Hello,
I have a chance to add a new monitor to my aging setup, and I’m wondering if I should consider a 4K display or avoid it.
I’d be using it for my regular job, but the monitor would also moonshine as the main display for Krita (KDE). I’ve been reading of all sorts of problems with multi-monitor Linux setups involving HiDPI – some people even advise to stick with 1440p, but this may be obsolete.
Do you use Krita with a 4K display? What’s your experience? Thanks!
I even combined three displays because I was curious. On the left 1920x1200 24’‘, in the middle 3840x2160 32’‘, on the right 1920x1080 37’', all together driven by a SUSE Linux Tumbleweed VM, and it works.
Michelist
I have Manjaro with KDE Plasma and have two 4k monitors for drawing and one WQHD for gaming. I recently switched to Wayland desktop session (a few weeks ago) because it allows fractional scaling and UI scaling per display while X11 only can scale everything or nothing (and gave me more and more issues recently) and that got pretty annoying with displays of different resolution and size. I didn’t use Krita much on Wayland yet. It is not ported yet and runs in X11 compatibility mode only and that can lead to some issues.
Thanks Takiro!
I was wondering if Wayland could scale displays independently and I couldn’t find a straight answer. Maybe that depends on Desktop Environment.
I’d be super curious about your experience with graphic tablets+Krita on your setup. My experience with Fedora 40 (Wayland, hard install) and ubuntu 24.10 (Plasma 6 and GNOME, on VM) was miserable – I wrote a separate post about it.
Mainly, the cursor did not move when I used the tablet pen, only with mouse. Maybe you could reply to that other thread of mine, that would be great!
After some testing of a few distros with different resolutions, I don’t think that 4K makes sense with my setup.
In my other thread about Wayland + Krita (Wayland allows monitors to be scaled independently) I installed Krita .appimage over a few brand-new distros and played with it for a short while.
Unfortunately Krita (and some other apps) does not run native on Wayland. What that means, Wayland will give you two options for scaling: 1) app does not follow Wayland scaling (=remains at 100% and will look tiny on HiDPI) or 2) Wayland scales the whole app - unfortunately Krita is unable to scale its interface (fonts, icons), and looks blurry.
Krita still looks fantastic on my 27" (W)QHD monitor (1440p), and at this point adding a 4K to the mix offers no returns. As of today, a 1440p monitor is roughly 60% of the price of its 4K equivalent.
When Krita goes full Wayland, the equation will change. Or maybe you already have two 4K displays and are happy with running Krita on that setup.
I have a 4K and 1440p display, and handling the scaling on Linux is a nightmare. I mean, if you are dedicated, want to use Linux on principle, etc. you can definitely put up with some inconvenience and make it work. But if you just want to use your system without nonsense, then Windows works much better.
Of course Windows isn’t perfect, has its bugs, etc., but simple stuff like getting your desktop to display properly “just works”.
For Linux, I highly recommend using a resolution that doesn’t require scaling and ensure that all your displays are the same resolution. That way you avoid a lot of annoying problems.
I’ve been working on 5K iMacs since they came out, paired with a 1440p monitor (both 27" in size). It’s maybe just my poor old eyes, but for most of the purposes I’ve used them for, the benefit of 5K was marginal over 1440p. The only time I intentionally preferred 5K was when viewing technical drawings in PDF format, which had a lot of fine lines and a lot of tiny text, and that really was easier to read close-up, without zooming in. For most of the content I was working with, seeing fine details in 5K graphics was way less important than having large work area uncluttered by UI, which 1440p has enough. It just feels weird to invest in 1440p when the beautiful 4K monitors are available.
Maybe going one ultrawide monitor would work best in this case? Yeah, likewise, I wouldn’t invest in 1440p now.
It’s a tough one. I’m just saying you will likely run into some trouble with it.
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