Scaling displays individually under Wayland with Plasma 6 - TUXEDO Computers

If you operate several monitors on the same computer at home or in the office, you are probably familiar with the problem that you cannot scale the display on the monitors independently of each other under X11 with KDE Plasma.

Multi-monitor setup

This means, for example, that if you operate a monitor with Full HD (1920 x 1080) and another monitor with Ultra HD (3,840 x 2,160) on the same computer, and you set the scaling to 100 %, the display on the Full HD display will be easy to read, but the display of fonts, control elements or icons on the Ultra HD display will appear way too small. However, even with two or more displays with the same resolution, individual scaling can make sense depending on the intended use.

Only under Wayland

This limited functionality under X11 is due to the Plasma component kscreen. As kscreen is now labelled as deprecated due to its limitations, the current situation will not change under X11.

With Wayland, the scaling is now executed by the window manager KWin. This means that you can now set not only the scaling but also the refresh rate for each display individually.

While the global scaling factor for X11 is set to a multiple of 6.25 % in order to minimize visual disturbances in applications under X11, you can scale in 5 % steps under Wayland.

In practice

To set each display individually, first select it in the system settings under Display & Monitor and then make the relevant changes. If you then click on Apply, the display changes and you can decide within ten seconds whether you want to accept this setting or not. If you decide not to, the display will revert to the previous settings.

In addition to the refresh rate and scaling settings, X11 and Wayland differ in a few other settings at the bottom of the screen. For X11 applications that have not yet been ported to Wayland, you can decide whether you want to leave the scaling to the application or whether it should be scaled by the system.

When scaled by the system, such applications may be displayed somewhat blurred. You must decide which setting offers the better display in each individual case. If you have ticked the box for Screen Tearing for fullscreen windows,delays are reduced on many monitors. However, this setting is not supported by all graphics drivers.

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