I tried, but the DPI options in all distros I tried are too limited for my needs. I have one 4k monitor and two 1080p monitors. Zorin OS 18 only allowed me to set 200% on all screens IF they were all mirrored, so completely useless for me. I’m not using the terminal either. I want my main screen to be at 150% or so, or I can’t see shit, and my side monitors to be (obviously not mirrored) at 100% DPI.
If anyone knows of a distro that allows the same settings as Windows for three monitors, please advice. I want to jump ship, I really do.
This used to be an issue, but has been resolved in most major applications. Are you on an “app” version of slack? Try updating it, or try using an up to date webbrowser like Firefox, or anything based on Chromium if you prefer.
My app version is up to date. Tried it a few months ago. Still black screen whenever I try to share the entire screen. Individual windows work fine. None of my coworkers have managed to make it work in Wayland.
It worked a few years ago with some workaround, but Slack patched out that workaround.
I just tested this on my dual monitor setup, Nobara Linux, KDE Plasma version 6.5.2 running Wayland and it worked no problem.
Set my main monitor to 150% scaling and left my side one to 100%.
Now on my setup, both monitors are 1080p, although my side one is oriented vertically, so Idk if it would act different if I had one at a completely different resolution.
Edit -
I just tested it on one of my laptops running Linux Mint Debian edition 7, (Debian 13 Trixie under the hood) with the Cinnamon desktop environment running X11 and it worked perfectly also. 4K TV set as the primary monitor scaled at 150%, the laptop’s screen as the secondary, 1080p at 100% scaling, applied the settings and it was completely fine.
I just tested it on one of my laptops running Linux Mint Debian edition 7, (Debian 13 Trixie under the hood) with the Cinnamon desktop environment running X11 and it worked perfectly also. 4K TV set as the primary monitor scaled at 150%, the laptop’s screen as the secondary, 1080p at 100% scaling, applied the settings and it was completely fine.
X11 fractional scaling is not great. It may have looked fine if you only had a cursory glance, but it has many issues. “True” fractional scaling in X11 doesn’t work on a per-monitor basis IIRC, instead any per-monitor fractional scaling will be a relatively simple resize operation that results in lots of blurriness.
Yes, KDE is a desktop environment. It’s one of the “Windows-like” ones and very customizable, and arguably the most technically advanced one at the moment.
Wayland is the display server, as it is called. It’s basically the back-end component that facilitates actually displaying anything on the screen. It replaced another component called X11, which was released in 1987 and had become a completely unmaintainable mess of technological debt.
Wayland took a very long time to develop and there are still some growing pains, which is why you will occasionally still see people arguing that X11 is better – these days you should probably just ignore anyone who says that though, as the overwhelming majority of users will be much better served by Wayland than by X11.
As for what distros support it, basically every up-to-date distro (latest major version release during or after 2024) using one of the following desktop environments will default to Wayland: KDE, Gnome, COSMIC, Sway, Hyprland. Other DEs don’t yet have stable Wayland support. Notably Linux Mint, a very common recommendation, is not on this list because the Cinnamon DE it uses does not yet support Wayland.
A couple of example distros mentioned in the thread and article would be Bazzite, Fedora and CachyOS. These distros all update swiftly, which is desirable because the Linux desktop is advancing very quickly at the moment. Slower-moving distros like Debian or Ubuntu LTS tend to miss out on a lot of nice new features.
I tried, but the DPI options in all distros I tried are too limited for my needs. I have one 4k monitor and two 1080p monitors. Zorin OS 18 only allowed me to set 200% on all screens IF they were all mirrored, so completely useless for me. I’m not using the terminal either. I want my main screen to be at 150% or so, or I can’t see shit, and my side monitors to be (obviously not mirrored) at 100% DPI.
If anyone knows of a distro that allows the same settings as Windows for three monitors, please advice. I want to jump ship, I really do.
Anything Wayland and KDE allows you to do what you want
Wayland is fantastic, as long you don’t need to do screen sharing in Slack. Only thing hindering me going Wayland on my work laptop.
This used to be an issue, but has been resolved in most major applications. Are you on an “app” version of slack? Try updating it, or try using an up to date webbrowser like Firefox, or anything based on Chromium if you prefer.
My app version is up to date. Tried it a few months ago. Still black screen whenever I try to share the entire screen. Individual windows work fine. None of my coworkers have managed to make it work in Wayland.
It worked a few years ago with some workaround, but Slack patched out that workaround.
And it’s specific to slack? Or do you have the same issue when sharing the screen on anything else?
I just tested this on my dual monitor setup, Nobara Linux, KDE Plasma version 6.5.2 running Wayland and it worked no problem.
Set my main monitor to 150% scaling and left my side one to 100%.
Now on my setup, both monitors are 1080p, although my side one is oriented vertically, so Idk if it would act different if I had one at a completely different resolution.
Edit -
I just tested it on one of my laptops running Linux Mint Debian edition 7, (Debian 13 Trixie under the hood) with the Cinnamon desktop environment running X11 and it worked perfectly also. 4K TV set as the primary monitor scaled at 150%, the laptop’s screen as the secondary, 1080p at 100% scaling, applied the settings and it was completely fine.
X11 fractional scaling is not great. It may have looked fine if you only had a cursory glance, but it has many issues. “True” fractional scaling in X11 doesn’t work on a per-monitor basis IIRC, instead any per-monitor fractional scaling will be a relatively simple resize operation that results in lots of blurriness.
KDE is a desktop environment right? What is Wayland? Does any distro come with these out of the box?
Yes, KDE is a desktop environment. It’s one of the “Windows-like” ones and very customizable, and arguably the most technically advanced one at the moment.
Wayland is the display server, as it is called. It’s basically the back-end component that facilitates actually displaying anything on the screen. It replaced another component called X11, which was released in 1987 and had become a completely unmaintainable mess of technological debt.
Wayland took a very long time to develop and there are still some growing pains, which is why you will occasionally still see people arguing that X11 is better – these days you should probably just ignore anyone who says that though, as the overwhelming majority of users will be much better served by Wayland than by X11.
As for what distros support it, basically every up-to-date distro (latest major version release during or after 2024) using one of the following desktop environments will default to Wayland: KDE, Gnome, COSMIC, Sway, Hyprland. Other DEs don’t yet have stable Wayland support. Notably Linux Mint, a very common recommendation, is not on this list because the Cinnamon DE it uses does not yet support Wayland.
A couple of example distros mentioned in the thread and article would be Bazzite, Fedora and CachyOS. These distros all update swiftly, which is desirable because the Linux desktop is advancing very quickly at the moment. Slower-moving distros like Debian or Ubuntu LTS tend to miss out on a lot of nice new features.