Linux mint fractional scaling

New Features

Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon

Linux Mint 20 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2025. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable.

Warpinator

The star of the show in Linux Mint 20 is a new application called Warpinator.

10 years ago, Linux Mint 6 featured a tool called «Giver» which could share files across the local network. Without any server or configuration, computers would automatically see each others and you could simply drag and drop files from one to another. When the Giver project was discontinued it had to be removed from Linux Mint and we’ve been missing that functionality ever since.

Warpinator is a reimplementation of Giver. Server configuration (FTP, NFS, Samba) is overkill for casual file transfers between two computers, and it’s a real pity to use external media (Internet services, USB sticks, external HDDs) just to share files when there’s a local network which could do just that.

With Warpinator, Linux Mint 20 brings back easy file sharing across the local network.

The main window shows you the computers on the local network which are also running Warpinator:

By clicking on a computer you can see more information about it and exchange files with it:

No more USB sticks or external drive are needed just to send a file.

NVIDIA Optimus

Linux Mint 20 features improved support for NVIDIA Optimus.

The NVIDIA Prime applet now shows your GPU renderer and you can select which card to switch to straight from its menu.

The NVIDIA «On-Demand» profile is also now fully supported. When you run in that mode, it is your Intel card which renders the session and a menu option is available to let you offload a particular application to your NVIDIA card.

Select an application in the menu, right-click and select «Run with NVIDIA GPU». It’s that simple.

From the command-line, two new commands are available to offload to GLX or to Vulkan:

To boost compatibility and make it easier to boot Linux Mint 20 in live mode without NVIDIA drivers, «nomodeset» was also added to the «Compatibility Mode».

XAppStatusIcon received the ability to handle mouse wheel scrolling events and a new function similar to gtk_menu_popup() which makes it even easier than before to port applications from GtkStatusIcon.

In all editions (Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce) many of the tray icons were harmonized, given symbolic icons and HiDPI support.

Blueberry, mintupdate, mintreport, nm-applet, mate-power-manager, mate-media, redshift, rhythmbox all use XAppStatusIcon and give the tray a consistent look in Mint 20.

Cinnamon 4.6

The performance of the Nemo file manager was improved. The new version tries to prioritize content and navigation and to delay thumbnails as much as possible. As a result, the content of directories shows up with generic icons before the thumbnails are rendered, but the improvement in performance is quite noticeable.

This also has a positive impact on performance in cases of heavy I/O and slow HDDS, such as when moving videos to external devices.

In the Display Settings, it is now possible to set the refresh rate.

Cinnamon 4.6 also introduces fractional scaling. Until now your scaling was either 100% (normal mode) or 200% (HiDPI mode) and it was the same for all your monitors. With Cinnamon 4.6 each monitor can have a different scaling and it can be set to values in between 100% and 200%.

In normal mode the resolution you set is the resolution you see. In HiDPI, at 200% scaling, the screen is showing twice the pixel density so everything looks sharper, but the resolution you see on the screen is only half the resolution of your monitor. Many HiDPI displays have a resolution which is actually quite small once HiDPI is activated.

Take a 13″ Macbook Retina 2013. Its screen resolution is 2560×1600. That’s too much for a 13″ screen; Applications, text and desktop items look way too small. In HiDPI mode, the screen shows twice the pixel density and everything looks really crisp, but look what happens to the resolution… it gets halved to 1280×800. The problem then is that 800px is not enough in terms of screen space, and some applications don’t even fit in it. A display like this one looks perfect in 1200px and that unfortunately means reducing the actual resolution to 1200px and not using HiDPI.

Another issue with HiDPI is multi-monitor support. You could plug an external monitor to this Macbook in the hope to stay in HiDPI on the laptop but to be in normal mode on the monitor. That wasn’t possible before though, either all screens or none at all could be in HiDPI. and a non-HiDPI compatible screen set in HiDPI was just unusable.

Fractional scaling addresses these limitations. By being able to set the scaling for each monitor independently and allow for scaling values of not only 100% and 200% but also 125%, 150%, 175%, Cinnamon 4.6 tries to get higher pixel density and to allow HiDPI and non-HiDPI monitors to play well with each others.

In the example of the Macbook plugged to a non-HiDPI monitor, we’d typically set the Macbook to 150% and the monitor to 100%. Under the hood, the entire desktop environment would run in HiDPI mode, but the actual scaling of the Macbook screen would be reduced from 200% to 150% and the scaling of the monitor from 200% to 100%. We’d end up with a monitor which looks perfectly normal, and a Macbook screen which has a nice 1200px resolution and a «half-hidpi» 1.5 pixel density, which doesn’t look as crisp as full-hidpi, but looks crisper than in normal mode.

Middle-clicking the keyboard applet cycles keyboard layouts.

Cinnamon screensaver supports custom commands, making it possble to use alternative screen lockers with Cinnamon.

XApps improvements

Xed received the ability to join lines together and to remove trailing whitelines before saving files.

Xviewer received fullscreen and diaporama toolbar buttons and remembers if its window was maximized.

In Xreader a print button was added to the toolbar.

To guarantee better support for modern Electron apps and indicators XappStatusIcon received mouse wheel support and SNI (StatusNotifier, libIndicator) support.

Other improvements

Gdebi, the tool used to open and install .deb files was given a new user interface.

The login screen (Slick Greeter) supports stretching backgrounds across multiple monitors.

Artwork improvements

The Mint-Y theme provides a nice variety of colors. A community project was started on Github to gather feedback and fine-tune these colors to find the right balance between colorful vibrant hues and contrast levels which don’t take the user’s focus away from the content being shown on the screen.

Yellow folders are also available.

As you enter the Linux Mint 20 desktop for the first time, the welcome screen will bring these colors to your attention and ask you which one you enjoy the most:

System improvements

Apturl switched backend from Synaptic to Aptdaemon.

APT recommends are enabled by default for newly installed packages (not for upgrades).

Snapd is disabled by default and APT packages are not allowed to install it.

Live sessions running under Virtualbox automatically get their resolution bumped to a minimum of 1024×768.

This release ships with linux-firmware 1.187.

Main components

Linux Mint 20 features Cinnamon 4.6, a Linux kernel 5.4 and an Ubuntu 20.04 package base.

LTS strategy

Linux Mint 20 will receive security updates until 2025.

Until 2022, future versions of Linux Mint will use the same package base as Linux Mint 20, making it trivial for people to upgrade.

Until 2022, the development team won’t start working on a new base and will be fully focused on this one.

Thanks to your donations and advertising Linux Mint is completely free of charge. We hope you’ll enjoy using it as much as we enjoy working on it.

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Linux Mint is Adding Fractional Scaling Support to Cinnamon

Using the Cinnamon desktop environment on a high-resolution display? If so, you may be pretty excited to hear that fractional scaling support is on the way.

Cinnamon 4.6 is expected to introduce support for fractional scaling when it’s released later this year, possibly as part of Linux Mint 20 (which will be based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) though it could be sooner.

At present the Cinnamon desktop offers just two scaling options: 100% (normal mode) and 200% (HiDPI mode). And the selected value is applied to all monitors connected, regardless of whether they have a higher or lower resolution.

But not for much longer.

Currently in ‘alpha testing’, Cinnamon 4.6 introduces additional scaling values between 100% and 200% (including the 125% and 150% sweet spots for 2K and 4K monitors respectively) and will allow different scaling values to be set for each connected display.

If Mint can stick the landing, Linux Mint will gain a major selling point over regular Ubuntu

Linux Mint lead and Cinnamon desktop developer Clement Lefèbvre explained more in the latest Mint update, writing: “By being able to set the scaling for each monitor independently and allow for scaling values of not only 100% and 200% but also 125%, 150%, 175%, we’re hoping to get higher pixel density and allow HiDPI and non-HiDPI monitors to play well with each others.”

If Mint can stick the landing of this feature then the Cinnamon desktop and Linux Mint, which uses Cinnamon by default, will gain a major selling point over regular Ubuntu.

Because while it’s possible to enable experimental fractional scaling support in Ubuntu it a) isn’t easy, and b) comes with some major performance caveats attached — caveats that put me (and many others) off of using it.

Fractional scaling support isn’t the only display-related improvement targeted at a future version of the Cinnamon desktop. The flavoursome DE is also adding options to change the refresh rate of monitors.

Home » News » Linux Mint is Adding Fractional Scaling Support to Cinnamon

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Linux Mint Forums

Welcome to the Linux Mint forums!

HiDPI fractional scaling

HiDPI fractional scaling

Post by dimonomid » Mon Aug 13, 2018 8:40 am

So on the laptop T470 which has 14″ screen with the resolution 1920×1080, scaling 1 is too small and 2 is too large. Is there a way to set the scale to be something in between?

The only workaround I’m aware of is to scale fonts, but the rest of the UI elements (like, icons in task bar, system tray, Alt+Tab, etc) remain either too small or too large. Is there a way to make the UI size properly if the desired scale is like 1.7 ?

Re: HiDPI fractional scaling

Post by roblm » Mon Aug 13, 2018 10:04 am

Re: HiDPI fractional scaling

Post by dimonomid » Mon Aug 13, 2018 12:12 pm

Thanks, but yeah using xrandr scaling is hardly an option, my eyes hurt.

Are there any plans to implement proper fractional scaling?

Re: HiDPI fractional scaling

Post by Pjotr » Mon Aug 13, 2018 12:14 pm

(if you type: the letter F is a capital letter)

Copy/paste the output in your next message.

Re: HiDPI fractional scaling

Post by gm10 » Mon Aug 13, 2018 12:33 pm

Probably not. All the statements I’ve seen from Mint devs where that they won’t care until support isn’t added upstream. The GTK3 toolkit itself does not support fractional scaling, nor will the upcoming GTK4 version.

The GNOME desktop itself has an experimental feature for fractional scaling but to be fair it’s more of a hack in conjunction with the compositor.

Re: HiDPI fractional scaling

Post by trytip » Mon Aug 13, 2018 12:35 pm

Re: HiDPI fractional scaling

Post by dimonomid » Wed Aug 22, 2018 3:09 pm

Re: HiDPI fractional scaling

Post by gm10 » Wed Aug 22, 2018 3:32 pm

Re: HiDPI fractional scaling

Post by trytip » Thu Aug 23, 2018 12:07 am

there’s no logical sense to have 1920x resolution on 14″ screen especially if there is vision difficulties. i moved from cinnamon to xfce ( installed it from repos but it’s not a full desktop and considerable extras needed implemented)
what i do now is zoom in when i’m in browsers with CTRL_ + CTRL_ — reset with CTRL_ 0 and in xfce/mate desktop (not available in cinnamon) i use custom DPI 97 i can go higher but then i also set fonts to corespond

as you can see in the snap the menu is much more clear and easy to read than the cinnamon menu which doesn’t obey the font size or scaling. you need to get off cinnamon before you ruin your vision. i still have issues in mint19 (tried cinnamon/xfce) chrome fonts are too close together and can’t pinpoint the issue. but since i zoom in on most pages i read, that helps out 100%

click the snap and zoom in to see how clear things are (my resolution is 1440×900 with nvidia graphics and compton window manager

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Linux Mint Forums

Welcome to the Linux Mint forums!

fractional scaling in Mint 20

fractional scaling in Mint 20

Post by matemint » Sat Jun 27, 2020 8:12 am

Re: fractional scaling in Mint 20

Post by AndyMH » Sat Jun 27, 2020 8:42 am

Re: fractional scaling in Mint 20

Post by matemint » Sat Jun 27, 2020 8:58 am

You can now download Linux Mint 20, the latest stable release of this popular Ubuntu-based desktop Linux operating system.

I get stable release this night..

Re: fractional scaling in Mint 20

Post by ernie dingbat » Sat Jun 27, 2020 9:03 am

On the system settings screen, just below the fractional scaling option, there is an option that is probably set to automatic. You need to change it to ‘Normal’ using the dropdown, then the fractional scaling is enabled.

I’m not in LM20 right now so I can’t tell you the name of the option.

Re: fractional scaling in Mint 20

Post by matemint » Sat Jun 27, 2020 5:57 pm

Re: fractional scaling in Mint 20

Post by palimmo » Sun Jun 28, 2020 9:18 am

Hi.
Since on my laptop monitor (FHD) text/images are too small, I have to use the fractional scaling (125%).. otherwise I will be blind soon.

At 125% it’s bigger, yes, but still not ok, since everything is now blurry.
How can I solve this problem?
Thanks!

(Furthermore: a scaling between 100% and 125% is not possible?)

Re: fractional scaling in Mint 20

Post by palimmo » Sun Jun 28, 2020 9:55 am

a quick workaround for the moment:

Scaling at 100%, but:

generally for LM:
Font selection -> Text scaling factor
changed to 1.3

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