Comment by EnPissant
6 days ago
You can use xrandr to scale the desktop, but it's not the same thing.
You can render at 2x in Mate, and then scale it down slightly (ie 1.25x1.25) with xrandr, but taking a large image and scaling it down using a cubic filter won't look as sharp as real fractional scaling.
The command you gave is upscaling, which will be worse than 2x + downscaling.
Real fractional scaling scales the sizes of elements before rendering. This results in the sharpest image and there is no resizing/filtering in the loop.
Then I don't understand how this actually works. Doesn't this require support by the underlying UI kit? Because after the UI kit, there will already be pixels and scaling that will always be blury.
Yes, it needs to be supported by the UI kit. That's why GTK needs to support this, not just Gnome. Gnome uses GTK4, which supports this. Mate uses GTK3, which does not.
KDE Plasma uses QT6, which also supports this.
So applications using e.g. Motif or some custom UI toolkit have completely wrong sizes then?
> Gnome uses GTK4, which supports this. Mate uses GTK3, which does not.
Damn. I tend to build against an older GTK3 version, because GTK deprecated so much good stuff, but that means my programs won't work correctly for that. I need to look whether it's easy to backport this.
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