
Don’t think it does it per window though.

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Does not apply to non-scaling windows

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This is a difficult question due to the different (legacy) technologies involved: X11, XWayland, and Wayland, and how they interact with modern higher DPI (HiDPI) screens. I know too little of your setup or the application to give you a simple answer.

The general explanation is this: with Gnome on Wayland and higher DPI displays, at least until Gnome 45 or 46, Wayland aplications are DPI-aware and render with the scaling factor you set in your display settings. Legacy X11 applications using XWayland were rendered for a low DPI screen and then scaled by the compositor. The advantage of this approach is that it works for any X11 application, whether it is HiDPI aware or not, but the upscaling of the pixels leads to an unsharp, fuzzy image. I do not know your applications but I would have expected them to get the fuzzy scaling treatment from Gnome.

KDE Plasma chose to expose this challenge to users and gave them the option to either have the compositor scale X11 applications (with the same fuzzy results) or rely on X11 applications to scale themselves (for which they need to be HiDPI aware, otherwise they are unusably small). However, this is a global setting, not per application.
I believe that Gnome 47 has introduced an experimental setting to match what KDE does (search the release notes for "xwayland-native-scaling"). If you have that enabled and your legacy X11 applications are not HiDPI aware, this could explain why they are rendered too small. (This is pure speculation, though, I switched from Gnome to KDE Plasma, mostly because of the fuzzy appearance of XWayland applications, and I have not used Gnome 47 at all.)

Hope this helps,
l-c-g

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