issues with "fractional scaling" for displays

In GNOME (and surely other systems) you can specify that you want the contents of the display scaled. For example, 200% scaling doubles the size of everything on the display in both dimensions. The control for selecting scaling is in GNOME's "Display Settings", under "scale". Easiest way to get there: right-click on empty part of the desktop and select "Display Settings" This is useful if you have a HiDpi (high resolution) display and low resolution eyes. Note: this is different from changing the display itself to a different resolution. Scaling by integral amounts has been available for a long time. But it isn't that useful. It would be better if the system could handle scaling by non-integral amounts like 125%. For example, I have a 13.3" with 2560x1600 resolution. 100% scaling is very fine. Sometimes 150% scaling is easier to read. Wayland allows this non-integral scaling. Yay! XWayland copes poorly with this: everything gets a bit fuzzy, even at integral scaling points (but perhaps not at 100%). XWayland is used by programs that use the X Window System APIs. (I don't even know which programs that I use are using XWayland so I don't know how badly this would affect me.) I was looking forward to fractional scaling in Fedora 39 / GNOME 45. But it seems to be turned off, again: See <https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/357> It appears that the Fedora folk think that: 1. fuzziness at integral scaling in XWayland is unacceptable 2. making a clear user choice "fuzziness is OK" isn't reasonable Fractional scaling has been available before this with a magic incantation. I haven't tested it with Fedora 39. $ dconf write /org/gnome/mutter/experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']" This only takes effect after the next login.
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D. Hugh Redelmeier