I set up Linux on a Dell XPS 13 with the HiDPI screen. With both Ubuntu and Manjaro it was relatively painless, especially using GNOME via Wayland. i3 and sway also worked well too. I had heard a lot of issues with Linux and HiDPI, and was worried I would have to return/swap for a FHD screen, but everything has worked almost flawlessly.
I have used a 4k screen for several years now without any issues on GNOME with 200% scaling.
However, I recently bought a ThinkPad T14 with a 1080p screen. With 100% scaling, the fonts and widgets are too small. The ideal scaling seems to be 125% or 150%. GNOME has experimental support for fractional scaling. This works generally ok for Wayland applications, but windows of X11 applications are incredibly blurry both on the laptop display with 150% scaling and the external screen with 200% screen. I think they are rendered at 100% and then scaled up. There are various workarounds for X11 applications, but it seems that e.g. none of the workaround really works with e.g. JetBrains IDEs (there are some bug reports about it).
Windows 10, on the other hand, handles fractional scaling and per-screen scaling just fine. It's frustrating, because I highly prefer GNOME and Linux and if all applications supported Wayland, there wouldn't be any major problems.
I have a similar problem with a QHD screen that I want 150% scaling. The worst part is that using the experimental scaling is it seems to consume a lot more cpu usage and thus power on my laptop.
14" WQHD would have the same problem, you would just switch 125% to 150%.
The ideal would be 3200x2000, but sadly, nobody sells such laptops anymore. Everyone jumps from WQHD to 4k. With 4k, you have exactly the same problem, except for 125% you need 250%.
In Windows, large fonts is basically 125% (120 dpi, vs the base 96 dpi, double for @2X HiDPI), except it enlarges only fonts and pushes dialog controls around, but doesn't touch raster assets. It is something that was part of Windows since '90s, but in many applications, it newer worked right, because the developers never knew about the option and newer tested it (looking at most Delphi developers here).
Changing scaling to 125% (since Windows 8 and 10) changes both font sizes, grid calculations in windows controls and bitmaps; the subtle brokenness of some apps disappears, just to be replaced by another set of subtle brokeness. However, the good news is, that the chance of developers testing in this mode is higher than them testing Large fonts.
I also have 1080p 14" laptop somewhere; at 100%/dpi the display is too tiny, at 125% it is great. I also used to have 1600x900 14" laptop (T430s) - that one, at 100% was perfect (except it was an TN display, which was different downside). Prior to that, 1440x900 (T400) - that one was a bit too large.
Its because everyone having issues is using X and likely 2 monitors with different dpis. On wayland its pretty much flawless unless you use 2 monitors at different scales and load an X application.
> unless you use 2 monitors at different scales and load an X application
Agree 100%, this is the only issue I ran into using Wayland (Sway) with different DPI monitors.
I only want to stress that the impact of this issue is very limited—at least for me. Most of the apps that I use run natively on Wayland and scale perfectly: Firefox (with some extra setup), Telegram Desktop, Alacritty, all GTK and KDE apps.
The apps that do get blurry are the ones that are made by big companies for which Linux experience is not the first priority (thus they don't care about native Wayland support). Zoom, Chromium, Google Earth, Discord, Steam, Skype. I don't use them much, and when I do I try to keep them on my big (non-scaled) monitor, and it works fine.
The xps 13 with 4k is gorgeous. Pair it with an external 4k and everything is seemless. If you go 1080 or whatever for the external monitor it becomes a pain to switch resolutions and scaling. I briefly had to do that and had a script to adjust things but pycharm for instance needed to be restarted
Once I upgraded to a 4k it's a great setup. I actually have dual 4k monitors now and that xps can handle it easily. No software issues either. The most I've had to do was adjust the zoo launcher to be hidpi
My only issue is that my mid sized 4k screen is a but clunky at 2x UI scaling but otherwise I don't have an issue until I plug into a standard Monitor when 2x scaling is ridiculous.
But I find 1x scaling to be too small to enjoy on the QHD screen. Multiple integer scale factors are possible but it is a bit complex and when I did it machine was prone to crash...
I'm using linux mint with fractional scaling on just one of my displays. (The other display is just 1:1). Everything seems to just work fine.
Well, except for an outstanding bug where after I log in, I get a duplicate, stationary mouse cursor appearing somewhere on the screen that just hovers over any open windows. Its annoying and weird.
