Improper UI Scaling on High DPI Displays

[KiwiCube]

OS: Linux (Fedora 36)
Client: Installed from rpmfusion-nonfree repository for Fedora 36
Display resolution: 3840x2160

As of the October 27th update, the Steam client no longer properly scales the UI for high DPI displays in Linux (possibly other operating systems based on other posts). The text and UI elements are way too small. Forcing scaling using the GDK_SCALE environment variable does not work. Prior to October 27th, UI scaling worked perfectly fine.

Considering that high DPI displays are extremely common in consumer hardware in 2022+, this is something that should be routinely tested for each update before this inconvenience effects users.

[Clarke's Third Mage]

I have Steam installed as a flatpak. Calling

flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam -forcedesktopscaling=X

from the command line works, but how do I edit the .desktop file to use -forcedesktopscaling? It's presumably in the Exec option, and the man page for flatpak-run seems to state that it needs to be somewhere after com.valvesoftware.Steam in that line, but I've tried all such possibilities and none of them work.

[babypunter420]

Originally posted by Clarke's Third Mage:

I have Steam installed as a flatpak. Calling

flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam -forcedesktopscaling=X

from the command line works, but how do I edit the .desktop file to use -forcedesktopscaling? It's presumably in the Exec option, and the man page for flatpak-run seems to state that it needs to be somewhere after com.valvesoftware.Steam in that line, but I've tried all such possibilities and none of them work.

To set display scaling to the Steam Flatpak, I ran

 flatpak override --env=STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING=2 com.valvesoftware.Steam 

For context, Valve folks created an environment variable [github.com] for this a month or so ago, "STEAM_FORCE_DESKTOPUI_SCALING", which can be used to force the desktop scaling in the same way that "-forcedesktopscaling" does.

[aki]

I'm using Fedora KDE, and I went in settings in 'Display Configuration'. Then I clicked 'Scaled by the System in Legacy Applications. Seemed to work for me.

[Clarke's Third Mage]

Originally posted by aki:

I'm using Fedora KDE, and I went in settings in 'Display Configuration'. Then I clicked 'Scaled by the System in Legacy Applications. Seemed to work for me.

This only works on Wayland, and the result is blurry. Presumably it means the app is rendered at 1x and then bitmap-scaled afterward.