Gala lacks the ability to scale multiple monitors differently.

[Riley Trautman]

Gala managed to detect and scale itself for my 3k screen (which is a nice feature), but I almost always have a 1080p screen plugged in as well. My 1080p screen ended up with scaling meant for 3k, which would be alright with a smaller 1080p screen, but mine is actually physically larger than my 3k screen making windows look really silly.

I've been informed that this may not be fixable until Wayland, but I hold onto the hope that some xserver genius can figure it out.

[Cassidy James Blaede (cassidyjames)]

For what it's worth, the only OS's implementation I've seen tackle this is OS X. They "solved" it by completely separating the displays as their own workspaces, and never allowing a window to overlap two displays.

[Naftuli Kay (naftulikay)]

@Cassidy so the newest Fedora 24 allows GNOME 3.22 to use Wayland, and it does handle independent displays properly. Scale factor for dragging windows is set to the display which holds most of the window. It's a little janky, but it IS usable and is really nice. Hope to see elementary using Wayland soon.

[Moritz (7-login)]

Yep, GNOME does it extremely well under Wayland, and it's actually the main reason for me (and I guess many others with high-resolution laptop screens) why I just can't use any other desktop environment.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/Displays contains some nice ideas on that, although I'd find it even more awesome if we can completely get rid of the scaling steps and use a slider instead.

[Moritz (7-login)]

Oh, and I really hope Juno also support fractional scaling with Wayland? The Q/A on https://blueprints.launchpad.net/elementaryos/+spec/hidpi-support doesn't sound like it, but Gnome/GTK 3 supports that feature extremely well - non-GTK3 applications look just a tiny bit blurry without being completely broken like some applications with 2x scaling under X11, and all GTK3 apps look perfectly sharp and HiDPI. As Elementary is based around GTK3, I'd think this would be something that can be implemented here?

[Corentin Noël (tintou)]

Juno won't use Wayland so it still won't support it.
Btw we migrated to GitHub, Gala project can be found here https://github.com/elementary/gala