I’ve had almost no problems with the display. Like others have said, fractional scaling is somewhat of a red herring, as the display is rather poorly laid out in terms of pixel size.
In GNOME, I set the scaling to 200%. With the Tweaks tool, I set the font scaling to around ~80%, and in the GNOME settings I reduced the size of the icons, as I like much smaller toolbars. This works very well for me and makes ~95% of apps render as I desire.
@Jeremiah_Jones I tried your method, and found that scaling to 100% and bumping font scaling to 1.5 is generally ok (and some of the electron-based apps that appear fuzzy with scaling are crisp using this method). However, if you use an external monitor that uses a higher resolution, the font scaling makes it excessively large.
Right now I’m using wayland fractional scaling set to 150% on my laptop screen, font scaling set to 1.0, and my external monitor at its native resolution scaled at 100%. I still have some fuzzy apps (Slack, for instance), but everything else is perfectly sized and perfectly crisp.
Have been using Sway (Wayland) with per monitor fractional scaling (i.e. different scaling for each monitor) for the last couple of months, and save for a couple of Firefox bugs that seem to be fixed now, everything works flawlessly.
YMMV of course, and there are some xwayland apps that look a bit fuzzy, at least now it is consistent and the scaling configuration is centralized.
I’ve been very impressed with fractional scaling: I have 1.5x (activated through ~Tweaks~ [correction: gsettings or dconf-editor]) for the laptop screen and 1x for a rather standard external monitor and for FC35 with the standard Gnome desktop, the experience has been very smooth: even windows straddling the two screens are properly scaled on both. This is a huge improvement over the situation just a couple of years ago.
You do have to convince some applications to use their Wayland backend (notably, Thunderbird – Firefox was already good by default), and Chromium/Chrome take even more convincing. They’ll look fine on the 1x display, but a little bit fuzzy on the 1.5x if they are using their X11 backend.
It’s been a painful and long transition process from X11 to Wayland, but it seems that Wayland is finally providing advantages over X11.
Do you mean the Font scaling? Well, I haven’t had the chance to try it yet because I’m still waiting for Batch 8 to be dispatched, and also I’ve never had the chance to run Gnome on an hiDPI monitor; but if you say that it works smoothly, that’s great news.
No, I mean the scaling in the “Displays” tab. Each display can have a “Scale” set. By default, these are 100%, 200% etc. (gnome limits the options to something reasonable based on the resolution).
I misremembered: gnome tweaktool does not have an option to activate fractional scaling, which extends the options to 100%, 125%, 150%, etc. Instead:
$ gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features “[‘scale-monitor-framebuffer’]”
as can be found on the always absolutely incredibly high-quality documentation of Arch:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI#Wayland
The important thing is that it allows the scaling to be set on a per display basis, because HiDPI is a property of the display you’re using, not of the gnome desktop as a whole. My font scaling is just on 100%.
Switched from 100% with 130% font (which auto enables large text in accesibility) – to 125% percent fractional display and 100% font without large text enabled. The former is FAR superior. The blur on this 125% fractional bullshit on wayland 21.10 ubuntu is unnacetable. Switching back once I post this. lol.
That blur is happening because you have a bunch of programs that are using their X11 (i.e. Xwayland) backend and X11 does not have proper support for fractional scaling. Many programs can be convinced to use a Wayland backend (sometimes experimental support, other times just not the default) in which case that will be resolved. Most of the major graphical toolkits (i.e. GTK, Qt, that sort of thing) already have Wayland support and have had it for a long time now, so it’s more an issue of programs updating to support Wayland (or even make it the default if a Wayland session is detected).
No ^ that’s not true. Built in Terminal is blurry at 125%. That’s how fractional works. The fact you can’t “see that’s it’s blurry” does not have anything to do with me using x11 apps. I am not the amateur you are looking for. I am also a icon/ui/ux/graphic designer and know exactly what aliasing is and looks like.
I mean…okay? Weird flex on an internet forum. I was just trying to be helpful, since many people don’t realize that X11 doesn’t support fractional scaling.
If fractional scaling bothers you, I guess…turn it off? Like, obviously you can’t have ‘fractional pixels’, and if the blurriness even with ‘proper support’ bothers you, then you might as well turn it off and rely on increasing the font size as you already have been. For many of us, however, at high enough resolutions and ‘proper fractional scaling support’, the amount of blurriness is only (acutely) visible when using X11 programs through Xwayland.
Side note: There’s no guarantee that the ‘built in terminal’ is running on Wayland — that depends on which DE/WM/compositor you’re using and what they use by default.
I did turn it off. Weird flex? You told me what my problem “was” … which it most definately is not. I understand sharpness in UI. My terminal (was one example) as is definitely running in wayland. Just forget it, your of zero help to me.
On Fedora 35, I have compared the results from two scenarios:
They don’t look quite identical. For one thing, with just the font scaling, the rest of the window decorations keep their original widths, so things like title bars look a bit cramped. Also, the display scaling ends up with slightly blacker fonts. But in neither scenario I’d describe the result as “blurry”.
Thunderbird and chromium looked disturbingly blurry to me out of the box, but after convincing them to use their Wayland backend, they look just like the native apps.
It may be that Ubuntu is differently configured, but from what I’ve see, display scaling on FC35 under gnome/wayland is an option that I’d expect is very acceptable for a lot of users. And it has the advantage that it’s now virtually seamless between displays requiring different scaling (that definitely didn’t use to be the case).
If you have to use X11 applications, then it might not be an acceptable option – zoom’s interface text does look a bit blurry, for instance (but not on the 100% scaled second monitor).
The internet is chock full of examples of 125% vs 100% scaling on Wayland. Again, the fact some of you can’t see the ‘blur’ doesn’t mean it isn’t there. And again, this is irregardless of X11 apps. I digress. Everyone here can just go on assuming they are the same level of sharpness.
I genuinely don’t get it. For most people, the ‘blurriness’ they describe comes from the cause I described. You could have simply said that that’s not the case on your end and that you can still discern the blurring coming from the inherent limitations with approximating fractional pixels.
Instead, you decided to escalate and not acknowledge the reality that most people have no issues with ‘properly supported fractional scaling’ (aka the way Wayland does it). When most people talk about blurriness in their fractional displays, they’re not talking about the inherent approximations (which apparently you are). They’re talking about programs that get rendered the way X11 handles fractional scaling.
Instead of acknowledging that (and the fact that I was responding to the most common source of frustration for Linux HiDPI users), you decided to nitpick and explain to me how fractional pixels aren’t a thing (yes, I already knew that). I had no way of knowing that you were referring to some micro-blurring that you’re able to discern, and I hope you can acknowledge that.
Presumably what you’re seeing also applies to Windows and macOS? Since they can’t magic fractional pixels into reality?
Acknowledge what? That you can’t see it? Yeah, I acknowledged that already.
Yes, absolutely applies to windows and macOS, but like some other things, they do it better.
I use the fonts at 1.30, I’m nearing 50. 
I actually love how gnome turns on the accessibility icon and auto checks “Large Size”, just becuase you increase it in fonts size in tweaks. I find that quite amusing. I get the field size thing, I wish there was sharp 125% done right on linux, but alas there is not, I would be in otherwise. I am sure the day is coming quickly.
Yep, and never did I say that people shouldn’t use it at the size they prefer, I pointed out the difference between the two (in terms of my experience and that even old ass me could see it). To be clear.
Just a reminder, for those who don’t know. If your distro uses Xfce, scaling basically “just works”. It’s a solved problem.