GNOME3 Scaling Won't Enlarge Audacity on 4K Monitors

[Lonnie Lee Best]

I use 4k monitors at max resolution exclusively. Both my laptop and 2nd monitor are 4K at 2160P resolution.

Although GNOME 3 allows desktop scaling at 200%, 300%, etc., it isn't true desktop scaling; only minimal (and insignificant) portions of audacity's user interface gets enlarged using GNOME 3 Desktop Scaling.

To use Audacity, I'd either have to drop resolution or use GNOME 3 Universal Access > Zoom feature. Neither of these options satisfies me.

The zoom option wouldn't be so bad, if you could smoothly alt-scrollwheel-zoom, but instead GNOME3's zoom is terribly un-smooth and requires multiple 3-factor-keystroke-combination shortcuts to activate and control.

Desktop scaling a foolish idea, anyway. What would be better is "window scaling", where you can scale each applications window separately. The window manager should keep up with the last scaled-proportions of each previously launched application.

Back around 2008, Mandriva released a desktop called Metisse that allowed (seemingly infinite) fractional scaling for each window! (much less is per monitor granularity) Here's a video of that in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxsUKX6xXyE&t=40s

To accomplish this, using Metisse, you'd simply hold down shift (or was it ctrl) while resizing the window.

You could do almost anything to that window, and all your mouse actions on that window would still work accurately no matter how you scaled it. You could even do silly impractical things like turn the window up-side-down, pivot it, push the left side of the window deeper into the background than the right side, etc. And, all your interactions with that window would still work accurately. It was amazing (and done on Linux first -- 10 years ago).

When will the world catch up with what Metisse accomplished in 2008? It was way ahead of its time.

Here's an academic paper on Metisse: https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00533597/document

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: audacity 2.2.1-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-20.21-generic 4.15.17
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-20-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_modeset nvidia
AlsaCards:
 0 [PCH ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH
                       HDA Intel PCH at 0x2ffff20000 irq 124
  1 [NVidia ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
                       HDA NVidia at 0xde080000 irq 17
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Tue May 15 04:04:06 2018
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-05-12 (3 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Release amd64 (20180228)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: audacity
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to bionic on 2018-05-15 (0 days ago)