Comment # 28 on bug 1202837 from Stefan Hundhammer

Atri, please don't get me wrong: I understand your pain. But please also
understand OUR pain: Whenever we start messing in that area, things (and
users!) start exploding; because inevitably we break it for some users while
trying to make another group of users happy.

What this whole stuff really calls for (loudly!) is an XDG standard. That
became a lot more apparent with the widespread use of HiDPI displays; but the
problem was there for many years, even without HiDPI.

Desktop scale factors were always desperately needed. I recall when I set up a
living room PC to watch movies on, and I still wanted to be able to read button
texts from my couch. I had to use totally fake DPI values to make it useable.
That was some time around 2007 or so.

Fast forward 15 years, and we now have to copy with old low-res displays in all
shapes and sizes, with HiDPI displays, with handheld devices with insane
resolutions (and small displays). There must be a way to adapt to all of that,
and only the user can really tell what's appropriate in the situation.

But when we start messing with all those little details in every single
application, things are bound to go downward fast. I am convinced that this
needs to be done on the toolkit level (Qt / Gtk / ...) with communicating the
user's wishes from some central desktop control center; nobody wants to set
this individually for every single application. And that needs a standard that
must be agreed upon by the desktops; just like all the other XDG standards.

I personally have no strong opinion if we should round to integers or allow
multiples of 0.25 or whatever; but what we really can't do anymore (because
it's really embarrassing) is fonts everywhere that are either tiny or huge with
nothing in between. Yet that is what users constantly complained about.

YaST needs to work smoothly with all major desktops, plus in the inst-sys where
there is only a very minimalistic infrastructure. So we can't simply set
anything to fixed values; some users will definitely complain.