Re: High-DPI GNOME update: great progress, remaining issues

[Brion Vibber <brion pobox com>]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 10:03 AM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:

On 24 February 2014 17:55, Brion Vibber <brion pobox com> wrote:

> The biggest oddity with GNOME proper I see is that the Shell's UI displays
> at half-size, like it's ignoring the scaling. I might just be setting the
> GDK_SCALE improperly though...

nope: you'll need to use the CLUTTER_SCALE environment variable as
well for the shell to pick this up.

though, to be fair, both GTK and Clutter should already pick up the
scaling factor from gnome-settings-daemon.

Setting both GDK_SCALE=2 and CLUTTER_SCALE=2 seems to go a little wonky, at least in the VM environment (it scales up the things that were already scaled, too!)... I'll try a native install to an external hard disk, I notice booting straight from the installer USB stick seems to detect the high-resolution screen automatically, so that may be a more correct environment to run in.
 

> It seems to me that the desktop compositor could double the displayed size
> of windows from those apps and display them pixelated, but the right size --

we cannot do that, because there is no input transformation in X11: we
can scale up the window as much as we'd like in the compositor, but
the pointer events would still happen at the coordinates of the real
window. also, we cannot really distinguish applications that support
window scaling from those that don't, from a compositor perspective,
unless we check that they are GTK+ applications compiled with GTK ≥
3.10.

I was afraid of that... ah well, it was worth asking!

> Does anybody have any recommendations on looking into that, or is that a
> dangerous direction to look in? Is advocacy for porting to GTK3 more
> worthwhile time spent?

having more GTK+ 3.x applications is always a better long term
strategy; that's where bug fixing and features happen first. also,
porting has the chance of uncovering new and exciting bugs, thus
improving the overall quality of the platform. :-)

Great, I'll check on porting status on the apps I use and see if I can help out. Thanks for the feedback!

-- brion