For some time I’ve been working on HiDPI support for Gnome, in order to support all the new laptops with very high resolution displays. This work is now at a stage where I can start showing it off and adventurous users might even want to test it out.

The support happens on many layers, like:

Wayland : I’ve added support in the protocol for scaled windows and outputs, and implemented this in Weston (the Wayland compositor reference implementation) and the wayland sample clients. This is currently in the unstable branches and will be in Wayland 1.2.

: I’ve added support in the protocol for scaled windows and outputs, and implemented this in Weston (the Wayland compositor reference implementation) and the wayland sample clients. This is currently in the unstable branches and will be in Wayland 1.2. Cairo : In order to seamlessly support hidpi rendering I’ve added support for setting device-scale on cairo surfaces. This code is a prerequisite for the Gtk+ support, and is currently in a cairo branch, but will land in Cairo 1.13 eventually.

: In order to seamlessly support hidpi rendering I’ve added support for setting device-scale on cairo surfaces. This code is a prerequisite for the Gtk+ support, and is currently in a cairo branch, but will land in Cairo 1.13 eventually. Gnome-icon-theme: Added high resolution version of most images used in the theme.

But most of the work has been in Gtk+. There is a branch called wip/window-scales that contains this code. It has:

Support for scaled windows in the wayland backend, including support for different scale factors on different outputs.

Support for scaled windows on X, limited to one scaling factor for all monitors.

Support for retina displays on OSX

Support for alternative CSS assets for scaled windows, so that you can specify higher resolution background and border images in your themes that will be used on hidpi screens.

Support for alternative high-resolution icons for scaled windows, including additions to the icon theme spec so that themes can specify higher resolution images with less details (i.e. 24×24@2x is the same size as 48×48@1x, but has less detail).

Here is how it looks right now: (click for full version)

This is work in progress, but if you want to try it out, here is the code you need to use:

Cairo device-scale branch

gnome-themes-standard wip/hidpi branch

Wayland master if you want to build the wayland Gtk+ backend.

gtk+ wip/window-scales branch

You can then enable the scaling either by setting GDK_SCALE=2 in the environment, or by using gsettings (only works under gnome):

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings overrides "{ 'Gdk/WindowScalingFactor':<2>, 'Gdk/UnscaledDPI':<92160> }"

There is still a lot of work to do, but I hope to have this mostly done for my talk at Guadec. Hopefully I’ll see you there!

And last, but not least, many thanks to Brion Vibber who generously donated a Chromebook Pixel to me so that I could work on this stuff.