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!

A recent batch of Unity and Compiz updates landed on Ubuntu 16.04, and it broke my fractional scaling. Someone already filed a bug, but nobody seems to give a shit. So what do you do? Roll back, obviously. Except rolling back Unity isn’t that simple — too many dependencies, plus core components like Compiz. If you’re going to roll back, you might as well go big.

A friend bought a gaming laptop and brought it over for me to install the OS, since he plays World of Warcraft on it. After the install was done, he fired up WoW and ran straight into a problem… Once you hold right-click to move the camera, the speed is insane — so fast you can’t control it at all… Changing the mouse speed doesn’t help. Changing the in-game mouse speed doesn’t help either. Some searching later, it turns out this is a bug Blizzard has actually confirmed, related to HiDPI support under Windows. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/10102720358?page=25 Specifically, if you have scaling enabled, you’ll hit this.