SUMMARY I use the Wayland session because of the scaling feature, which makes everything in a good enough size to fit on the 1366x768 display of my laptop. It is sharp on the display but blurry when taking a screenshot. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20220708 KDE Plasma Version: 5.25.2 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.96.0 Qt Version: 5.15.5 Kernel Version: 5.18.8-lqx1-1-liquorix (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i3-7020U CPU @ 2.30GHz Memory: 11.5 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® HD Graphics 620 Manufacturer: LENOVO Product Name: 81FE System Version: Lenovo ideapad 330-15IKB
Can reproduce on neon unstable. Operating System: KDE neon Unstable Edition KDE Plasma Version: 5.26.80 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.100.0 Qt Version: 5.15.6 Graphics Platform: Wayland
There seems to be some misunderstanding about scale factors less than 100%. If you have 75%, the application will use 100% because smaller scale factors are not supported. kwin then downscales the surfaces to 75%. Any kind of downscaling or upscaling is going to produce some visual distortions, it can't be sharp.
I think what they mean is that it's less sharp in the screenshot than it actually is on the screen. KWin does a remarkably good job of downscaling or upscaling the screen's content when displaying it on a monitor.
With the following commits, I think we've improved image quality with screen scales less than 1x about as much as we can: https://invent.kde.org/graphics/spectacle/-/commit/00c90e574ae93b146e703b8f5a7cb6db42fda465 https://invent.kde.org/graphics/spectacle/-/commit/2c184fc77d6e569e6d3624579c7158b0181cdd10 https://invent.kde.org/graphics/spectacle/-/commit/ff778b4f9f96a8ff1a6cab99448a5eea822b07a4