KDE and GNOME are both supported DEs for Fedora Asahi...

KDE and GNOME are both supported DEs for Fedora Asahi Remix, but there's still one issue that makes it impossible for me to honestly recommend GNOME to anyone trying out Linux on these platforms for the first time: GNOME does not support fractional scaling out of the box, and it is actively broken with XWayland if you enable it by editing the configs directly.

I consider proper HiDPI support with fractional scaling a basic fundamental requirement for Apple machines. It's a basic macOS feature, and not having it on Linux is just silly. It doesn't even need to be perfect fractional scaling support (integer scaling + display output rescaling is fine, it's what macOS does AFAIK)... but it needs to be there.

In GNOME you can enable it via the command line (sigh...), but if you do, XWayland apps just become a blurry mess since they render at 100%. This includes apps like Thunderbird out of the box.

KDE does this right, within the constraints of the legacy X11 protocol: the X11 scale is set to the largest of your monitor scales, so X11 apps look crisp on at least one monitor (even crisper than on Wayland at non-integer scales, at least until the native Wayland fractional scaling stuff catches up) and only minimally soft on the others (typical downscaling softness, same thing macOS does and same thing you get on Wayland for most apps today).

KDE had that problem way back when we first shipped the Arch alpha, which is why that was using native Xorg. They fixed it soon thereafter, so now KDE Wayland works as intended. But GNOME still hasn't caught up, and AIUI they don't even plan to do what KDE did...

For folks who are happy with GNOME, of course, we do consider it a supported desktop environment and will debug issues that crop up related to our platform drivers/etc. But I just... can't in good conscience tell people to try GNOME first as a first-time experience on Apple Silicon, not when the out-of-the-box experience is just "200% or 100%, nothing in between, unless you hack configs manually and then a bunch of apps become horribly blurry".

* Note: By fractional scaling, I mean effective fractional scaling, not native fractional scaling. Native fractional scaling is brand new in Wayland and stuff is still catching up, but even macOS doesn't do that either. The important part is that things are the right size (and you have more than integer sizes available), and that nothing is ever upscaled from a lower pixel density, which is what you get with KDE today.

Like 2 Dec 2023 at 9:21 | Open on social.treehouse.systems

18 comments

sxpert

@marcan that, and 27in displays is a silly size

2 Dec 2023 at 9:23 | Open on mastodon.sxpert.org

Andrew

@marcan always amazed how this isn’t universal yet. Even on windows it’s completely broken and unusable with mixed scaling ratios

2 Dec 2023 at 9:27 | Open on hackers.town

Jernej Simončič �

@cinebox @marcan Windows lets programs declare if they're per-monitor DPI-compatible. If they aren't, the program will render at primary display's DPI, then bitmap-scale on other displays; unfortunately this is slightly broken if you maximise such programs on non-primary displays – somehow Windows in this case manages to randomly not maximise the window completely (you get 1 pixel wide area at the top where clicks fall through, which is great when you want to close or unmaximise such window, and you actually do that to whatever was behind it).

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2 Dec 2023 at 11:37 | Open on infosec.exchange

hoya

@marcan To be fair, 200% is pretty much spot on, at least for me. Very happy with #GNOME on Asahi Fedora mpb.

2 Dec 2023 at 9:27 | Open on fosstodon.org

Hector Martin

@hoya Not for me, 150% is what I have on almost all my machines.

200% might be OK for a subset of the userbase, but it's kind of silly to say "try GNOME but I hope you like the size of things on screen, because you can't change it" when that is such a basic feature users expect. And it becomes even more important with multi-screen and mixed DPIs, which we're about to release driver support for.

(Of course, this is not the only basic configurability thing GNOME doesn't have... being able to change the trackpad scroll speed is another one that came up recently.)

@hoya Not for me, 150% is what I have on almost all my machines.

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2 Dec 2023 at 9:29 | Open on social.treehouse.systems

hoya

@marcan Absolutely, I don't disagree with anything you wrote. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it shouldn't be a blocker for GNOME users to install Asahi, even in the current state.

2 Dec 2023 at 9:56 | Open on fosstodon.org

Ivan Jelić

@marcan You are 100% right there. I was very surprised to see that GNOME folks don't care about this whatsoever (like GTK5 will maybe support it), as I started using laptops that need fractional scaling. In fact, I don't think GNOME should be recommended at all until they address this as there's already bunch of affordable 14 inch FHD laptops around, for example. Not to mention HiDPI models that often are not 2x. Meanwhile, Plasma 6 is almost out with QT6 supporting wp-fractional-scale-v1.

2 Dec 2023 at 9:37 | Open on mastodon.social

Hector Martin

@escapetofreedom Yup. KDE doesn't get all of this perfect (there are still fractional scaling related rendering issues) but they're damn trying and AIUI a lot of bugs have been fixed for Plasma 6 :)

2 Dec 2023 at 9:38 | Open on social.treehouse.systems

Ivan Jelić

@marcan @escapetofreedom I see people liking Plasma 6 a lot in this regard, althogh it already works great for me (Framework 13, 12th gen). Keep up the good work btw, you and the @AsahiLinux folks are great!

2 Dec 2023 at 10:04 | Open on mastodon.social

lj·rk

@marcan I use 100% scaling plus "large fonts" accessibility setting, as mostly it's the fonts that I need larger :'-)

But yeah, it's all a hack. Other than that, it's mostly down to preference, but I just really love the GNOME UX approach which heavily de-emphasizes the mouse: Either use a touchpad/trackpad or keybinds only; it suits me really well :D

2 Dec 2023 at 9:41 | Open on todon.eu

FOSStastic

@marcan This and GNOME not supporting variable refresh rates were my reasons why I migrated to Plasma 5.27 on all my devices after using GNOME Shell for a decade or more.

I really miss GNOME's workflow (dynamic workspaces, overview, ...), but hardware compatibility is higher on my list of priorities than the GNOME workflow.

(I also appreciate KWin's window rules so that games actually appear in front of my steering wheel.)

2 Dec 2023 at 9:43 | Open on mastodon.social

stereo griever

@marcan honestly, what's even the point of still gatekeeping wayland support like this? why do I still have to slap a bunch of variables in some config file for this to work?

2 Dec 2023 at 9:43 | Open on social.hackerspace.pl

jade

@selfisekai @marcan ask chromium. everything else works properly in my experience, without any changes.

2 Dec 2023 at 9:50 | Open on hachyderm.io

stereo griever

@leftpaddotpy @marcan nah I've really seen Mozilla and Qt still doing this in 2023. at the same time I've slapped --ozone-platform-hint=auto over the whole of Electron in Alpine myself without thinking much, it works

2 Dec 2023 at 9:54 | Open on social.hackerspace.pl

jade

@selfisekai @marcan oh nvm wat, i think i just didn't notice due to distro packaging making a Firefox Wayland desktop entry

but qt? it definitely works properly on kde, i dunno did they screw up elsewhere?

2 Dec 2023 at 9:59 | Open on hachyderm.io

Dmitry Borodaenko

@marcan I've been using 150% scaling in GNOME for about 3 years now, what did I miss?

2 Dec 2023 at 9:51 | Open on mastodon.social

Fabio Valentini

@marcan yeah ... the fractional scaling Implementation in GNOME is really sad and broken 😞 we wanted to enable it by default for Fedora 39 but it turned out to break rendering of Xwayland applications, *always* upscaling from 1x, even on "integer" factors ... (side effect: fullscreen applications like games only "see" a scaled framebuffer so they can't even render at full resolution if you wanted)

the "let xwayland windows scale themselves" option in KDE is not perfect, but much better 😐

2 Dec 2023 at 9:51 | Open on mastodon.social

Sonny

@marcan the reason GNOME doesn't enable fractional scaling by default is that none of the solution for XWayland was considered satisfying until now. There is more to it, but that's one of the main issue.

We are looking into using rootfull Xwayland to solve the problem.

See "Are we done yet?" in https://ofourdan.blogspot.com/2023/11/xwayland-rootful-part-2.html but I recommend reading both parts.

2 Dec 2023 at 10:52 | Open on floss.social