this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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    Framework 2880 x 1920 (new) display review (lemmy.world)
    submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
    96 comments fedilink hide all child comments
     

    Wuuttup. I'm here complaining again about Framework's Linux unfriendly display. The new one this time.

    https://frame.work/products/display-kit?v=FRANJF0001

    Old display, 2256 x 1504 (3:2)

    GNOME

    100% scale

    • Nothing looks blurry
    • Everything is tiny
    • Unusable

    100% scale + large text accessibility

    • Nothing looks blurry
    • Most apps scale appropriately
    • Some apps don’t respect GNOME’s large text setting (Alacritty)

    125% scale

    • Most apps look blurry (Picard, Firefox, Spotify, Alacritty)

    200% scale

    • Everything is way too big
    • Unusable

    Plasma

    100% scale

    • Nothing looks blurry
    • Everything is tiny
    • Unusable

    125% scale + Apply scaling themselves

    • Nothing looks blurry
    • Most apps scale appropriate
    • Some apps can’t scale themselves and look tiny (Picard)

    125% scale + Scaled by system

    • Most apps look blurry (Picard, Firefox, Spotify, Alacritty)

    200% scale

    • Everything is way too big
    • Unusable

    New display, 2880 x 1920 (3:2)

    GNOME

    100% scale

    • Nothing looks blurry
    • Everything is tiny
    • Unusable

    100% scale + large text accessibility

    • Nothing looks blurry
    • Most apps scale appropriately
    • Some apps don’t respect GNOME’s large text setting (Alacritty)
    • Everything is tiny

    150% scale

    • Most apps look blurry (Picard, Firefox, Spotify, Alacritty)

    200% scale

    • Everything is way too big
    • Unusable

    Plasma

    100% scale

    • Nothing looks blurry
    • Everything is tiny
    • Unusable

    150% scale + Apply scaling themselves

    • Nothing looks blurry
    • Some apps can’t scale themselves, but look a little better here? (Picard)

    150% scale + Scaled by system

    • Most apps look blurry (Picard, Firefox, Spotify, Alacritty)

    200% scale

    • Everything is way too big
    • Unusable

    tl;dr

    In the old display, GNOME at 100% + large text was the best compromise. In the new display, Plasma at 150% + Apply scaling themselves is the best compromise.

    Interestingly, Picard scaling itself looks super tiny in the old display, but in the new display it looks... better. It's still not correctly scaled like native Wayland apps, but it's better.

    Warning

    If you can't stomach moving from GNOME to Plasma, then 🚨 DO NOT BUY THE NEW DISPLAY 🚨. The new display is worse for GNOME.

    Once again

    I am once again begging Framework to just give us a damn regular DPI display that works! Without workarounds. Without forcing users on specific DEs. Without forcing users to stop using their favorite apps. This new display has basically all of the flaws as the previous one.

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    [–] [email protected] 178 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    I am once again begging Framework to just give us a damn regular DPI display that works!

    Bottom Skinner is right, though. It's 2024. HiDPI has to be supported by all toolkits, desktops, and applications at this point. There are no excuses. Even 1080p on a 14" laptop screen warrants 125% scaling, IMO.

    [–] [email protected] 85 points 2 months ago

    "This hardware works fine and even has compatible software that it works great with. But I'm going to prefer the broken software for other reasons. And that means it's the hardware's fault."

    Software that is built to be compatible with a wide variety of hardware should be compatible with a wide variety of hardware.

    If software can't handle a 16.5:16 aspect ratio, then that's bad software. I don't care how weird of a niche thing that is... just make your software abstract enough to handle those cases.

    It's 2024, any resolution/aspect ratio/DPI combo should be supportable. There's enough variety of monitors out there that we should have a solution for handling things on the fly without needing to have a predefined solution.

    [–] [email protected] 55 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Scaling for HiDPI displays is unacceptable on every desktop OS, it is crazy that so little effort has been put into making the experience of modern monitors good.

    [–] [email protected] 42 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I feel this is one of those few sectors, like wifi compatibility, where Windows completely destroys Linux, MacOS, and BSD. As someone who regularly switches between operating systems on bare metal & 4K, trying to use a HiDPI display on *nix is painful and will only kinda work with caveats after 100 hacks (as seen here), whereas Windows has a zoom slider that just works.

    [–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    macOS seems to handle this pretty well, honestly. About the only issue I have is XQuartz and even it’s pretty good.

    What’s the issue you’re seeing?

    [–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Scaling, MacOS has no actual scaling it will only lower the resolution, and using Retina on anything that isn’t sold in an Apple store (and even then) just simply does not work. It essentially has no HiDPI support past using native resolution with slightly larger text that is not adhered to by most of the operating system itself. I am at a loss at why you think this is well handled, what criteria are you using?

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    [–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I've had most stuff look good with Plasma 6. But not perfect.

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    [–] [email protected] 73 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

    So hardware manifacturers need to adapt to XOrg now? LOL the reason that some apps dont scale right even on Plasma is that they are probably not Wayland native yet.

    And GNOME still doesnt have stable fractional scaling, unlike Plasma.

    Hardware vendors shouldnt need to adapt to GNOME too.

    [–] [email protected] 40 points 2 months ago

    Agreed. HiDPI is the way to go and we should appreciate Framework for putting that in their laptops instead of continuing the use of shitty 1366x768 screens.

    Xorg is the reason why OP is facing the scaling issues. OP, try to force the apps to run on native Wayland if they support it but don't default to it. The Wayland page on Arch wiki has instructions on that. Immensely improved my HiDPI experience.

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    [–] [email protected] 68 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    Blurry apps come from xwayland compatibility. Firefox and alacritty (or other terminal like wezterm or kitty) have native wayland, with no blurry check Archwiki for example HiDPI. With Spotify, live with it or use spot (gtk client). Hopefully next gnome release incorporate something like plasma, and then ctrl+ native in spotify increase its size.

    [–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    Or use spotify from the browser

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    [–] [email protected] 57 points 2 months ago

    Meme is right, in 2024 poor HiDPI scaling is a software issue

    [–] [email protected] 48 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

    I have basically zero issues with fractional scaling with Gnome on Wayland, I thing you probably have something configured wrong.

    Here's a screenshot of how a few programs look for me with 125% scaling on my original framework display. The only thing slightly blurry is spotify but it's not enough to be noticeable in normal use. 1000008665

    Edit: Looks like lemmy actually compressed my screenshot a fair bit but I think you can still tell that things are scaling properly

    [–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

    You can launch spotify under native wayland instead of xwayland, it gives scaling without blur

    https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Spotify#Running_under_Wayland

    this way works for all electron programs like discord, motrix

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    [–] [email protected] 42 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    96 DPI should be a choice, agreed. But it's a software issue when an app or a framework doesn't display well on HIDPI.

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    [–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Would you be happier with 640x480?

    [–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Seriously, cannot go back. When MacBooks came out with retina, got one and got a program to run at native resolution. So much data and text on a screen! Looking forward to this display with 100% scale. Full stop. Everyone always says my text looks tiny but I love it! Dual 4k monitors, no scaling on my desktop Linux. My old Alienware laptop was 4k oled, gnome and KDE looked fan frickin tastic! I'm not buying pixels to not have em go to full use.

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    [–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    scaled by system/themselves ... looks like those are x11 apps. why is firefox into this? run it as native wayland with MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND

    [–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    Not necessary anymore with current version Firefox. It has Wayland enabled by default now.

    [–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

    Sexy

    [–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Weird... My experience with the old display is quite different

    Plasma

    100% Scale

    • Nothing looks blurry
    • Everything a perfect size
    • Wonderful
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    [–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago

    You want hardware manufacturers to provide shitty screens in perpetuity just so Linux devs can avoid implementing proper scaling? Yeah, no.

    [–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

    Just to make sure, have you logged out and back in after applying the scaling? Some apps look blurry until you do that. Try to avoid quarter scaling, no x25% or x75%...

    [–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

    I really hope that all Linux desktop software gets scaling support soon. Can't live with only integer scaling increments

    [–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

    You should try 110% and 130%. Dunno if it's the 5's but those seem to work better for me.

    [–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    Just tried 100% + large text on Gnome, it feels much better than 125% scaling, thanks for letting us know it's a possibility!

    [–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    Gnome looks better with font scaling instead of display scaling, because the buttons and top bar are already way too large by default.

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    [–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

    I installed one of these new displays this past weekend and it looks fantastic in Linux. Granted I've only tried Plasma so far on Wayland but that's because I really don't find Gnome usable. It looks good at 200% though and a similar scale to 150% on the old display.

    [–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    GNOME sucks, both in their community engagement culture, and actual look. I've never liked their culture, but they used to have a superior desktop IMO.

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    [–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

    Is it that bad? I run gnome on two 4k monitors with 100% scaling and large text and it's great

    [–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    Thanks for the write up. I was in a similar situation with a 4k 14 inch Dell something, instead of scaling at 200%, I lowered the resolution to half at 1080p and it worked flawlessly. Maybe you could try it too?

    [–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

    The issue here is that some apps don't support scaling, so they show in a lower resolution, making them look blurry.
    Your solution just makes everything do that.

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    [–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    How are you feeling about the Framework otherwise?

    [–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    It's all right otherwise. Not phenomenal, but not crap. The specs you can get with other laptops. The hardware feel isn't as good as a Dell XPS or an X1 Carbon. The expansion card stuff is kinda cool, but other laptops have ports too. I've never swapped out the cards.

    The main reason I bought this laptop is repairability. If that's not your main priority, then I probably wouldn't recommend this laptop.

    If you want to use this laptop with Linux and not spend time fixing hardware compatibility issues, then I definitely would not recommend this laptop. Definitely get a Dell XPS for a Linux laptop that Just Works.

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    [–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

    Honestly I might be dumb, but I don't understand why I can't scale any app individually to custom fractions. Why don't DEs add this as a feature?

    [–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    My exposure to Linux is pretty minimal, especially Linux with a GUI, so forgive my ignorance. Even reading over this thread I'm confused as to the issue here.

    I don't need an ELI5, but maybe someone can explain it like I don't know what Wayland is?

    My understanding is that an app should ask the system to display an object at X size, let's say text at size 14. The system then works out that at the currently selected display resolution, size 14 will be Y pixels big. If needed, the system can scale that based on user preferences- a small, high DPI screen could render size 14 at only a couple of millimetres, for example.

    Is the problem that devs are building things in a way that bypasses scaling? For example, hardcoding size 14 text to be Z pixels high?

    [–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    One of the issues at hand is that X11, the predecessor of Wayland, does not have a standardized way to tell applications what scale they should use. Applications on X11 get the scale from environment variables (completely bypassing X11), or from Xft.dpi, or by providing in-application settings, or they guess it using some unorthodox means, or simply don't scale at all. It's a huge mess overall.

    It is one of the more-or-less fundamentally unfixable parts of the protocol, since it wants everything to be on the same coordinate space (i.e. 1 pixel is 1 pixel everywhere, which is... quite unsuitable for modern systems.)

    Wayland does operate like how you say it and applications supporting Wayland will work properly in HiDPI environments.

    However a lot of people and applications are still on X11 due to various reasons.

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    [–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

    Huh, I actually run Plasma at 100% with my FW13 2256x1504. I didn't know there was a new display, but if I had it, 100% wouldn't cut it anymore. Frankly, for such a small display, I wouldn't desire a higher resolution than what I have in the FW13, even if all the software scaled properly.

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