XWayland activities are blurry on HiDPI displays #45

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opened 2026-05-17 14:55:48 +00:00 by albert · 0 comments

albert commented

2026-05-17 14:55:48 +00:00

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The root cause is that Sway doesn't pass down the scaling to XWayland

This doesn't impact usability, but it does mean that games in particular are capped in resolution on these devices.

Possible fixes include:

Reconfiguring Sway at runtime via swaymsg (which may cause the HUD to also re-scale...)
Using something like gamescope (which may have implications for Steam activities in particular, since we currently launch Steam on boot)

While the fix for #7 works fine for shepherd-launcher itself and Wayland applications, XWayland applications are rendered at the regular 1x DPI and then scaled up to the native resolution. For example, on a 1080p screen with 1.5x scale, an XWayland application will render at 720p. The root cause is that [Sway doesn't pass down the scaling to XWayland](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Sway#HiDPI) This doesn't impact usability, but it does mean that games in particular are capped in resolution on these devices. Possible fixes include: * Reconfiguring Sway at runtime via swaymsg (which may cause the HUD to also re-scale...) * Using something like [gamescope](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope) (which may have implications for Steam activities in particular, since we currently launch Steam on boot)

albert referenced this issue from a commit

2026-05-17 17:49:02 +00:00

Toggle compositor scale for XWayland activities

albert referenced this issue from a pull request that will close it,

2026-05-17 17:52:33 +00:00

Toggle compositor scale for XWayland activities #46

albert closed this issue

2026-05-18 01:23:06 +00:00

albert referenced this issue from a commit

2026-07-04 19:55:44 +00:00

display: coordinate the HiDPI workaround with the mirror (#87)