DE scaling just isnt that good?

General system Gaming, sound and video
1

I’m loving KDE, but the scaling isn’t really all that good. I’m experiencing mouse sensitivity issues with the pointer depending on the scaling option. Considering that I’m on a native 4K screen, at 100% scaling, the icons, text, and cursor are very small, and having bad eyesight isn’t helping, lol.

On Windows and even my work Mac, the scaling is flawless—no issues with pointer speed. Everything just scales correctly and works fine, but the scaling on Linux is a real letdown.

Is there anything I can do to configure my KDE instance to make the scaling closer to Windows without having to change the DPI of my mouse (which isn’t ideal for my games either)? If not, I might have to look at another DE that could accommodate this.

2

100% is no scaling at all. Try changing it to 200%

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3

Also remember KDE under Wayland is relatively new, maybe use X11 (just a suggestion but it may help your use case)

4

Thats sort of what im getting at, only at 100% scaling, IE native scale, do i get true mouse sensitivty, 125 / 150% scaling is what i run on windows and its the sweet spot for me, in terms of enough screen realestate and having the ability to actually see everything. 200% is a little too much for me haha. 200% ups the sens of my mouse to very high, practically turning it from 800 DPI to like 1600, very uncomfortable unless i use a different profile thats on the mouse to compensate, IE dropping from 800 DPI to 200, and that of course throws out all of the sensitivty in my games.

5

This is what i was worrying about, seeming like its a Wayland X Nvidia thing, or maybe just a wayland thing. I have tried it on X11 and it isnt quite as bad but its still not quite what im after.

6

Fractional scaling isn’t ideal. Don’t use it.

If you need an in-between scale, use DPI-scaling. I know it seems counterintuitive but almost the whole UI will scale with DPI.

7

However, when you first log into a new KDE plasma Wayland session, KDE itself scales to a fractional value (e.g., 125%)

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8

Sure, but I would still recommend changing it to integer scaling and using DPI scaling to handle the fractional amount for most use cases.

9

What are the drawbacks of fractional scaling? I mean, e.g., in plasma; I know in gnome it increases power consumption.

10

The issues I have seen is that not all applications are rendered crisply or sometimes even correctly. Many applications are fine but some applications seem…imperfect. Especially non-toolkit applications.

The OP is also reporting a mouse sensitivity issue which I have not personally noticed but it is possible I just gave up on fractional scaling before I had a chance to notice it.

11

I wanted to do some experiments, but on Wayland KDE you cannot set font DPI anymore: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/62

they say to rely on fractional scaling, I seem to understand.

Font DPI setting is still available on X11, though discouraged.

On Wayland, manually increasing font size leads to ugly results.

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