Re: [gentoo-user] Re: High resolution on a 13 inch screen

[Mart Raudsepp <leio@gentoo.org>]

Ühel kenal päeval, R, 01.09.2017 kell 10:16, kirjutas Grant:
> > My laptop's 13" screen has a native resolution of 3200x1800 which
> > makes everything crazy small on-screen.  Is there a good method for
> > telling Xorg or xfce4 to compensate, or should I one-at-a-time my
> > applications?  I can adjust the resolution down but it makes the
> > colors look weird.
> 
> 
> After some more research, it turns out this is a pretty well-known
> problem on the Linux desktop (it's called HiDPI) without a good
> solution... except for this:
> 
> https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=159064
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94816
> 
> The solution is to patch xrandr with the capability to do nearest
> neighbor filtering and run xrandr like this:
> 
> xrandr --output eDP1 --mode "3200x1800" --scale "0.5x0.5"
> 
> It works great.
> 

I don't see how it can be called great. This is pretty much losing most
of the benefits you have with a HiDPI screen, by just making it be
almost the same as a 1600x900 screen, except the scaling involves some
nearest neighbor filtering, which sometimes might be good, sometimes
bad, and never as good as rendering things in HiDPI.

For HiDPI you want the toolkit to support it properly and configure it
as such. GTK+3 is such a toolkit, but outside of GNOME (where it works
out of the box), I don't know what exactly it takes to set things up.
Plus you'll need a solution for your gtk2/whatever other things,
preferably one that doesn't make things worse for gtk3 things, like
that xrandr hack does.

Probably something like
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 2
combined with something for the other stuff that doesn't mess with the
former.
Outside GNOME, maybe exporting GDK_SCALE=2 works, if the dconf setting
isn't honored outside it.


Mart