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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Last time I asked around about this question, the answer was surprisingly “probably not much”! When a low-power x86 chip (like those mobile chips) is idling (which is pretty much all the time if all you are doing is hosting a server on it) it consumes very little power, about the same level as an idling Pi. It is when the frequency ramps up that performance-per-watt gets noticeably worse on x86.

    Edit: My personal test showed that my x86 laptop fared slightly worse than my Pi 3 in idling power (~2 watts higher it seems), but that laptop is oooooooold.


  • One of the issues at hand is that X11, the predecessor of Wayland, does not have a standardized way to tell applications what scale they should use. Applications on X11 get the scale from environment variables (completely bypassing X11), or from Xft.dpi, or by providing in-application settings, or they guess it using some unorthodox means, or simply don’t scale at all. It’s a huge mess overall.

    It is one of the more-or-less fundamentally unfixable parts of the protocol, since it wants everything to be on the same coordinate space (i.e. 1 pixel is 1 pixel everywhere, which is… quite unsuitable for modern systems.)

    Wayland does operate like how you say it and applications supporting Wayland will work properly in HiDPI environments.

    However a lot of people and applications are still on X11 due to various reasons.



  • Yeah I get the display server part. What I meant was that 200% scaling gets you 1920x1080 logical resolution on HiDPI applications – LoDPI applications continue to be blurry just as if you set your actual resolution to 1080p, but HiDPI applications will enjoy the enhanced visual acuity.

    Even on smaller screens like the 14" ones, the quality of very high resolution (e.g. 4K) is still quite visible IMO, especially when it comes to text rendering. But it could very well just be my eyes.




  • Agreed. HiDPI is the way to go and we should appreciate Framework for putting that in their laptops instead of continuing the use of shitty 1366x768 screens.

    Xorg is the reason why OP is facing the scaling issues. OP, try to force the apps to run on native Wayland if they support it but don’t default to it. The Wayland page on Arch wiki has instructions on that. Immensely improved my HiDPI experience.








  • Do I hate systemd now?

    No, because that’s not specific to systemd.

    I can quite clearly remember the long shutdown times back when Ubuntu was still using Upstart.

    Generally speaking, long shutdown times are an indication of a system issue (e.g. HDD going bad or slow network) or just scripts being written poorly, and could be worked around by changing the timeout value. Systemd defaults to 90 seconds, but you can change that to 30 secs or lower.