Linux desktop and high resolution laptops

drago01 drago01 at gmail.com
Sun Jan 11 10:42:22 UTC 2015


On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 11:21 AM, Peter Laursen <jazcyk at gmail.com> wrote:
> "setting a scale factor of two" is a much too simple logic IMO. There should
> be a number of scaling option (a logarithmic scale for this would obvious).

A non integer scaling factor can't work, see
http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2013/06/28/hidpi-support-in-gnome/comment-page-1/#comment-1814
for details.

> Besides I am the user and I want controls

You can override the scaling factor using gnome-tweak-tool

>(per monitor if there is more than
> one)

That's not possible with X11. We will fix that with wayland though.

>so that I can tune it to my taste, the quality of my monitor(s) and the
> applications I use. It is OK that the desktop has a reasonable default, of
> course, but user controls could be at least "very_small .. small
> ..normal/default .. large ..very_large" for instance. System should not take
> control(s) away from user.

No one is taking control away from you. I have no idea how you come to
that conclusion.
That being said most people don't want control but the system should
simply "just work", which is what we focus on i.e the system should
scale when its appropriate without having the user messing around with
settings.

> I accept that there is an ongoing process, and it is not simple nor trivial.
> Various mainstream Linux desktops should agree on a common mechanism (so
> that it will work for KDE applications running in Gnome, for instance).

For X11 there is no "common mechanism" GNOME exports the scaling
factor via xsettings, no idea how KDE handles that.

> But
> that is of course also not easy. I don't think the developers of different
> desktops communicate much and they use different 'abstraction layers'
> (various versions of qt and GTK as well as X11 versus Wayland (soon)) for
> development.

On wayland the buffer scale is part of the protocol so it works for
all toolkits / applications.


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