HiDPI support

[nuclearsandwich]

HiDPI support in Linux is pretty bleeding edge at the moment. Cinnamon 2.2 adds HiDPI support so I just kind of defaulted to it as a test DE, I also used Mint as a live rescue OS recently and was super impressed with the polish of Cinnamon. KDE Plasma Active seems like something worth checking out when it's support stabilizes some. In the meantime I'm using i3-wm which doesn't really give a hoot about DPI since it renders text with the X11 DPI settings.

GTK-3 applications will render with HiDPI support via

$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 2

and Firefox supports it as well via the about:config setting

layout.css.devPixelsPerPx

The big stinker is actually Chromium, which requires a custom compilation flag just to support it and context menus are all distorted and broken.
I have mine set to about 1.5 because 2.0 made everything just a bit too big.

[Vistaus]

HiDPI support is pretty good on GNOME Shell 3.14 on Antergos (Arch).

[benasse]

HiDPI and multitouch are awesome with gomne 3.14 !

[Vistaus]

Ikr? :D

[nuclearsandwich]

One other fun aspect of this is the virtual console font size. The default vconsole font is way too small to be comfortable. Terminus has some nice larger fonts but setting them in vconsole.conf doesn't persist after KMS reinitializes the graphics.

Last time I checked adding i915 to the kernel modules didn't help. Attempting to do that and add the consolefont hook to mkinitcpio. We'll see how it goes next reboot.

[nuclearsandwich]

One or both of those things fixed the issue and I can now actually see the terminal on boot.

[Vistaus]

Hmm, strange. I never had to anything to get the font size of the virtual terminal correct. It's perfectly readable here. A little bit smaller than on lower res screens, but not too small. And mind you, my eyesight is not too bad but less good than the average human being.

[nuclearsandwich]

Downgrading this to partial because when you have an external non-hidpi display everything is too huge. I doubt it's possible within X to use different DPI settings for each display. Is this something Wayland & co can do?

[revoluzzer]

for chrome/chromium the following start parameter also works:

--force-device-scale-factor=XX (i use 1.3, same as firefox)

[revoluzzer]

Is there a way to use different factor for an external monitor (smaller resolution 1920x1080) ?

[nuclearsandwich]

@revoluzzer X doesn't have the ability to use different DPI or scaling factor settings across multiple monitors. It's something that supposedly Wayland/Weston will support though I've not used them enough to tell how well that works.

[lcartercondon]

You can scale external monitors using xrandr: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI#Multiple_displays

[nuclearsandwich]

You can scale external monitors using xrandr: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI#Multiple_displays

While this works, it has a substantial effect on system responsiveness on the Surface. Firefox and Chrome both are super choppy when scrolling. I did discover and install the Infinality bundle for Archlinux and it has drastically improved font rendering on both the builtin and scaled external displays.

[nuclearsandwich]

It's not perfect, but with the xrandr details above it's Pretty Okay:tm: