The GNOME Project revealed the fact that the next version of its graphical environment, GNOME 3.32, will have fractional scaling for HiDPI / 4K displays, implemented in GNOME Shell and Mutter components.
HiDPI monitor support has been around for a while in GNOME, but is limited to scaling windows by integer factors, but most modern displays are in between those DPI ranges. Fractional scaling will allow is scaled to fractional values like 3/2 or 2 / 1.333 to make screens look better.
GNOME / Ubuntu developer Marco Trevisan reported on fractional scaling for GNOME 3.32, with years of development behind, mentioning that the relevant proposals are being prepared for implementation in GNOME Shell and Mutter components for the next GNOME 3.32 coming next. week.
"We started this work a few years ago (ouch!) And this led to the Taipei Hackfest, but amongst other work to do and other priorities this was delayed a bit. Then the new shell will paint the elements correctly and in good visual quality with fractional scaling,”Marco Trevisan mentions.
So you can enable fractional scaling in GNOME 3.32
When GNOME 3.32 is available later this month or early April, users who want to enable fractional scaling for their HiDPI monitors should be aware that this feature is not enabled by default as it is considered experimental. One thing that must be made clear is that it is only present for Wayland and not for X11.
Enabling fractional scaling is as simple as running the following command in a terminal.
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"
Once activated, you only need to go to the GNOME control center to choose the type of scaling you want.