Blurry fonts after updating to Bluefin Fedora 40

Bluefin
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Hi,

First, thanks for such a great desktop environment.

I have Dell XPS 9510 with 3 external monitors. Under Bluefin dx Fedora 39, everything looked great. After getting the Fedora 40 update, fonts in tabs and menus for Chrome and Vivaldi are blurry and compressed looking almost like they are horizontally compressed to fit into a certain size. I also notice this under vscode in the file explorer and terminal but not in the text editor.

I see a lot of information about wayland and fractional scaling. Fractional scaling is not set on any of the monitors, and fonts are blurry on all of the monitors including the built-in display.

I’ve tried bluefin-dx and bluefin-dx-nvidia with no difference.

Any help is appreciated.

Edit: I did try setting Chrome’s preferred ozone to Wayland, but then when opening Chrome, I got a flickering title bar with a transparent window frame.

1 Like
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I had this Issue with Bluefin 39, this is some wierd issue with wayland and flatpaks I think.
I’m back to X11 for now, would love some more information on this.
Using bluefin-dx-nvidia btw.

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How did you go back to X11?

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On the log-in screen is a tiny button in the bottom right, there you can select Gnome X11 or Gnome Wayland.

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Thanks. That didn’t make any difference for me except devcontainers in vscode stopped opening because it was looking for a wayland users.

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I’ve noticed that the latest version, 124, of Chrome/Chromium etc are broken if you have enabled the flag to use Wayland.

I’m currently using Warehouse to downgrade theses app to 123.x and it seems fine.

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What’s interesting is I installed bluefin 40 in a VM amd the fonts are fine.

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They only get blurred when scaling is going on. That might not happen at the resolutions presented by the VM.

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I don’t have scaling enabled on any monitors.

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@simeon-walker
Have you tried any of the newer versions since then? I ran into this today and flathub doesn’t seem to have 123.X on the server anymore.

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I checked the screenshots I took in April and compared them to what I see now, and the fonts look normal now.

I’m using Chrome 127.0.6533.72.

1 Like
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I have Chrome 127 and Chrome dev 129 now, both are fine.

1 Like
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After poking around wit a number of things, I think the issue was that display scaling was set to 125% by default for some reason.

Setting it to 100% seems to have done the trick.

Appreciate the help narrowing it down!

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Adding a little extra here after some more poking around.

I was tinkering with org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor 0.8, when I noticed that this affected the Chrome rendered display, but not the Firefox one.

So I tried rebasing to Aurora. The blurriness in Chrome compared to Firefox disappeared.

A few other paper cuts in Aurora brought me back to bluefin instead, but now I suspect there’s some sort of GNOME issue here (maybe with my laptop or whatever)… but not enough to dig in further.