Electron 38 ships with Chromium 140 which landed this change which made the Ozone (Chromium’s platform abstraction layer) feature detection “auto” by default (from, like not feature detecting at all, apparently). It bases it’s decision on the XDG_SESSION_TYPE environment variable.
Previously I always had to add those flags to the command line:
/usr/bin/obsidian --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland
That works but is annoying: you either need a terminal open and remind yourself to not use Albert (the launcher I’m using).
I also tried patching the installed .desktop files:
# copy and patch a desktop entry (one-off)
desktop-file-install --dir=$HOME/.local/share/applications /usr/share/applications/obsidian.desktop
# then edit ~/.local/share/applications/obsidian.desktop and add the flags to Exec=
It worked, but I was looking for a more permanent solution.
This answer on the Unix Stack Exchange hinted me to use the ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT environment variable, which is supported by electron between version 28 and 38 (at which point it was removed, because unnecessary).
I initially tried to edit my ~/.profile:
export ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT=wayland
However, this wasn’t working:
- Albert was still launching apps with low DPI.
- Launching the app from the terminal (without flags) finally used HiDPI, but I was back to square one.
What worked was embracing systemd (that I don’t know enough about) and discovering a new way of setting environment variables:
cat ~/.config/environment.d/electron-hidpi.conf
ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT=wayland
Another reboot later and Albert was finally launching apps with HiDPI.
That will do, until all my apps are not using Electron 38 ;)