This Week in Plasma: Better fractional scaling
blogs.kde.org
This week's headliner change is something that I think will make a lot of people happy: better fractional scaling! Vlad and Xaver have been hard at work to snap everything to the screen's pixel grid, with the effect that using a fractional scale factor now results in a lot less blurriness as well as no more gaps between windows and their shadows. You'll see it in the screenshot below (which was taken at 175% scale) but the effects are subtly better everywhere. Really great stuff!

This week’s headliner change is something that I think will make a lot of people happy: better fractional scaling! Vlad and Xaver have been hard at work to snap everything to the screen’s pixel grid, with the effect that using a fractional scale factor now results in a lot less blurriness as well as no more gaps between windows and their shadows. You’ll see it in the screenshot below (which was taken at 175% scale) but the effects are subtly better everywhere. Really great stuff! And lots more too, of course.

    • brandonEnglish
      3•3 days ago

      My Gnome has everything between 100% and 350% in 25% increments?

    • exuEnglish
      18•4 days ago

      Not really. The reason is that Steam (and an unfortunate number of other programs) run through Xwayland when your compositor is using Wayland. If you then use fractional scaling, Xwayland will render at the fractional of your resolution and will be scaled linearly to your display. This results in general bluriness for X11 applications.

      Kwin, to my knowledge, is the only Wayland compositor that allows decoupling Wayland scaling from Xorg (and does so by default). While this results in different scaling behaviour for X11 apps, it does mean they are never blurry.

        • @EyronEnglish
          5•3 days ago

          A hidden experimental flag isn’t “fixed.” It might be the start, but until it’s stable and usable through the normal UI, it’s not really done.