GUI scaling

[Duncan]

René JV Bertin posted on Sat, 27 Oct 2018 16:15:14 +0200 as excerpted:

> I don’t know what problems you havd with kscreen; I got my non-standard
> redolution working just fine by defining it via xrandr. It now shows up
> in the display kcm and the setting sticks. Even for my AV. amp which
> doesn’t have a screen attached .

It has to do with multi-monitor, and for all I know it's fixed ATM, but 
the kde monitor configuration tool, whatever it may be called at the 
time, has had a history of breaking things more often than it actually 
works properly since the kde3 era, and the last time I had problems with 
positioning not staying put the way I had them configured in xorg.conf.d 
(and repeatedly in plasma as well) I unmerged (aka uninstalled) kscreen, 
et. al., and have had rather less problems since. =:^)  Tho that was 
probably 18 months to two years ago now, so like I said, they may well 
have fixed it now, but I'd never know.

What's really weird is when kwin has the position correct -- all the 
normal windows go to the correct spot, the mouse moves between monitors 
at the expected edge, etc, but plasmashell (plasma5, aka plasma-desktop 
in kde4) gets things wrong, putting the wrong activity on each monitor, 
etc.

And I know kscreen uses xrandrproto, the same as the xorg-CLI xrandr 
program does, but for whatever reason, xrandr "just works" as expected, 
while kscreen (and earlier pre-kscreen kde solutions)... might work for a 
couple months, then be broken for a couple years, before they fix it and 
it works another couple months again...

But I've had far less problems with that sort of thing lately, as the kde/
plasma kscreen tool and (dbus-call-based ??) library that plasmashell, 
etc, tries to use as well, isn't there now, and can't mess things up any 
longer.


FWIW that's actually one of my biggest concerns about switching to wayland 
as well -- as best I can tell, there is (yet) no generic/standardized 
wayland config like there is with X and xorg.conf and/or xrandr, with 
each compositor (kwin_wayland it'd be for kde/plasma) having its own non-
standardized private config methods and config storage formats.

And at least for monitor management kde's history doesn't give me a lot 
of confidence!

I figure it'll go one of two ways.  Either: Free to do thing its own 
thing without the generic settings interfering, and without having the 
generic config fallbacks available, maybe they'll actually get it working 
and keep it working.  Or: It'll continue to be true to the poor history 
on xorg, and I'll eventually get tired of the hassle and decide it isn't 
worth it, ultimately resulting in me dumping "it" entirely.  In that 
case, "it" would first refer to wayland; I'd retreat back to plasma on X, 
then likely eventually to plasma, as xorg support faded and I was left 
choosing between an undependable kwin_wayland config, and finding 
something rather more dependable on wayland.

I honestly haven't a clue which of the two ways it'll go, but I'm 
obviously worried and thinking about it...

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman