The state of HiDPI on Linux, and the future

Hey I was just wondering what everyone thinks about the state of 4K/HiDPI in Linux and where it’s going.

I use a 4K 32" monitor and it’s been great running KDE Garuda at 125% global scale up until the KDE 6 update. Since KDE 6 is very sub-par on X11 I let the forced Wayland adoption happen… but Wayland still looks kind of bad with global UI scale turned up above 100% (better than it used to, but still nowhere near as good as on X11).

So I went with a different approach and stopped using 125% scale. I turned up all my KDE font sizes by one point, set Firedragon default zoom to 120%, and made other font size adjustments where I could. It’s not perfect (some things are still too small) but it’s pretty good.

I was just thinking about it and I was wondering how long we’d have to deal with things being too small in Linux on 4K displays. I’m not sure how common 4K is these days… I used to love lower res screens like 2K but after fighting against the push to get rid of bitmap fonts in Linux… I gave up and went for 4K instead. For me it has to be bitmap fonts on low res screens… the blurry anti-aliasing of vector fonts at low res is not pleasant. I feel like bitmap fonts were killed off way too soon, since many people were still using lower res screens.

Anyway, just wondering what others think about the situation. I am pretty happy with my system now but I feel like it shouldn’t take so much tweaking to not go blind with a 4K monitor in 2024.

It’s not a Linux problem; it’s more like a Desktop Environment (DE) problem. Gnome is working on addressing it, as well as Cinnamon, etc. If you enjoy tinkering, you can use Hyperland and configure it the way you want. KDE and Wayland, in general, are improving day by day but are still not yet complete.

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