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This also works well on GNOME Wayland (and probably other Wayland compositors) since about 1.5 years ago (for me at least). In the display settings you can pick a scale per monitor and almost all apps will respect it. (It seems some apps with custom toolkits are lagging but I can't remember the last time I ran into one of these).


I've got 4K display for my Linux machine in 2017; Fedora+Gnome+Wayland worked fine at 200% scale back then.

That's 4 years. After those 4 years, there are people still trying to make their X11 square peg fit into the HiDPI round hole.

X11 is dead. Nobody is going to retrofit HiDPI into it as it is in Wayland. In another 4 years, it is still going to be as annoying as it is today to fix up X11 desktops and apps; maybe even more so.


> worked fine at 200% scale

My X11 setup also works perfectly fine back then, at 200%. Maybe even earlier, 2016 or so.

The caveat is, of course, 200%. Try 150% and it is really a pain in the ass.


> Try 150% and it is really a pain in the ass.

Yes and no.

Wayland clients work file with 150%, or 125%, or whatever scaling. X11 client don't, they are blurry, as they are upscaled from @1X scale.

In the past, I considered that a problem, but I no longer do. You see, 20 years ago, one of the great things Apple did with their migration to Unix-like system was to make X11 clients second class citizens, beyond any doubt. You had to run X11 server manually and later, they even stopped shipping XQuartz with the system. It was a message, that while X11 apps work, if you are the author, you should really make your apps native.

Blurriness of X clients is a similar message here. You want it sharp? Ask its author for a native client. By dragging the feet the problem won't be solved. Chrome, and by extension Electron, are "working" on Wayland support since, what, 2016? For 5 years? They obviously do not see any need for it. The blurriness is a kick so they feel that they should see the need.

Similarly, JetBrains. Recently, there was an article how they partnered with Azul to rework their JIT for M1. M1 is a product, that wasn't on the market yet, but they were working on supporting it. On the other hand, they haven't managed to introduce Wayland support during last years yet. Again, the difference is, that they know M1 is inevitable, but they can afford to delay with Wayland, the users will excuse that, will look for hacks on their own and they won't be blamed anyway.

So if anything, the problem is too nice Xwayland integration and Ubuntu, that delayed switch to default Wayland session, giving time to ISVs to ignore the Wayland support for another couple of years. The distributions have to signal inevitable changes; the problems that will appear by not doing so will be their own, and solving them later will be harder.


Been using Ubuntu Mate X11 for five years on two 4k monitors and have to correct posts like this once every few days.


Works fine for me and always has, since my SXGA+ Thinkpad X61T. Currently running KDE Plasma on a WQHD screen and everything native (QT and GTK) is great; only WINE programs are too small.


Electron is the biggest offender these days. I saw that they added support a few months ago but it seems the apps haven't turned it on yet


The good thing about Electron apps is they all usually accept ctrl+shift+plus to quickly zoom in the whole application, not just the text. Just like zooming any page in the browser.

The bad thing is it applies to all windows of that app, so you can't mix big and small vscode if put one window on laptop HD screen and one window on 4k external monitor.


You can do it on X11 using xrand (crapy but works)




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