Fractional Scaling on Budgie

Marxi

Hi hi everyone, is there a way to scale down the whole UI (not just text) on budgie and applications? My screen is kinda small and I was searching for a way to set UI scaling to something like 0.9 or 0.8. I managed to find a way to do that on Krita with the option "env QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1", but any value lower than one breaks the interface.

I already disabled high DPI support on Krita by the way, icons are on their lowest size, and etc but I still want things smaller, plus I'm looking for a system-wide setting if possible.

Thanks in advance!

JoshStrobl

No, fractional scaling isn't supported at a toolkit+WM level by GTK and Mutter under X11. You can sorta get fractional scaling by upscaling by 2x then downscaling lower than that via X11, but that is at the cost of it rendering for a higher resolution than what you have.

Your best bet is mostly to change the Budgie panel size, as well as increase the default size of the various fonts. This can be achieved via the fonts section of Budgie Desktop Settings.

Marxi

JoshStrobl Thank you, it can be marked as solved then. Gonna wait for when support for that arrives or I get a batter laptop, whichever comes first 😄

tomscharbach

WetGeek I do believe that fractional scaling worked well in Ubuntu Budgie, unlike in other Budgie distros I tried.

I got interested in fractional scaling (used on my laptops, but in Windows) as a result of this discussion, and it turns out to have been (still is, maybe?) a real mess, even in earlier (pre-22.04) versions of Ubuntu, including Budgie.

I'm not technical enough to understand why, but it has to do with differences between video cards (works with some Nvidia cards, but not others, on so on), graphics protocols (X11, Wayland), Mutter, and G-d herself knows what else.

This from Josh Strobl in 2021:

JoshStrobl No, fractional scaling isn't supported at a toolkit+WM level by GTK and Mutter under X11. You can sorta get fractional scaling by upscaling by 2x then downscaling lower than that via X11, but that is at the cost of it rendering for a higher resolution than what you have.

... or maybe just throwing the laptop at a wall and rattling its brains a bit.

Who would have thought that it would be that difficult? I may have lucked out looking at fractional scaling in UBB because the computer I used is as vanilla an Intel build as you can get. So don't rule out the possibility that my experience a few minutes ago was the exception, not the rule.

I hope that Linux gets on top of this sooner rather than later. It is getting difficult to buy a laptop with 1920x1080 resolution that doesn't natively scale in Windows at 125% or 150%. Without decent scaling, Linux laptop users are going to become frustrated.

Phantop

You can sorta get fractional scaling by upscaling by 2x then downscaling lower than that via X11, but that is at the cost of it rendering for a higher resolution than what you have.

I attempted doing this via the following command after doing some research: xrandr --output eDP-1 --scale 1.5x1.5. It results in a lot of tearing on my laptop's Intel UHD 620, tearing that doesn't occur otherwise. Do you know why this is and is there any way to fix it?

MattX

I got another solution. In many desktop environments there are options to set the icon size, like for example file manager icons, desktop icons. Maybe setting all the fonts size from 12, 10 to 8 or 6. Also the panels can be made thinner and all the applets will get smaller to fit in etc. I know it may be more exhausting than just setting the global dpi, but it's worth a try. Also some themes have thinner window decorations etc.