[pkg-cinnamon] Bug#812805: cinnamon: automatic desktop scaling for HiDPI screens no longer works

[Margarita Manterola]

Control: tag -1 +wontfix
 
El Miércoles 9 Marzo 2016 10:07 CET, Christian Pietsch <cpietsch+debian at uni-bielefeld.de> Ha escrito: 
> A while after filing this bug here, I filed it upstream where somebody
> was able to explain this unexpected change:
> https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/5059
> HIDPI_MIN_HEIGHT was changed from 1200 to 1500 (but I'd prefer 1440):
> https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-settings-daemon/commit/fa3e2fd638422cc7ec259e3ffa4a0bb3ab4533d7

I happen to know a bit more about the context that led to this change.

The change was done because a lot of X1 Carbon users were complaining that their Cinnamon 
session looked very ugly in "Double" scaling and were all moving it manually to "Normal", so they 
requested that the default was changed.

The problem with the X1 Carbon in this resolution (there's also a 1080p model) is that it's not
really 4k, and thus double scaling looks bloated, but it's also too many pixels for "Normal" 
scaling, which means Normal scaling looks very small. It would be ideal if users could set the 
scaling to 1.5 (or other floating numbers of their preference), but this is not possible due to a 
limitation of the underlying GTK libraries.

What this means is that until the GTK libraries are fixed, for your screen you have the choice of 
"bloated" or "small" :-/.  I understand that you preferred the previous default, but from my 
experience dealing with quite a bunch of X1 Carbon v3 users, most people prefer the "small" 
option.  This is what led the Cinnamon developers to changing the default.

As you have already found, you can manually change the scaling so that it matches what you 
had before. Another option is to leave the scaling at Normal and change the font scaling to 1.5, 
some users have mentioned that this setting, while not totally ideal, is better than the other 
two options.
 
Hope that helps,

-- 
Marga