Fractional scaling

Are there any plans on enabling fractional scaling soon? Even more and more devices are HiDpi nowadays and nearly all available solutions to handle this situation are sub optimum at least:

Take for example a 13" Device with 1920x1080 resolution (170 DPI). For most people running with a scale of 100% results in items too small to clearly see. (Reference: On this device, Microsoft automatically switches to a scale of 150% with Windows 10). So your current options are:

  1. Run at 200%. This results in everything too big.
  2. Run with a lower resolution (with same aspect ratio) and let the display scale up. This results in everything blurry.
  3. Use some xrandr commandline-fu to archive a good result
    3.1. Details: Scale everything 2/3/whatever, then zoom out again, adopt panning limits.
    3.2. This is essentially what fractional scaling in recent GNOME versions does under the hood

Comparison of the different approaches:

100% Scaling:

200% Scaling:

Display upscaling


This one is hard to see in a Photo, but it doesn’t look that great, trust me.

XRandR scaling:


This one looks good. At least better than the previous two.

We’re likely to gain support for fractional scaling by a future move to Wayland – though not by default in 3.9.

Thanks for the information!

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