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[mattkhan]

I have a laptop which dual boots KDE and Windows 10, it has a QHD display and MC looks pretty normal on Windows (after the bunch of fixes applied a few versions ago to make it work on such resolutions). However on Linux, it seems like the scaling has gone so everything is tiny. If I change the scaling in View > Size (e.g. to 150%) then it still looks bad as the fonts don't appear to scale accordingly so all the text is tiny. If I change the font size in the Options > Tree > Font setting then some bits of the UI change size while others don't (e.g. the settings screen doesn't change.).

some pics attached showing 100% vs 100% with font 16

 

[mattkhan]

same comparison at 150%

[mattkhan]

125% and a bigger font is usable, looks a bit ugly though as the increased font size seems to mess with the spacing.

expected behaviour or something missing from the linux build?

[mwillems]

The linux builds require setting both the UI scaling and the font size separately to get the scaling to work correctly, but as you're seeing the math isn't necessarily one to one.  I just tweaked both until it looked right.

[mattkhan]

OK thanks, I'll do the same.

Not a great user experience mind you as it is not an obvious solution and still ends up looking a bit ropey.

[mwillems]

OK thanks, I'll do the same.

Not a great user experience mind you as it is not an obvious solution and still ends up looking a bit ropey.

I agree, but unless you're using Gnome the HiDPI experience on Linux requires setting scaling separately for fonts and for window elements in X11 anyway (for example in KDE you have to set scaling for fonts and window elements separately).  I found the JRiver settings odd at first, but later realized it was nice to be able to set them in a coherent separate way instead of getting some of the weird interactions that the windows version has if you try to change font size while also using JRiver's UI scaling.

[mattkhan]

Is the desktop environment relevant? I thought MC (re)implemented all of this functionality itself so was largely decoupled from the underlying environment. This is just an assumption though so not sure if it is really true.

Anyway I can only comment on this device, on Windows it looks fine out of the box so I haven't had to tweak at all whereas on Linux it looks bad. The font and window scaling looks a bit odd on Linux as the spacing seems off to me, if it looks worse and/or is more fiddly on Windows then that seems like a somewhat pyrrhic victory to me

For completeness, here's what it looks like on Windows on this machine out of the box

[mwillems]

Is the desktop environment relevant? I thought MC (re)implemented all of this functionality itself so was largely decoupled from the underlying environment. This is just an assumption though so not sure if it is really true.

The desktop environment doesn't affect MC directly; I'm saying that for many Linux users scaling must be set in two places as an ordinary matter, so the fact that MC requires one to set scaling in two places wouldn't be unfamiliar or different, whereas windows users expect to set the scaling one place and have everything sorted.  It was more a comment about likely user expectations than about how the DE interacts with MC, if that makes sense.

Anyway I can only comment on this device, on Windows it looks fine out of the box so I haven't had to tweak at all whereas on Linux it looks bad. The font and window scaling looks a bit odd on Linux as the spacing seems off to me, if it looks worse and/or is more fiddly on Windows then that seems like a somewhat pyrrhic victory to me

Oh I don't think it's a victory exactly; it would be better if one could change only one setting and have it work, and better yet if it could get automagically detect the resolution or get the scale factor(s) from the DE's environment variables and scale automatically rather than requiring the user to manually set it.  My comment was more of a negative comment about how weirdly the windows font settings work when you're using scaling, the absence of which is a beneficial side effect of the Linux setting separation.

In re: spacing, have you verified that you're using the same fonts on Linux and Windows?  I don't think Linux ships the windows default font that MC uses (you need to install the proprietary windows fonts separately), and it may be that they would look more similar with the same font.