Score:4

Different scaling with dual monitor setup: slow in x11, blurry in wayland

sa flag

I am using Ubuntu 20.04. I just got a new 4k monitor which I am now using together with the previous 1080 one.

The 4k display is unreadable at 100% scaling, so at first, I turned on fractional scaling to 150% on the 4k display (leaving the 1080 at 100%). This worked great, except that everything was noticeably slower. Googling suggested that this is a common issue with Xorg and there is nothing that can be done. One solution was to change the font scaling in gnome-tweaks instead of fractional scaling. This worked great, everything was fast and readable on the 4k display, but the font on the second display is too large. One solution I found was to use xrandr to scale down everything on the 1080 display but this results in a very blurry display. More Googling suggested that I should not be using Xorg, but Wayland, as it is fast and it is the future. So I tried Wayland, with fractional scaling of the 4k display, and it was indeed very fast. However, the fonts are blurry. Googling again shows that this is a common problem.

So what should I do? Should I upgrade to 21.10? Will it help? Is there a solution to this problem?

Score:1
pe flag

You need to run your Desktop session under Wayland. Which is the default in Ubuntu 21.10

If you experience blurry fonts It's because the particular applications you are running are not Wayland Native, instead running in "legacy" X11 mode.

Most if not all gnome-shell components should be Wayland native in a later release of Ubuntu. Firefox supports Wayland natively but might need to be started with a particular flag in older releases of ubuntu. For firefox it's:

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox

An easy way to see if an application is Wayland is to install and run the xeyes terminal application (available in x11-apps). It starts a pair of eyes that follow your mouse cursor. If The eyes can "follow" the mouse cursor in an application it's not running Natively. If the eyes stop moving. It is native.

Either then the application isn't configured properly or simply doesn't support Wayland yet.

mangohost

Post an answer

Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.