Rocky Version 8.5 display issue

I had been using Rocky Linux with a 4K external display. But since version 8.5 I have had a problem with scaling, namely, it no longer provides fractional scaling. At first the choice of Wayland display server was missing from the login choices. Then at an update it reappeared. However, something was odd - it would take several attempts to log in when set to Standard (Wayland). Even then the display would stall/stop a couple times before logging in.

Re-initializing the code to get fractional scaling back is not restoring the previous settings (code: gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"). Can I do something different to get the scaling back or is this a permanent situation?

Have you solved this problem? I don’t have fractional scaling either. This is a big problem for my 4k 32 monitor. I need a value of 125%

No, sorry to say. I gave up on Rocky because of this issue. The login options kept changing with the updates.

Out of shear curiosity you mentioned you have this problem with Wayland, did you try this with the X11 option? If you look at all your DE options you will find 2 of everything; 1 with Wayland, 1 with X11.

Wayland is still considered EXPERIMENTAL, whereas X11 still considered the “STANDARD”.

No. Red Hat has set Wayland as the default display server in RHEL 8. They would not do that, if they would think Wayland to still be experimental.

HI, FWIW, I’m on X11 because while Wayland might not be experimental any longer, I get the feeling it still doesn’t fully live up to X11 in some cases. Especially with gnome, I see some tiny differences like with “topicons” et cetera - might just be me. Anyway:
I get access to fractional scaling settings by using X11 and the “gnome tweaks” app, where I switch to the “fonts” tab. Mabye this helps?

Cheers, Thomas

Hummmmm. RH has always been an “Early Adopter” of new technologies. A classic example is RH’s dumping the GRUB2 format and put all the kernal files in /boot/loader/entries so that a nifty utility like Grub-Customizer no longer works, because it is looking for those files under /boot/grub2/grub.cfg like most distros, so I suppose it is should be no surprise that they have made Wayland the default display server. Having said that, when asked what the status of Wayland was, the reply was,

" Wayland is still under development , and there are still applications and behaviours that don’t work as expected, you may find that some applications have not been updated to work properly in Wayland and currently the only way these applications will run is using Xorg instead of Wayland."

This maybe why RHEL (…and Alma, RL, et. al) now include both a Wayland as well as an X11 version of every DE. To say that, “and there are still applications and behaviours that don’t work as expected” is a vast understatment: The second I log into KDE using Wayland and SDDM the thing FREEZES, no mouse, no keyboard, no nothing. I suspect that Wayland does not play well with X11 as in X11 I end up in a login loop, that forces me to try logging in using Wayland, which allows me to login but then FREEZES forcing me to try logging in once again with X11 which then works. I guess we should be grateful that they still include access to X11.

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When making references to RHEL, you have to remember that KDE is not supported, only GDM and Gnome, which work with both Wayland and fractional scaling.

Besides, desercat has omitted the fact that EL8 offers “two” desktop environments: Gnome and Gnome Classic. Each can be started with Wayland or Xorg window server. “Four” options.

“Under development” is good. The opposite of “discontinued”, like the officially dead python2 that EL8 will drag with it until June 2024. There is a chance that the Wayland improves, if constructive feedback is given.

Each RHEL major release has lifetime of ~10 years. The X11 will not be “young and perky” in 2029. It is preferable to have technologies that seem to have a future. That said, CentOS Stream 9 has Xorg …

“When making references to RHEL, you have to remember that KDE is not supported, only GDM and Gnome, which work with both Wayland and fractional scaling.”

That IS TRUE!! That said, for RHEL to make Wayland, something that is still still under development, the DEFAULT solely because RHEL, the 10 Ton Gorilla in Linux-land, which defaults to GNOME and GDM, while at the same time totally ignoring KDE, the second most popular DE, then say that Wayland is not still Experimental simply because it plays Great with 1 DE that RHEL happens to prefer is kind of shortsighted… if not an outright lie. If Wayland breaks the current Standard – X11 – and KDE when it tries to implement Wayland – tells me that Wayland is far from being ready for Prime Time, let alone being being made the DEFAULT for any one OS let alone the 10 Ton Gorilla RHEL.

I am not saying that Wayland may not be a valuable alternative to GDM – a DM I truly detest and something I have had nothing but a bad experience with – some day, but Wayland is clearly NOT ready NOW… and I suspect that RH damn well knows this. That said I also suspect that RH, because of their size is trying to drive the technology, even if it is not ready for prime time.

The closest analogy would be RH’s breaking with the /boot/grub2/grub.cfg standard that everyone – other than RH and its derivatives now uses – to use /boot/loader/entries . That is not necessarily a bad thing as GRUB2 sucks, but that it breaks all the known recovery programs, such as grub-customizer, as well as programs that are looking to find /boot/grub2/grub.cfg left up the creek without a paddle. That said that is nothing compared to trying to force the acceptance of Wayland , first started on the 30 Sep 2008, with the first Stable release 1.6.1 coming on the 23 Jan 2015. As of 28 Jan 2022 it has reached 1.25.

Then there is “Weston” which I am not sure what that is other than a " reference implementation of a Wayland compositor". This means nothing to me.

My take: Wayland – still not at version 2.0 – along with “Weston”., is / are project /projects that are busy stomping out BUGS.

The smartest thing RH could have done, would have been to have stuck with GDM and X11, while offering Wayland as an experimental alternative for people to play around with should they choose NOT because RH throws it weight around by making this buggy thing the DEFAULT on RHEL.

Had RH the strength of their conviction that Wayland was ready to roll out, they would have nuked X11, and gone solely with Wayland only, but RH seems to know that Wayland is prone to breaking things, including KDE which even if they do not use it , they know plenty of their competitors who do use it. The last thing they want to do is to drive those KDE / RHEL users into the arms of those competitors.

Instead what RH has tried to do is to have their cake and eat it too: by offering both X11 and Wayland knowing full well that since Wayland is still under DEVELOPMENT it is more likely than not, going to break programs that their enterprise customers depend upon. By having X11 as a fall back position they do not leave those customers high and dry.

Me?!? My days of “living on the ‘Bleeding Edge’” by being a RH Beta Tester, by using Fedora for years have long since passed. I did not sign up for “CentOS Sreams” because I would once again become a RH Beta Tester. The appropriate place for Wayland would have been in either Fedora or CentOS Streams, not in RHEL (RL, Alma, etc.). Wayland is not ready for prime time if its implementation breaks other programs such as SDDM and KDE, and may or may not interfere with X11. RH screwed up by cutting CentOS off at the knees long before CentOS would have reached EOL, which resulted in a mass exodus from RH; now they might force yet another exodus by forcing a bug riddled project like Wayland on its users who are to serve as RH Bug Testers. It does not matter if Wayland works with GDM and GNOME; if you want it to be accepted it had best work with all DE, especially KDE which is the second largest DE behind GNOME… without breaking it. The only good thing that RH did was to give a method to access all DE a means to access the X11 variants even if it means it doubles the number of DE’s bringing more chaos to the login page than would be necessary.

“There is a chance that the Wayland improves, if constructive feedback is given.”

Then there is the chance that Wayland will NEVER improve, and proves that it is the giant turd it seems to be. It is a highly complex program that breaks everything it touches. Since its inception, it is filled with BUGS.

Then you mention, " …if constructive feedback is given." If there is one thing I have learned from KDE 5, they have no desire to listen to users. Features that USERS WANT, and should be simple to implement, the devels (or is it “devils”?) are never implemented, no matter how many USERS want a given features. No, KDE 5 wants to make USERS to jump through a large number of hoops to achieve the same results they were able to achieve in KDE 4.14 using Virtual Desktops. Now the USER has to jump through “Activities” only to arrive back at “… Virtual Desktops”, which you were able to do with two clicks of the mouse back in KDE 4.14. KDE 5 is the perfect example of a project that lacks any type of focus and is devel driven, that ignores the wants and wishes of its USERS and their imput. KDE 5 is now at – I think – 5.24, and promises to continue to drag on and on, and all they seem to do is to add “new” FEATURES, which then ends up in a never ending cycle of BUG FIXES. They have something that works perfectly, then they screw with something that breaks that which worked perfectly before, which then requires fixing… again. Rather than calling for a FEATURE FREEZE, and perfecting KDE 5, so that it runs like a finely tuned Swiss Watch, you have a bug riddled DE that that has many minor improvements that degrade the overall USER experience, because they make it overly complex to use.

OK how’s this for Wayland “constructive feedback”:

  1. FIX THE DAMN THING so that it is not filled with BUGS, and works with ALL the major DE especially KDE 5.

  2. LISTEN to your damn USERS and what THEY WANT, and implement those ideas if at all possible

  3. PUBLISH THE DAMN MANUALS that shows how the thing and is features are suppose to work.

  4. Make YouTube Videos showing how to get some desired effect. Not some slapped together “Review” that doesn’t show you HOW to accomplish something. If it requires you to make multiple videos, then make them!!

  5. Implement a FEATURE FREEZE at some point. Make it work like a fine Swiss Watch. DON’T allow this to drag on, and on, and… Don’t allow Wayland to become Devel directed like KDE 5.

  6. POLISH WAYLAND, then POLISH IT SOME MORE.

While I would LOVE to see Wayland come to fruition, right now it is a bug infested turd that breaks both KDE and X11 implementations of KDE. Rather than calling for a FEATURE FREEZE and POLISHING Wayland until it shines, ensuring that it will work with KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, Xfce without major glitches, Wayland promises to go in the same direction as KDE 5: A bug infested turd that drags on, and on, and…

Okay, you prefer KDE but don’t like KDE 5? Am I mistaken, or are your comments about KDE 5 (developers) quite similar to the comments about Gnome 3 (developers) by Gnome 2 users? If so, have KDE developers cherry-picked “best practices” from Gnome people or completely ignored mistakes therein?

Nevertheless, KDE developers most likely are not the driving force behind Wayland, nor necessarily chips from the same tree. Is it productive to assume that all developers are alike? A blatant “FIX IT!” does not inspire anyone, not even close to how a detailed bug report does.

Although we’re far off-topic from fractional-scaling-howto, I’d like to point out that whenever an IT “thing” makes an impression of being messed up or a complete fail, it boils down to missing/wrong/unaligned priorities. Or bad communication. Or both. :slight_smile:

Sorry. KDE 5 has driven me CRAZY. Having to develop workarounds will do that to normally sane people

This is why it’s usually best to find a distro that already has KDE supplied by default. You have far less problems that way, than attempting to get it working on a distro that doesn’t have it by default.

True!! But I’m “Old School” I’ve been using RH since Red Hat 7.1 – That’s Red Hat 7.1, NOT RHEL 7.1, and many of the Red Hat Offshoots such as Mandrake 7.1 when RH offered both GNOME and KDE, then there was Fedora which I used for years, but got tiered of donating blood to RH, by sitting on the “Bleeding Edge”, so I migrated to CentOS, first 5, then 6, then 7, and then tinkered with CentOS 8 – first kicked the tires of 8.0 (a REAL DOG), then 8.1 (still should have been taken out and shot) then 8.2 (first point release that showed potentental) finally 8.3 (still a DOG, but actually a USABLE DOG), then came 8.4, and I thought I was on my way… until Red Hat pulled the rug out from under me. In short I learned “The Red Hat Way” of doing things.

Usually what has both my buddy and I to change to a different distro is when we can’t get it to work on our rigs, or if one distro is easier to work with than another.

Technically I am referred to as the “Official Test Guinea Pig” as he uses his computers for mission critical work, and can’t afford to have his system go down, where as I am a free lance researcher, ergo I test a given distro, and test it for gotchas; if there are too many we move on to an other distro. This time we are working in tandem, I’m testing Rocky Linux (and a few others, but RL is by far the best) and the one he is testing is openSUSE 13.5 Leap (KDE). openSUSE and RL are almost, the same but installing RL is far easier than SUSE which is a Giant PITA to install, but once it is installed, it is almost a breeze to install things. In RHEL (…and CentOS, RL, Alma L et. al) programs such as Scribus, Amarok, Cinnamon, et. al. all present in CentOS 7.9, are totally absent or require you to jump through hoops to install in CentOS (and its offshoots) 8; yet I had very little problem in installing them on openSUSE 13.5 Leap. There is one MAJOR exception: I will NOT try to install Nvida drivers in openSUSE. I did that and it toasted my install. Once I have finished moving and have RL fully backedup, I will try to install the nvidia drivers via kmod-nvidia. Given how in many ways both OS’s are very similar to each other one of them will become the Primary OS, and the other the Secondary.

With RHEL 8.x desktop, the initial GDM login screen offers both Wayland and X11 together with Gnome and Gnome Classic. The options you choose when you log in for the first time will be remembered when you log in next time. I use Gnome Classic with Wayland, and fractional scaling of 125%.