 Okay, so the win.protocol for fractional scaling has landed into the win.protocols.gitlab repository, but what does that mean? Like what will change in the future and when? I've read articles and actually none of them seem to have dancer right now. They're very big. They say something like this will allow for fractional scaling, but didn't we have that already? So I actually took a day yesterday to investigate about this. The video that I published yesterday was pre-recorded because all of the time was meant like to try to understand what was going on. And I think I did. And by the way, shout out to both David Edmondson who explained to me a lot of these things and also you know actually pushed this merger quest to win and protocol forwards a lot. You organize like meetings for everybody to go in and organize how to actually do this. And also shout out to Nick Graham for explaining the missing part because it was a long journey. So I'm going to cover like roughly how is styling scaling working right now in X11 and Wayland and what does this patch actually change and when? So let me start off by saying that some applications are support being drawn at fractional scaling like support drawing at fractional scaling and QT is an example of this. If you tell QT, AQT please draw me this application and at 1.27 as an example fractional scaling, it should be able to do that. Some other applications don't and that truly depends on the toolkit like QT is able to do that. GTK to make as another example isn't. There was this possibility with like GTK 2 but with GTK 3 that possibility was removed and GTK is only able to do integer scaling. And that is also the case for GTK 4 and if anything changes about this it will probably be in like GTK 5. So a long way into the future. The developers seem to be convinced that actually implementing fractional scaling in GTK would take a lot of time and effort and that can be done right now especially this way because Wayland only supports integer scaling anyway but we'll get to that. So if you are an X11 how it works right now is that applications that do support this fractional scaling out of the box just draw themselves like that fractional scaling and nothing is wrong really. All of what I'm going to talk about from now on is making sure that what works in X11 also works in Wayland funnily enough. I know this doesn't make for a very interesting beginning but you might also ask how do we get fractional scaling if an application does not support fractional scaling. For X11 I'm actually not sure because that's really not the point of the video but to Wayland we'll talk about that a lot. So Wayland. So when switching to Wayland something was missing. So firstly basically applications couldn't draw themselves to a fractional scaling even if they could before. Now they don't have the possibility anymore. That's the idea on Wayland. They can only do integer scaling. So how do we still achieve fractional scaling in Wayland because right now if you go to settings you do have fractional scaling how do we do that in Wayland even though we don't have fractional scaling in Wayland anymore. So what happens is that an application is drawn at two times the scaling so that is integer scaling and then it is resized to be 1.5. So you draw at two times and then you downscale that image to 1.5 and by doing that you actually get like candle okay fractional scaling. That does have a significant downside though. Firstly it actually might lead to some blurry images but I won't get into that but most importantly actually drawing everything at two times the size even though you only need it like 1.5 will take much more resources even to actually store on a much bigger surface what you're drawing and also the downscaling process like downscaling an image from two times as big to 1.5 even like all the time that also takes some significant processing power. So you are wasting some resources to do fractional scaling when some of the applications like those based on QT in theory could do fractional scaling already by themselves. So the situation wasn't perfect so but here's the thing if you go into the settings of KD Plasma right now and you go into the scaling section you will see that there are a couple of settings that allow you to choose how x11 applications in Wayland are scaled and whoa what's going on. Okay so the fact is that when we switched to Wayland it's not like all applications were ready for Wayland already. So some applications are run with the x Wayland that is they are actually x11 applications that are run as if they were x11 application but on Wayland. So they are still considered like x11 clients but they are underneath Wayland. Now here's the thing we knew that in x11 applications that do super fractional scaling could draw them at fractional scaling. So with x Wayland for our x Wayland client you could actually go to the x Wayland client and because underneath it's still an x11 client you could ask that client to be drawn at fractional scaling like proper fractional scaling not the resized up and then down thing that Wayland does. But that also has an issue because some applications do support this fractional scaling some others don't. So what happens if you go for that option if you actually ask the x Wayland clients to do proper fractional scaling is that some applications will support it and will look very good. Some other applications will not support it and they won't be scaled at all. So you will get like big dolphin because maybe dolphin should support this fractional scaling and then small no tillers because no tillers I think does not support this proper fractional scaling. So for x Wayland clients in Wayland you get the option in system settings to either ask for all applications to be upscaled and then downscaled like I said previously just like all Wayland applications or you have then other options option just for x Wayland to actually ask for proper fractional scaling but that will only work with application that support it that's the situation. So luckily most if not all of the KDE and GNOME application that you're using nowadays are not x Wayland are like proper Wayland applications inside of Wayland but stuff like Firefox and Chrome might still be x Wayland. I think Firefox you can currently switch it to a proper Wayland window in Wayland but we'll see we want you can see if you want Firefox to be proper Wayland in Wayland. Right now as far as I know for most people it's still x Wayland. So Wayland windows inside of Wayland seem to actually be more limited in what they can do compared to x11 and x Wayland applications because even x Wayland applications you could go to them and ask to do proper fractional scaling that is not something you can do in Wayland. Now a little info on how window managers are currently offering fractional scaling. KWIN practically lets you choose anything not like any value but a lot of values even very niche ones whereas MATTER which is GNOME's window manager only allows you to choose I think that out of the box just one and two scaling but as an experimental feature also 1.25, 1.50 and 1.75 that might have changed I'm not sure haven't used Wayland in GNOME sorry in a bit so you can check that but that's how it was. Okay so what has changed thanks to this new Wayland fractional scaling protocol now compositors that is like window managers like KWIN for KDE and MATTER for GNOME can ask clients only the Wayland clients so not x Wayland actual Wayland clients to please do proper fractional scaling if they support it which means in theory we'll get to practice in a bit in theory if there is an application that supports being drawn and fractional scaling like QT you could go that to that application and KWIN can ask please draw yourself at a fractional scaling instead of drawing that at integer scaling two times as big and then downsizing which again is kind of a waste of resources so we can already understand a bit better how this will impact KDE and GNOME differently so in theory QT applications most of KDE applications are QT applications if not all they all support fractional scaling in theory so you will have a big impact you will get back to have proper fractional scaling for almost all applications in GNOME it's very different JDK does not support fractional scaling doesn't seem to want to right now so you will not actually get fractional scaling so I've seen lots of people say that fractional scaling situation is better on KDE than on GNOME not quite it's better on QT than on JDK so all we QT KDE people are happy and they will live peacefully from now on not not quite not quite nothing goes completely well from the beginning to the end so to have this you actually have to implement so yes fractional scaling for win and protocol has landed but it's just like the protocol you can actually go and see the actual merge request see the file that have changed it's interesting because it's more like just a spec and you can go through it maybe it's not fully understandable but you can get an idea to implement that you actually have to implement it into you know kwin to actually ask for this fractional scaling in welland and on QT to be drawn if asked at fractional scaling that is how I understood it so this request changes to kwin and QT so here's the thing I've been told I don't know the technical details that this might not come at all for QT 5 due to technical reasons like there are patches already but for QT 5 they might not be able to land if that is the case and again who knows we're it's too soon yet but if the QT 5 patch doesn't indeed land and it does land only for QT 6 it means that it will work only for QT 6 applications there are already some QT 6 applications out there like I think OBS latest version but currently all of KDE applications are still QT 5 maybe they will switch to QT 6 with like KDE Plasma 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 I don't know if that's going to be aligned or not but it means that you would have to wait anyway for these QT 6 applications to arrive because QT 5 might not support this feature this is very important and it's also very important to notice that in the GNOME world not much will change I think like yeah sure if you're using applications that do support fractional scaling in GNOME MATR is implementing this specification so that should improve but JTK application in GNOME doesn't seem to do fractional scaling anyway so as far as I understood it they will still be drawn and two times the size and then downscale to the fractional scaling you want so you're not getting anything there so this is funny so we are just getting with this latest protocol patch what we had for both x11 and x windows in wetland if I understood the correctly if I made any mistake feel free to say so because this was actually very complex to put all together and I wouldn't be surprised I will make sure to like pin comments or add stuff in the description if anything I've stated is incorrect I want that and really thanking all the sponsors especially because in the last videos I have not shown like the list of sponsors and that is because I usually do that when I'm using the green screen over there I haven't made videos with a green screen again yesterday's was prerecorded and I've actually received a very big donations that made sure that I got to my goal of 700 euros for this month and with some luck I will also meet that for next month because it was so much this month that some like all the money that went past the goal will switch to next month so it's going really well I really want to thank all sponsors and very soon you'll actually get a list of all sponsors as soon as I get back to the green screen I actually ordered a new one so thanks everybody for following along I hope that the explanation was somewhat useful I've tried my best and see you tomorrow with yet another video