My batch 5 arrived today. Overall I’m super impressed with this machine. Build quality, keyboard, everything has been great.
My original intent was to run Linux on this from day 1. I tested out all sorts of distros leading up to the Framework arriving, and settled on Manjaro Gnome or KDE.
I have now tried Manjaro (gnome and kde), fedora 35, and popos on my machine and I’m really unhappy with how scaling is treated in Linux.
In Gnome it’s either too small at 100 or too big at 200. Fractional scaling in Pop is OK at best, but some things are still wonky. I was able to get KDE pretty dialed in, but it’s still not great.
Are there any distros that actually work well with the odd resolution of the framework and can give you the scaling needed right out the box? Or a straight forward guide to fixing any of the major ones?
Ubuntu supports fractional scaling out of the box. 175% seems to be about what it should be. Unfortunately fractional scaling as currently implemented causes tearing which can’t be fixed. If you’re OK with tearing, you can use it. From what I’ve read, so long as we’re using Xorg, that’s unavoidable. The problem doesn’t exist on Wayland, but then you have to deal with another set of problems. Personally, I stick with 200% and if I really need more space in something like Inkscape, I turn fractional scaling on, temporarily.
If you are on Manjaro already (and maybe anyway), This article on the Arch Wiki might be helpful. Unfortunately there are some applications which need extra care. Can’t blame Linux or your Distro for that.
In my own experience, it got better. But there is no one single dial to turn and expect everything to work as you expect.
It is an imperfect solution, but I am on GNOME 41 on Fedora 35, and what I found worked best for me/looked best to my eyes was leaving the default scaling at 200% and then, through the Gnome Tweaks (gnome-tweaks) set the font scaling down to somewhere in the range of .85-.9.
This is results in a a good scaling and size across about 98% of my workflow, the only real problem being the occasional very large UI element next to some properly sized text.
I’m using sway on Debian sid/experimental, and the fractional scaling does work pretty decently imo. It’s one thing I was scared of, but I can’t notice any significant blurring with the fractional scaling, so I’m going to stick with it until/unless I start noticing blurry text.
I like things smaller than most (though pure 1:1 scaling on this display is excessive even for my tastes) and am just using font scaling set to 1.25 (via gnome-tweaks). Electron stuff, gnome’s own apps, and browsers work pretty nicely with this option. Just about the only thing that’s strangely small that I use regularly is Steam, but I don’t really care about its own interface so much.
Has anyone had any further luck on ubuntu? I’ve also decided to just stick with 200% scaling for now after trying to follow this guide and this guide. Both did help a lot with screen tearing (there was still some but mostly only noticeable when playing a video to test for screen tearing), but they resulted in horizontal lines going up and down my screen. Honestly I barely had an idea of what I was doing, so it’s possible I missed something else that should’ve been done.