Global scale-to-fit?

[DarkManiels]

Greetings Mobianites!

Poking around a bit recently I discovered that there appears to be a global scale-to-fit setting for phoc that is set to false by default. To see what would happen I set it to true:

Code:

gsettings set sm.puri.phoc scale-to-fit true

After doing this I noticed that I can now dismiss multiple Evolution notifications at a time (with the "Dismiss all" button) from the notification itself, whereas previously that button was off the screen so I had to either dismiss them one-by-one or open Evolution to dismiss them all. It also seems like I no longer have to individually turn on scale-to-fit with new applications, but I've only installed a few apps since making that change and maybe they were ones that would have already fit anyway.

Does anyone know if this is really what this setting is intended for? And if so, why would it be set to false by default?

[Hyz]

Not sure why it's disabled by default, but I've enabled this with no negative side effects that I've noticed. Thank you for sharing this trick!

[fernando_c_m]

Does anyone know if this is really what this setting is intended for? And if so, why would it be set to false by default?

I didn't know about this global setting, but it certainly does what you suppose it does. 
gnome-majohngg will scale nicely after setting this value for instance. Telegram-desktop, which had an issue also.
Maybe some apps crash if started with scale-to-fit set to true, but I haven't found any yet.

[DarkManiels]

I've been meaning to get back to this post to update it. I communicated with the folks at Purism and they told me they set the default to "false" because they would rather see developers fix scaling problems with their apps so we'd have truly responsive apps instead of having to do a global hack like this to essentially hide the problems (i.e., doing it this way we don't even know which apps actually have problems scaling, so we can't go to the developer and ask them to fix it). They are working on a better way to implement scale-to-fit on an individual app basis, using a GUI approach rather than the current command line, shot-in-the dark approach we have to use. They also said they're going to remove the global option once they have all the kinks worked out with the per-app approach.

I understand their concerns, and would also like to see all apps just work well on the Pinephone (or Librem 5). But we're way off from that right now, and even the per-app scale-to-fit often doesn't work when there are popup menus or notifications involved. So for now I'm still using the global approach. But when they roll out the improved per-app method in an upcoming release of phoc I will set the global default back to "false" and see if I can get the same results doing it individually for each app.

[Hyz]

Interesting to hear their reasoning behind this decision!

But we're way off from that right now, and even the per-app scale-to-fit often doesn't work when there are popup menus or notifications involved.

That's the biggest issue I had prior to enabling this flag. Hopefully this improved scale-to-fit will fix this. But until the global flag gets removed, I'm keeping it enabled.

[DarkManiels]

I did let them know about the issues with popups and notifications not being caught by the per-app scale-to-fit, and they said that was a bug they would look into. So hopefully they really will fix it before taking away the global option!