Friends don't let friends buy HiDPI displays

Yeah totally the customer's fault for wanting a nice display in friggin 2024, certainly not the software's which still has no proper support for it.

Exactly! All I want is a nice display in 2024—and Framework chooses a garbage display with known issues.
- No, YOU chose the software with known issues.
- Discord, Spotify and other electron applications will work fine in a browser. Rather than installing packages that are causing you issues just run them in Firefox.
  It's not a hardware issue but a combination of software issues.

Let me guess... You're running an X.Org based WM/DE?

X11 Doesn't support fractional scaling properly . So some DEs will simulate it by scaling the apps the same way you scale a rasterized image like a PNG or JPEG, and as a result everything looks blurry. You'll generally also have the same issue with XWayland apps on a Wayland display.

The best way to combat this? Try to use Wayland native apps as much as possible.

2nd best? Use non fractional values for scaling (x1 or x2 instead of x1.25)

You can also adjust the x dpi with .xresources, but switching to wayland is the better solution
- Doesn't Gnome ignore dpi in .Xresources in favor of its own hardcoded dpi?
So some DEs will simulate it by scaling the apps the same way you scale a rasterized image like a PNG or JPEG
So in the end they DO fractional scaling
Let me guess... You're running an X.Org based WM/DE?
Na, using Wayland with Gnome 45. 1.25x scale actually looks less blurry than 2x. (Putting aside that 2x is ridiculously large.)
The best way to combat this?
Is to buy a laptop with a regular DPI display and avoid this class of bugs altogether. This way I can keep using Discord and 1Password.
- Also kde is way better about this than gnome. Especially kde 6.
  Discord is blurry because it's an electron app, and electron isn't native Wayland. You can make it work with --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland
- KDE and Qt have much better fractional scaling right now. GTK won't implement it until a much farther release
- Interesting, if it's a native Wayland app, I'd guess the issue is just gnome problems then - from what I hear gnome is one of the poorest DEs for Wayland use, mainly because they refuse to support things the same way that everyone else agrees to, if at all. And they take a fair amount longer to deliberate and agree how to implement anything they do decide to support.
  I'd think of looking at KDE, which is very functional at this point, or a wlroots based Compositor/WM, - hyprland seems like one of the more well supported window managers out of the ones using wlroots.
- Try setting scaling back to 1x but then set font scaling to 1.25 using Gnome Tweaks. I'm running two 4k monitors this way and it's as good as true scaling with no blur
- 2x being “ridiculously large” is the same as as 1080p display genius.
- Is to buy a laptop with a regular DPI display and avoid this class of bugs altogether.
  Yeah, never understood why people believe the image quality is better if it goes beyound their eye's capabilities and they have to work around it.

How dare you use modern technology in current year?

How dare you use standard display tech on any commercial laptop bought within the last 5+ years. You should be like me, vastly superior in every human way, with my old tech. I am very smart.

Mac OS has has this nailed down basically perfectly for over 10 years now, even windows has been great in the last 5+ years. Not having scaling done right in the age of 4k displays being cheap is a sin.

Fractional scaling in Windows is still eh, largely because they can't do a whole lot about icons not designed for that scale. For example in Rhino a bunch of the icons get weird pixel doubling when running 150% because they were designed for 100% and use a lot of 1 pixel wide elements.
It's honestly the main reason I keep hanging on to my now 10 and 15 year old displays. I'm hoping for a 6k 32" display so I can run true 200%. Dell makes one but they put a stupid webcam forehead on it.
I see scaling problems on Windows 11 (work PC) almost everywhere, in new dialogs and the older stuff. My own Linux box with Gnome has no issues; only webkit-gtk produces blurry fonts on some pages when my minimal font size conflicts with font-size of the page. This is a problem of the specific web page, I guess.
No HiDPI display here, btw. My old monitor is still good enough and fonts look awesome.
Disclaimer: I wear glasses and cannot see pixels where others might notice them. I increase font sizes everywhere, so font hinting has more to work with and everything looks sharp to me.
Only Windows manages to make it worse. ^^
Legacy apps have problems in windows also, I guess in MacOS now basically you are not able to run them, but 3 years ago I remember same issues with old apps, blurry or pixelated...
The main issue is gnome not letting apps to scale themselves, whereas kde has just a toggle for that. So in gnome you have consistent size across monitors (cool) but blurry apps when running in xwayland (horrible)
KDE does fractional scaling really well, GNOME has big issues though.

Just like the teacher at school who kept turning all computers' screen resolutions to 640x480 because the text was too small.

Fun fact: Instead of implementing scaling settings for RDP, Microsoft just uses lower resolution on its Android RDP client and then upscales that to fit the whole screen.
Which is why the official client is so blurry compared to e.g. aFreeRDP by default.
This is my boss, except he uses 1024*768...

Use KDE, especially Plasma 6. Hasn't been an issue for me FW13 12Gen Intel since the last few Plasma 5 releases. I tried GNOME for a while but it can go pound sand.

A lot of apps still have issues and it just takes one personally important one to make the whole thing not worth it.
- My laptop is at 150%, my external display is at native resolution, like god intended.

your fault for using a DE/distro which can't even handle fractional scaling

Framework's fault for poorly choosing a display with known issues.
- Whats is a known issue to the said display?
- Framework: let's put a high resolution display in our laptop GNOME: oh shit I can't handle more than 1080p correctly! Jg1i: Why would Framework do this?

I’d love to switch back to Linux but this is why I moved back to macOS for good several years ago. Once I got a taste of reading code at 4k/retina (faux-4k) – not to mention the better font support – there was no going back, for me at least.

If it’s considered user error for someone to want a high DPI display in 2024, then I can only surmise that people who share that sentiment have convinced themselves that more eye strain is a worthwhile tradeoff for FOSS. Commendable but a tough sell.

This is what gets me every damn time I see some post saying Linux desktop isn't a mess. Absurd shit like this.

You see. If you have this exact hardware with this exact software it's going to work flawlessly. Pinky promise.
Of course Linux desktops are slightly less reliable than the both less flexible and also commercially tested stacks of Apple and Microsoft.
But that doesn't mean that OP is right. They might be one of the luddites that religiously use some ancient tech stack based on X11 or so.
I mean MacOS has the reverse problem. They dropped support for sub pixel rendering once they switched to HDPI screens so now text looks blurry as fuck on all normal dpi monitors.
Windows and some Linux distros are the only OSs that nicely handles resolution scaling across both high and low dpi screens.
- Yeah but most customers buying a MacBook don't give a shit about running 10 year old 1080p monitors. Linux users high s much higher chance of running old hardware.

Either the framework display sucks or there's something wrong with their setup. I'm staring at a high-res display at 200% scaling and it looks great

Nothing to do with the hardware. It's the lack of fractional scaling support and not knowing the workarounds
- It’s the lack of fractional scaling support
  200% isn't fractional scaling, though
- It has everything to do with the hardware. This specific piece of hardware is not as compatible as a regular DPI display.
  These problems only exist because of this poor hardware choice on Framework's part.

Sounds like a config problem to me

Sounds more like a GNOME problem
Sounds like a Linux problem to me

I'm rawdogging my QHD on 14" at native resolution. 10pt font. Sue me

100% scaling on 14" 1440p looks fine to me. More screen real estate the better.
- That reminds me that 1440p is probably the worst resolution on a laptop for me. 100%: everything too tiny. 200%: not enough space to fit everything. All in between tends to get blurry.
  I'll wait for a affordable 4k monitor that has the same features like my current one. And the old needs to fall apart first before I get a new one.
I would but I'll need to find a loupe to read the text of the lawsuit!

2K + KDE + Wayland works like a charm

Until I disabled my nVidia GPU and switched to Wayland the only problem I had with my HiDPI screen was with mixing in a low DPI display. That was easily solved by just running the HiDPI display at half the resolution. Now with Wayland even that problem is gone.

Do you even have blurry fonts with Wayland applications? There must be something wrong with your configuration.

Been using KDE + HiDPI + X11 for close to 5 years now, not a blurry font to be found.

hidpi is poggers but current AMD GPU drivers for newer hardware is NOT poggers

This is a very helpful explanation thanks
- 😂
vrr? never met the guy!
Yeah the 780m on Phoenix has been buggy AF.
But the 7900xtx in my desktop has been working like a dream.
- glad I'm not the only one suffering lmao. it's such a good chip but the drivers are far more heavily than I've ever experienced on Nvidia

No issues here with Gnome via Arch on a Framework 13. At 150% scaled if recall correctly.

Yeah I’ve got Fedora (specifically Bluefin) at 1.25x scaling and everything looks fantastic. I had an issue with VS Code (an electron app), but as soon as I enabled Wayland in its .desktop file I didn’t have anymore problems.
You have bought too high res in a too small display?

No issues with 4k on Fedora stock

i don't get it, my screen and 4k ultrawide display both look lovely (framework 13 + ubuntu), check your settings

You should just add FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="cff:no-stem-darkening=0 autofitter:no-stem-darkening=0" as an environment variable, and use wayland

What does that do?
- The environment variable enables stem darkening(a font rendering technique), and wayland is noticeably better at scaling
If youre not on debian stable and kde.
- Why?

I was excited for the Framework 17 but the GPU in the addon module they're offering at launch is rather pathetic, especially for the price. Maybe one day there'll be other options but it's really not compelling as a performance laptop.

LTT talked about this a while back.. it's because the GPU companies don't want modular GPUs.

So, does Linux just not support those displays?

No, electron, xwayland, GNOME cause problems.
KDE with fractional scaling on Wayland works well.
Not sure about GNOME today, but they hid it away in the past and forcing 120%/150% made everything blurry
- Electron and Xwayland don't cause problems. GNOME is the only source of problems on Linux.
- Meanwhile, macOS has been handling high-dpi displays with zero issues since 2012.

framework 16 over here, running hyprland, the only blurry fonts have been in Darktable, everything else is fine (telegram, discord, vscode, thunderbird, firefox, waybar, quodlibet, thunar, alacritty, seahorse, synology drive client...)

Guess it's time to create an issue on your display manager's github. And pray to the penguin gods they resolve it.

Works for me with a framework 12 on LMDE6 with plasma5/Wayland. I probably did some configuring and forgot.

Use Plasma6 on Wayland

768p

5k display and you’ll never have to deal with fractional pixels again.