When connecting the Steam Deck to a HiDPI monitor, I would like to have the scaling set to 150%. However, this scaling does also apply to the Steam Deck.
Is there a way to decouple the two scaling percentages in order to have 100% on the Steam Deck’s screen and 150% on the HiDPI monitor? Thanks.
Not easily. You would have to launch the Wayland version of the desktop instead of the X version.
Basically Wayland is a newer graphics stack for Linux that has more support for such things like separate scaling. Unfortunately it is still a little bit buggy with KDE. I guess that’s why Valve didn’t use that for the desktop.
The Steam Deck probably doesn’t even have everything needed to run the desktop with Wayland, so it’s probably hard to achieve.
Thank you for the explanation. I run everything at 100% then until SteamOS desktop mode also switches to Wayland.
My workaround on my Linux laptop with a hidpi display was to use half the resolution on the hidpi one. I didn’t need the high resolution anyways.
Better yet, I’d like the option to automatically boot into desktop mode when I’m hooked up to a display, complete with desktop-specific settings.
Would be a helpful feature. I can imagine that this could be easily solved with a settings toggle or in the UEFI.
Apologies if this is a dumb suggestion, I only briefly tested it, but couldn’t you simply run your display at a lower resolution? The deck would perform better and the interface/game scale would match each display correctly.
EDIT: Ah, maybe you mean the desktop, not the steam deck game interface, in which case things would look pretty bad at a lower resolution.
True, I have not specified it. Yes, I mean the desktop mode.
