Non blurry on high resolution or 4k?

[soennchen (Sönnchen)]

Can you help me? How do I get a “bigger picture” without blurriness?

I am on a 2019 Macbook Pro with a 3072x1920 Display. And I have an external 4k with 3840x2160.

And if I don’t scale “all the people on the internet are so small” I can’t barely read stuff.

I tried:

1. Reducing resolution and keep scaling to 100% - results in blurriness.

2. Activate fractional scaling and scale to 125-150% by keeping my original resolution - results in blurriness and battery eating

3. Increasing the font size on the whole system with

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor 1.5

and increase the symbol size in the dock and of the files.

Way better, no blurriness - but: Some apps simly ignore this and then all of a sudden - everything is little again. Apps like Telegram or Notesnook (which I use to notes and code on all my systems)

What am I missing? I mean, I can’t be the only one with a high resolution display using fedora?

Or is fedora DE just not made for contemporary displays?

(Tried it on Gnome and KDE)

[kparal (Kamil Páral)]

You can disable fractional scaling (i.e. use integer scaling) and scale to 200%. That will be sharp, but possibly too large.

You can use fractional scaling, but only Wayland apps will be sharp. XWayland apps (which includes most Chromium or Electron-based webapps packaged as a standalone app, like Telegram) will be blurry. Some of them can be tweaked, though. See this:

[F40] Fractional scaling in Fedora 40 Workstation makes some applications blurry

Problem In GNOME in Fedora 40 Workstation, old applications (which don’t support Wayland natively) may appear blurry if you enable display scaling. Note: GNOME might enable display scaling even automatically – that depends on what particular display you have. Cause Display scaling is the process of making everything (application windows, texts, etc) bigger on your screen. It’s often used for modern high-density displays, otherwise everything would be tiny and hard to read. There are two dis…

Or you can increase the font size only, yes. And in those apps, which don’t follow the GNOME font configuration, configure it individually. It’s a lot of work, but might work well enough. This is a good starting point guide:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI

Just be aware that lots of older guides on the web assume X11 session, and it might work differently when running in a Wayland session.

I think the default experience is quite good with fractional scaling and the default Workstation apps. But once you start using third-party apps, it breaks apart, because their Wayland support is mostly not finished yet.

[alan-jelaska]

@kparal

HiDPI - ArchWiki

Great resource. I recently managed to buy a second monitor for my laptop and was pleasantly surprised when I found out it can do 3840x2160 when connected via HDMI. I started to write a cookbook for adjusting non GNOME apps. But this ArchWiki already has it better. I’ll add this one for gkrellm2 (very peculiar one). To make labels readable you just write desired font sizes in ~/.gkrellm2/theme_config

0
Sans 16
Sans 14
Sans 13
100

For legacy X apps You can put some things in ~/.Xresources.

But do use that ArchWiki link.

[soennchen (Sönnchen)]

Hey thanks a lot for the feedback - and the great ressource!

For now I settled with fonts at factor 1.5 and making my symbols in files and dock bigger - and switching to xorg for the moment - as long as apps I use often have no wayland support.

Fractional scaling made my machine run so hot it turned itself off … and I can’t look at the blurry stuff, it makes me bananas … (Obsidian for example is one of those apps)

Thanks for taking the time and really helping out! I really appreciate that!