In 2024, with GNOME 45, Wayland, and 1.25 fractional scaling, regular DPI displays still look better than HiDPI displays. This is a photo of Discord on two laptops side by side.
The blurry one is the HiDPI display from Framework 13. The sharp one is a regular DPI display from Dell XPS 13. Both laptops.
The difference is even more stark in person.
Even the screenshots from the Framework are blurrier than the screen shots from the Dell.
This might be a bit of a hot take, but fractional scaling is generally not worth it, it almost always leads to some apps rendering things blurry and uses slightly more graphics resources. I’ve got a Framework 13 and I can say that just turning on the Large Text feature in Accessibility settings does the trick for me. This obviously doesn’t work for everyone’s needs, but if you’re like me and just want things to stay crisp but big enough to read, this could be a viable alternative.
For apps on supported compositors (not Discord, it’s even experimental in Chromium), fractional-scale-v1 works quite nicely depending on the scale. Qt6 can have some minor artifacts at times when using some custom scales like 115%