Created attachment 179693 [details] keyboard icon at 105% scale SUMMARY Some fractional scale factors (like 105%, 110%, 115%, 120%) are still affected by significant blurriness. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Go to Display and Monitor settings and change the scale factor to 105%. 2. Use the zoom function (Meta++) to see the difference in icons' pixels. OBSERVED RESULT The icons are too blurry compared to 100% or 125% scales. EXPECTED RESULT Less blurriness. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: Manjaro Linux KDE Plasma Version: 6.3.3 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.12.0 Qt Version: 6.8.2 Kernel Version: 6.12.19-1-MANJARO (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland
Created attachment 179694 [details] Keyboard icon at 100% scale
Created attachment 179695 [details] Keyboard icon at 125% scale
Created attachment 179696 [details] Brave icon at 110% scale
Created attachment 179697 [details] Brave icon at 100% scale
As you can see from the attached images, the pixels become too faded and whitish for fractional scales, while I think that they should retain a less faded color, closer to the 100% scale.
The only exception are scales like 125%, 150% and 175%. These are OK. You see the difference between the 105% and the 125% images. The darker pixels in 125% scaled icon are very similar in color to the dark background. The same should happen in some way for the 105% scaled icon but it doesn't.
Is the issue only seen in panel/tray icons? How about other UI elements in Plasma, or even in apps? Can you test in a bunch of different places on your system?
Potentially everything that scales could be affected by this issue, probably even text in some edge cases, but it is seems OK to me. Not only the icons in the tray but also icons in desktop files and menus are affected, apps included. Some icons in some apps and are not affected, though. I tested in LyX, Gimp, Krita, Dolphin, the system settings and the launcher menu. Barring Krita, in all this apps I noticed that some icons become blurred after scaling.
Created attachment 179827 [details] Image comparing icons at different scales As you can see from the image, the keyboard icon in the System Settings app becomes blurred, in particular the green pixels on the upper right are almost completely faded out, while they should remain visible like in the 125% scale (although this is still not perfect). From the nvtop desktop icon it can be seen that the color is not consistent across different scales, sometimes it's darker for some letters, sometimes lighter (for instance, the T at 110% is lighter in color than the T at 120%).
It looks like the blurriness increases the closer we get to 100%, without actually being 100%. To a certain extent this makes sense since 100% will be pixel-perfect, while anything larger but below 200% will not be pixel perfect. It appears that the lack of pixel-perfection becomes is more easily hide-able the higher the scale is. I wonder how fixable this really is. KWin may have to get extremely clever with its scaling algorithms for low fractional scales.
*** Bug 502099 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***