I just received my 13 Pro and must say I’m very disappointed with the screen resolution handling. There is no 3:2 option for half resolution. 200% scaling in Gnome works in about 80% of the apps right, with the rest messed up in various ways. I actually use my computers for stuff other than web apps, so the inability to change resolutions is a major pain. Running Memtest86+ was crazy with a little postage stamp in the middle of the screen. Grub uses the whole screen, but it’s unreadable. I’m sure it’s fixable, but having to hack every app sucks.
Although the body of the laptop is quite high quality, one can only describe the magnetically held on bezzel as poor.
I’m on the fence about returning two of them as I bough one for a family member too. Hopefully Windows works better, but I doubt it. Old windows apps don’t support scaling at all, so I expect them to be unusable.
Ah, I had this - but I corrected it. Confusingly, there are several versions of memtest86. One is proprietary with a free version (which also didn’t take up the whole screen for me) and one is actual open-source software (this was fine).
I use Cinnamon in Mint, and I found scaling across a mix of 1080p and 4K screens to be poor until I turned on Fractional Scaling - this was a game-changer. FWIW, I can see a 3:2 option (2880 x 1920) in my displays list.
My point is not that you should swap to Mint - it is that your OS/desktop is likely in control of the options you have. Thus, I think your problem is not hardware-related, and it is very fixable.
Windows 11 testing worked perfectly. Ancient WinForms apps do scale properly.
Setting Grub to 1024x768 works well for making it viewable.
I also set the Linux kernel to use a larger terminal font, which worked well.
I’ll have to try fractional scaling as mixing monitors with the internal display gives less than ideal results. I have a Dell WD22TB4 dock on the way, hopefully it will make external displays better.
I was quite impressed with the driver packages for Win 11, everything went very smoothly doing a fresh install.
In my experience there are some kinds of programs that behave bad on scaling:
electron-based apps
Some Flatpaks
ancient X11-programs
Apps using simpler frameworks like TCL/TK, …
Using native new-world apps in Gnome oder KDE Plasma behaves most of the time OK to me. (But not as optimal as I knew it from my MacBookPro 2013 with Retina)
(My screenshot is from an old version of Mint, taken on my old laptop - I think newer versions are more comprehensive. However, that menu option is in the same place).
How do you change it? On my FL16 just changing the screen size in the Grub file doesn’t change the screen resolution, I still end up with micro miniature text in the corner.
My own experience, I prefer how KDE Plasma handles scaling especially across multiple monitors. If you find gnome settings GUI to be lacking try plasma. Use one of the live distros like fedora kinoite on a USB key if you want an experiment. But you can install Plasma on any distro.
From my experience, all apps work great with fractional scaling on KDE Plasma—X11, Electron-based (running both under Wayland & X11 ozone), etc. It’s mainly Gnome’s implementation that sucks ass.
I believe that for Gnome 50 there was a pretty major overhaul of the graphics settings as they brought in Wayland by default… so if you’ve not tried v50, you might find it much improved.
I’m running Fedora on both my (non-FW) desktop and my FW13 laptop… but I run KDE on the desktop and Gnome on the laptop… I don’t have issues with either.
