Third party applications on HiDPI display

Question

I noticed that some apps (Google Chrome, Viber, VKAudioSaver) have problems with HiDPI dispays (everithing is too small). Other apps work nice. Strange thing is that Cromium works good (with some issues) and Chrome does not.

Is there a way to fix it?

Solution

No, there is no way to fix this to make applications scale automatically on HiDPI displays. Each application/GUI toolkit needs to be updated to cope with HiDPI. There was some talk of supporting legacy applications by automatic scaling up (as OSX does) but it has not been done yet.

Comments

[umpirsky]

Thanks! Is there a list of supported GUI toolkits? How come Chromium supports and Google Chrome not? I thought they use same GUI toolkit.

[bain]

QT and GTK should both support HiDPI now, however, applications probably need to be updated to use the newer versions. Chromium and Chrome do use the same toolkit, but Google currently disable HiDPI support when they build Chrome on Linux, probably because it does not work 100% correctly yet (see chromium bug #143619)

[bain]

btw one of the people who is responsible for HiDPI support in Ubuntu has blogged on the issue: The future looks very small. As for automatic scaling of apps he says, " I’d really like a system-wide fix, but the reality that isn’t going to happen. Not this year, I’m afraid."

[Pablo Bianchi]

Actually, you can run apps with a defined scale factor by using run_scaled.