09-03-2020, 04:46 PM
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.
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.