Wayland has still no way to set DPI of multiple monitors. The fonts look terribl...

thewebguyd · 2025-11-26T16:33:41 1764174821

If you haven't tried KDE on Wayland in a while, do try it. Fonts looking terrible on Wayland was a GNOME thing, and KDE/Kwin handles display scaling and mixed DPI fine, GNOME/Mutter didn't until very recently.

KDE had the setting to allow X11 apps to scale themselves (no more blurry XWayland apps) years ahead of GNOME.

sapiogram · 2025-11-26T16:29:05 1764174545

I thought this problem was Wayland's reason for existing?

hatmanstack · 2025-11-26T16:37:54 1764175074

Nah mate, it's all about the Wayland Trust model. No keylogging, consent-based screen recording, and no window spying. Isolation.

StillBored · 2025-11-29T17:11:51 1764436311

https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xextproto/security.ht...

Notice the date.. 1996

(for those that didn't click the link, that is the X11 security extension which address all that, and it was published ~30 years ago).

nhumrich · 2025-11-26T16:31:59 1764174719

Sure it does. I have that set right now... Fonts looking terrible seems to only be when using an x app on wayland

thewebguyd · 2025-11-26T16:35:11 1764174911

> Fonts looking terrible seems to only be when using an x app on wayland

I suspect the original commenter had an issue with GNOME specifically, as I've noticed it too, on Wayland native apps. GNOME handled fractional scaling poorly, and fonts didn't align to the grid right and looked fuzzy at anything that's not 1x or 2x scale.

KDE got this right from day 1.

kanbankaren · 2025-11-26T16:41:09 1764175269

How to do it? I am not talking about fractional scaling.

nhumrich · 2025-11-27T19:08:44 1764270524

Display settings in kde

kronicum2025 · 2025-11-26T16:40:57 1764175257

You can. KDE Wayland allows you to even set fractional scaling. I had 125% on one monitor and 100% on three others. all work like a chgarm

kanbankaren · 2025-11-26T16:46:48 1764175608

How did you arrive at 125%? What is the formula? Just eyeballing?

I set DPI so that a 15pt font occupies 15pt physical space on screen. Not sure how to set DPI using fractional scaling.

electroly · 2025-11-26T16:52:41 1764175961

The formula is DPI ÷ 96. 100% is 96 dpi, 125% is 120 dpi.

surajrmal · 2025-11-27T02:37:29 1764211049

Doesn't that depend on how far you sit from the screen?

kanbankaren · 2025-11-26T16:59:10 1764176350

My monitor DPI is 70. 70/96 is 0.73, but there doesn't seem to be a way to set 73%?

electroly · 2025-11-26T17:03:43 1764176623

You might be out of luck. I don't think it's possible to set the scaling lower than 100%. DPI scaling is primarily concerned with high-DPI.

kanbankaren · 2025-11-26T17:14:35 1764177275

That is why some of us still need X11 support.

kronicum2025 · 2025-11-26T17:10:23 1764177023

I could set my screen to 75%, not really 73% but close may be?

kanbankaren · 2025-11-26T17:17:58 1764177478

How did you do it? It doesn't allow any value below 100%?

ndiddy · 2025-11-26T17:28:29 1764178109

On KDE you can just type a number into the scale percentage field in the display configuration settings pane. I typed "73" and it snapped to 72.5 which is probably close enough.

I don't know whether GNOME supports anything similar, unlike KDE they really don't like giving users very many configuration options.

kanbankaren · 2025-11-26T17:46:58 1764179218

I tried it on KDE Plasma(6.5.3) just now and it resets to 100%.

ndiddy · 2025-11-26T18:07:13 1764180433

Weird, mine lets me go down to 50%: https://files.catbox.moe/gjuzl6.png . Out of curiosity, do you use an nVidia graphics card? I know in the past their drivers have had problems with scaling on Linux.

kronicum2025 · 2025-11-26T20:41:10 1764189670

The other commentator is right. I have an AMD graphics card and I can do this as well. https://imgur.com/a/7mjm8O9

maeln · 2025-11-26T16:57:53 1764176273

> Wayland has still no way to set DPI of multiple monitors.

It does, but not every DE expose that functionality. There is some command that should be DE-agnostic like wlr-randr that should allow you to do that.