[teeheelol]

Yep. Some of the garbage I've seen out there is shocking. It scares me.

Then I try and get fractional scaling working on Wayland with my NVidia card and want to gouge my eyes out with frustration that after a decade I still can't do what I can do on a closed source thing that came free with my computer. Actually make that 25 years now. The enterprise crap while horrible, actually mostly does work reasonably well. Sometimes I feel dirty about this.

Quality is therefore relative to the consumer. The attention is on what the engineers care about with Linux, not the users I find. Where there's an impedance mismatch there are a lot of unhappy users.

[takluyver]

> after a decade I still can't do what I can do on a closed source thing that came free with my computer

I don't know the specifics, but there's a good chance that your issue is ultimately because Nvidia wants to keep stuff closed, and Linux is not their main market - at least for actual graphics, I guess these days it's a big market for GPU computing. So it's the interface between closed and open source that's giving you grief.

[drdaeman]

I don't think this is nVidia issue. Wayland/nVidia woes are primarily about flickering, empty windows and other rendering problems. I may be wrong, but I believe HiDPI support is mostly hardware-independent issue.

[teeheelol]

If it isn't a hardware independent issue, they really fucked up Wayland.

[drdaeman]

Here's a decent summary that tries to explain why things are bad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40909859

[teeheelol]

Oh wow. They really did fuck up Wayland.

[teeheelol]

It doesn't work properly on Intel or AMD either. It just sucks worse on NVidia.

[michaelmrose]

In a window manager or KDE(x11) you can use nvidia-settings you can click advanced in monitor settings and selected viewport in and viewport out. If you set the viewport out to be the actual resolution and the viewport in to be some multiple of the actual resolution you can get fractional scaling and if you make the factor chosen a function of the relative DPI of your respective monitors you can make things perceptibly the same size across monitors. That's right fractional scaling AND mixed DPI!

You can achieve the same thing with xrandr --scale and its easier to automate happening at login.

You can also achieve pretty good fractional scaling in Cinnamon (x11) directly via its configuration. You enable fractional scaling on the right tab and suddenly global scale is replaced with a per monitor scale. Super user friendly.

Also your copy of Windows was just as free your computer was. You paid someone to configure windows acceptably for you and Microsoft and various OEMs who make windows hardware split your money giving you something usable in return.

You then decided that you wanted Linux on it and now you are the OEM which means you get to puzzle out integration and configuration issues including choosing a DE that supports the features you desire and configuring it to do what you want it to do.

[adrian_b]

I have been using only 4k monitors in Linux for at least a decade and I have never had any problem with fractional scaling.

I continue to be puzzled whenever I hear about this supposed problem. AFAIK, this is something specific to Gnome, which has a setting for enabling "fractional scaling", whatever that means. I do not use Gnome, so I have never been prevented to use any fractional scaling factor that I liked for my 4k monitors (which have been most frequently connected to NVIDIA cards), already since a decade ago (i.e. by setting whatever value I desired for the monitor DPI).

All GUI systems had fractional scaling already before 1990, including X Window System and MS Windows, because all had a dots-per-inch setting for the connected monitors. Already around 1990, but probably already much earlier, the recommendations for writing any GUI applications was to use for fonts or for any other graphic elements only dimensions in typographic points or in other display independent units.

For any properly written GUI program, changing the DPI of the monitor has always provided fractional scaling without any problems. There have always been some incompetent programmers who have used dimensions in pixels, making unscalable their graphic interfaces, but that has been their fault and not of X Window System or of any other window system that was abused by them.

It would have been better if no window system had allowed the use of any kind of dimensions given in pixels in any API function. Forty years ago there was the excuse that scaling the graphic elements could sometimes be too slow, so the use of dimensions in pixels could improve the performance, but this excuse had already become obsolete a quarter of century ago.

[drdaeman]

> For any properly written GUI program, changing the DPI of the monitor has always provided fractional scaling without any problems.

Parent comment was talking about Wayland, and Wayland does not even have a concept of display DPI (IIRC, XWayland simply hardcodes it to 96).

You're correct - in theory. In practice, though, it's a complete mess and we're already waaay past the point of no return, unless, of course, somehow an entirely new stack emerges and gains traction.

> There have always been some incompetent programmers who have used dimensions in pixels

I don't have any hard numbers to back this, but I have a very strong impression that most coders use pixels for some or all the dimensions, and a lot of them mix units in a weird way. I mean... say, check this very website's CSS and see how it has an unhealthy mix of `pt`s and `px`es.