Fixing XWayland HiDPI scaling

[Nate Graham]

KDE doesn't maintain a fork or patch collection for XWayland, so I don't 
think there is any way we can integrate that work ourselves. That would 
be something for distros to consider.

You could also add your (polite) opinion to the comment thread over 
there to show support for the proposed approach.

Nate


On 11/12/21 12:09, Alex Bujorianu wrote:
> I would, but if you read the comments posted on the Gitlab link 
> <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/111> 
> you’ll see that the programming has already been done (and isn’t even 
> very difficult from what I understand) – the problem is that the 
> upstream, well Gnome, developers have a seemingly ideological opposition 
> to this patch. They basically claim that any non-Wayland native 
> application should be assumed to have no support for HiDPI, which is 
> plainly false. Of the few remaining applications that have no support 
> for HiDPI scaling at all, it would not be difficult to force upscaling 
> with a GUI context menu or environment variable.
> 
> Windows can already do this:
> 
> My request would be for the KDE team to merge the aforementioned patch 
> for XWayland in Kwin/KDE. The changes are quite small and shouldn’t be 
> too difficult to maintain. I think the benefits are very clear.
> 
> On 12/11/2021 19:45, Nate Graham wrote:
>> Hello Alex,
>>
>> Please feel free to help get these issues fixed upstream, as it seems 
>> like you already have a good grasp of the technical issues at play.
>>
>> Nate
>>
>>
>> On 11/11/21 06:03, Alex Bujorianu wrote:
>>> The current status of XWayland applications in both Gnome and KDE 
>>> Wayland implementations leaves something to be desired, especially 
>>> with regards to HiDPI scaling. Currently, all XWayland clients are 
>>> upscaled by the compositor, which produces horribly blurry results 
>>> for many popular applications like Jetbrains IDEs, any Wine/Proton 
>>> game, and some common Electron apps like Discord and Teams. Those 
>>> same programs are able to scale just fine on a straight X session. 
>>> There is already an AUR package that contains the necessary patches 
>>> for XWayland on Sway: 
>>> https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/sway-hidpi-git/ Indeed a similar 
>>> fix was implemented two years ago in this merge request: 
>>> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/111
>>>
>>> Until this situation is fixed, the KDE Wayland session is not usable 
>>> for me, and I would not be able to recommend running a Wayland 
>>> session to a new Linux user. Because of this, I would have to tell 
>>> any potential user with a mixed DPI setup to stick with Windows or 
>>> Mac OS until these display issues get ironed out.
>>>