Could sommelier from Chrome OS be used on Ubuntu?

Desktop
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#1

This is a question maybe @vanvugt can answer since he is a Mutter developer. I would like to know if this tool called sommelier could work on Ubuntu. Sommelier allows X11 applications to stay nice and crisp when using fractional scaling on Wayland. It does a very good job. Here are some examples from ChromeOS with 120% scaling on a 1080p display:

xf31nimzzyj91
xf31nimzzyj911920Ă—1080 218 KB
w1u8zg620zj91
w1u8zg620zj911920Ă—1080 150 KB
6ch5uze31zj91
6ch5uze31zj911920Ă—1080 249 KB

Those are all legacy X11 apps that scale very nicely on ChromeOS wayland. Since sommelier is open-source, do you think it could be implemented in Ubuntu?

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#2

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but that’s a definite “no”. We don’t need a new compositor just to improve texture sampling. That’s something which can be done with patches to mutter (as I have attempted in the past).

This discussion should be tracked in the existing bugs:

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#3

Got it. Will there be any fix for blurry legacy apps on Gnome soon? KDE has a decent fix in Plasma 5.26. Also, is there a way to set a fractional scale factor on Wayland between 100% and 125%?

#4

Nobody is working on it so it’s safe to say there won’t be any change soon.

I suspect that scales between 100% and 125% are not available because it makes resampling even harder/blurrier when you don’t have a quotient of two small numbers (5 / 4 = 1.25 = 125%). Or maybe it’s that using multiples of quarters results in less bad resampling.

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