[hollerith]

Wayland supports it (and Chrome supports it very well) but GTK does not. I run my UI at 200% scaling because graphical Emacs uses GTK to draw text, and that text would be blurry if I ran at my preferred scaling factor of 150% or 175%.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

GTK uses Pango/Harfbuzz and some other components to draw text, all of which are widely used in other Linux GUI stacks. GTK/GDK do not draw text themselves, so your complaints are not with them directly.

[hollerith]

I'm not asseting that text is being rendered incorrectly. I'm asserting that after rendering, the text is being downsampled.

[gucci-on-fleek]

This works with GTK for me at least. I've been using Gnome+Wayland with 150% scaling for almost 4 years now, and I haven't noticed any issues with GTK. Actually, my experience is essentially backwards from yours—anything Electron/Chromium-based needed a bunch of command-line flags to work properly up until a few months ago, whereas GTK apps always just worked without any issues.

[hollerith]

If you're using a high-DPI monitor, you might not notice the blurriness. I use a standard 110-DPI monitor (at 200% scaling in Gnome) and I notice it when the scaling factor is not an integer.

Or more precisely, I noticed it eventually as a result of my being primed to notice it after people on this site insisted that GTK cannot handle fractional scaling factors.

Compared to the contents of a browser's viewport, Emacs and the apps that come with Gnome are visually simple, so it took me a year or 2 to notice (even on a standard 110-DPI monitor used at 150% and 175% scaling) any blurriness in those apps since the app I'm most conditioned to notice blurriness is my browser, and Chrome's viewport is resolution independent except when rendering certain image formats -- text is always non-blurry.

Yes, Chrome's entire window can be quite blurry if Xwayland is involved, but it now talks to Wayland by default and for years before that could be configured to talk Wayland, so I don't consider that worth talking about. If Xwayland is not involved, the contents of Chrome's viewport is non-blurry at all scaling factors except for the PNGs, JPGs, etc. For a long time, when run at a fractional scaling factor under Gnome (and configured to talk Wayland) the only part of Hacker News that was blurry was the "Y" logo in the top left corner, then about 2 years ago, that logo's PNG file was replaced with an SVG file and the final bit of blurriness on HN went away.

[gucci-on-fleek]

> If you're using a high-DPI monitor [...] I use a standard 110-DPI monitor (at 200% scaling in Gnome)

FWIW, I'm using a 184 DPI monitor with 150% scaling.

> you might not notice the blurriness. [...]

> Compared to the contents of a browser's viewport, Emacs and the apps that come with Gnome are visually simple, so it took me a year or 2 to notice

I'm pretty sensitive to font rendering issues—to the point where I've complained to publishers about their PDFs having unhinted fonts—so I think that I would have noticed it, but if it's really as subtle as you say, then maybe I haven't.

I do have a somewhat unusual setup though: I'm currently using

  $ gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer','xwayland-native-scaling']"

although that might not be required any more with recent versions. I've also enabled full hinting and subpixel antialiasing with Gnome Tweaks, and I've set the following environment variables:

  MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
  QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland
  GDK_BACKEND=wayland,x11,*
  CLUTTER_BACKEND=gdk,wayland
  SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland
  SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER=wayland
  ECORE_EVAS_ENGINE=wayland_egl
  ELM_ENGINE=wayland_egl
  QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=1
  QT_ENABLE_HIGHDPI_SCALING=1

So maybe one of those settings would improve things for you? I've randomly accumulated most of these settings over the years, so I unfortunately can't really explain what (if anything) any of them do.

> Yes, Chrome's entire window can be quite blurry if Xwayland is involved, but it now talks to Wayland by default

Ah, good to hear that that's finally the default; that probably means that I can safely remove my custom wrapper scripts that forced those flags on.

[hollerith]

Do you notice blurriness on MacOS when the Settings app (name?) has been used to change the scaling factor to a fractional value?

[gucci-on-fleek]

Sorry, but I haven't ever used a Mac, so I unfortunately can't answer that. I've used Windows with fractional scaling, and most programs aren't blurry there, but the few that don't support fractional scaling are really blurry.

[hollerith]

That's an accurate summary of my experience with Windows, too.