I’d like to share a brief update regarding the state of high DPI support. Since getting a laptop with a 4K screen, I’ve found all sorts of subtle papercuts and have been doing my best to fix them or at least file bug reports. Here’s what’s been fixed recently:
Fixed recently
- Fixed a variety of little visual glitches in Elisa (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.08.0)
- KRunner is no longer mis-positioned when using PLASMA_USE_QT_SCALING=1 (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.19.2)
- Incorrect wallpaper size is no longer chosen when there are multiple sizes available and using PLASMA_USE_QT_SCALING=1 (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.19.3)
- Small Icons, Large Icons, and Thumbnails task switchers are no longer too small (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.19.3)
- The minimize animation no longer sucks windows into the wrong location on screen when using PLASMA_USE_QT_SCALING=1 (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.72)
- Monochrome icons no longer incorrectly use colorful versions at > 200% scale (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.72)
- Menu separators in QML-based software are no longer too thick (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.73)
- LibreOffice’s hamburger button no longer scales poorly (Jan-Marek Glogowski, LibreOffice 6.4.6)
- LibreOffice’s toolbar buttons with downward-pointing arrows no longer scale poorly (Jan-Marek Glogowski, LibreOffice 6.4.6)
…And the work continues! Here are the bugs next on my list to investigate and try to fix:
Next up
- Qt scaling is not used on X11, which makes Plasma icons, checkboxes, and radio buttons tiny and margins all over the place too small – I already submitted a merge request to to this which is going through review: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/139
- Bottom Plasma panel and desktop are not fully adjacent to screen border on right and bottom screen edge
- Auto-detect scale factor on X11, at least for the easy cases
- Window decoration corner radius does not respect scale factor
- Cursors do not respect scale factor on X11
- Plasma dialog/pop-up shadows don’t respect the scale factor on X11
- When mirroring the internal 4K display to an external FHD display, the image on the external display is cropped rather than scaled
A lot of the above issues are sort of stretch goals for me as each one requires a great deal of learning before I can even begin to try to put together a halfway-intelligent fix. So feel free to help out if you find this work useful and have relevant skills!
