I noticed that Firefox is amazingly crisp (better than my macbook) while other apps look fuzzy (eg. Discord, vivaldi); and not just the fonts, but the window chrome) ??
I’ve struggled with this, but there is an interplay between your monitor resolution, scaling of the total image, scaling of elements on the screen like text, and whether apps are Wayland or X native. I’ll try to share what I’ve learned.
I have a Framework 13" AMD laptop and yes, Bluefin can look awesome!!! Different OS’s have different choices for fractional scaling of your screen.
100%: Sharp and everything’s tiny. 200% is sharp and huge. 150% is usually good. I like 125% scaling and the sharpness varied wildly between Fedora GNOME, Fedora KDE, Ubuntu 22.04, Windows 10, Ubuntu 24.04 and Bluefin. I felt like the full capability of the hardware had been unlocked.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Wayland vs. X war. If not, you should look it up. Briefly, X Window is a way to display graphics on a screen and it is 40 years old. Wayland is the upgraded replacement and is 15 years old. Obviously this upgrade is taking some time. Some apps, especially “corporate apps” will default to X for maximum compatibility, requiring Xwayland to act as an intermediary and things get fuzzy. I’ve never used Discord but sometimes you can force an app to use Wayland. This Reddit thread might help get you started on that:
https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/s2xvrn/getting_discord_to_run_natively_on_wayland/
An easy way to tell is the terminal command xprop. Hover over a window with the mouse. If the window is Wayland, it will look normal. If the window is X, the pointer will look like a cross.
Things become even more complicated when it comes to fonts. There are systemwide fonts but many apps have their own font settings. You can click Settings/Accessibility/Seeing/Large Text, but that does not work with all apps. Some apps like Chrome have their own zoom settings. It can requre some tinkering.
I have found this exciting. I like this laptop, but when I installed Bluefin, it made the hardware really shine. Using Ubuntu at 125% scaling was mostly all mildly fuzzy windows. The frustrating thing about Bluefin is the mix of razor sharp windows next to really ugly fuzzy ones…
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I’ve had a pretty similar story with my 125% scale laptop, I found KDE Plasma to be the least bad (generally pretty good, but certain java apps just didn’t scale at all), but supposedly later (current) versions of Gnome should have improved on fractional scaling.
Currently I use sway on my laptop which supports Wayland’s fractional scaling, it tends to work pretty great in my experience, but of course I can’t easily recommend someone to switch to a tiling WM just for that.
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FWIW, I had tried out Win11 on the framework at one point. A couple apps has fuzzy or tiny text. I’m not a developer but this seems like a “hard problem” for everyone
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Thanks for the thorough and coherent explanation.
The last time I used Linux as a daily desktop driver, we still had to edit xconfig.init to the monitor specific settings (loong before Wayland).
I tried Kinoite first, a few months ago and I noticed a big degradation when I switched to Universal Blue.
Apparently I can use OSTree to rebase to Kinoite (instead of doing a full install like the last time).
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