Compiling Unity 7.4.5 to Fix UI Scaling

A few days ago I had dinner with some big shot from Beijing, and we got to talking about whether GNOME Shell is shit or not these days…

We arrived at the same conclusion: GNOME Shell is a piece of shit.

And it’s not just that “GNOME Shell itself” is shit — it’s more that “the whole pack of shitty GNOME Shell developers” is shit.

GNOME Shell has been talking about supporting fractional scaling since last year. The feature was already mostly done last year, with only final fixes left. It was supposed to ship in GNOME Shell 3.26, but they ran out of time and it slipped to GNOME Shell 3.28. The GNOME devs even wrote a blog post bragging about how amazing GNOME is, how it has every feature, fractional scaling included.

Yet a year later, with GNOME Shell 3.28 Beta about to be released, the fractional scaling feature is still nowhere to be seen.

Is nobody working on it? Of course not!

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/merge_requests/3 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/merge_requests/5

It’s been over a month and nobody’s merged it… nobody’s reviewed it either. No idea what the devs are doing.

They’re fast when it comes to their own GNOME Recipe, instantly responsive to any request, but on the key features they just leave it sitting there with nobody caring.

You say GNOME Shell is shit, they tell you to file a bug report. You file the bug report, they say they don’t have time to fix it — so you write your own patch and submit a merge request, and they don’t review it or give a damn about you… and when they finally do give a damn three or four months later, they review it and say your variable names aren’t nice.

I’m sometimes reminded of that time the Deepin Linux project lead said on Zhihu: foreign Linux developers don’t take users seriously at all.

He got looked down on by the noble open source chefs for that. But sadly, he was telling the truth.

The only desktop distro that currently has fractional scaling that meets my needs is Ubuntu with Unity. By the way, KDE has it too, but it doesn’t support different scaling for different monitors. It does under Wayland, but only 1x and 2x.

But after the recent Ubuntu update, this feature got broken too.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1750273

Basically, 1.5x scaling gets forced to 2x. I dug around for a while and found it’s related to this update:

https://code.launchpad.net/~azzar1/unity/round-gtk-scaling-to-closest-integer/+merge/313459

So what to do? I decided to compile the code myself and fix this shit.

sudo apt-get build-dep unity
bzr branch lp:unity/7.4
cd unity

Then revert that patch in the directory and rebuild. If you’re interested, don’t forget to bump the top version number in debian/changelog so it doesn’t get overwritten.

sudo dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

At first I thought about just compiling and installing it myself, but it turned out the compile-install process throws a whole pile of errors in Unity’s own shitty Python install and test scripts. I didn’t want to compile-install at all anyway — packaging directly is faster.

Finally, install the compiled deb, log out, log in, problem solved. You’d best compile on Ubuntu 16.04, and be sure to fetch the 7.4 branch, since 7.5 targets Ubuntu 17.10 and above. And unfortunately, compiling Unity on 18.04 fails — seems related to too high a GCC version. Only the Test module fails though, and it works without tests. Someone’s already looking into it, hope it gets resolved soon.

Today I saw GNOME Shell is holding a Release Party. No idea what there is to party about for a new version that has no features worth a damn and just coasted through. For now I’ve decided to stick with Unity until any DE offers fractional scaling.