All my applications scale perfectly fine (in that they just don’t change their scale factor when moving from monitor to monitor). But somehow lmms scales very weirdly. The main monitor shows the program way too large (like in the photo, that is fullscreen) and my side monitor shows the application in slightly too small scale and the text is miniscule. This video shows the difference between the two: https://youtu.be/r8IIEwjYbEo Does someone know what might be going on here? I’m running Debian 12 with Gnome 43 (seemingly X11) with the website version of lmms (stable)
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Yes, the scaling sucks in LMMS and I don’t think the devs care to fix it.
That’s unfortunate. I guess I’ll have to live with the apt provided version without vestige then…
Could you try it on Wayland? It would likely use xwayland anyway but maybe it gets the geometry reported differently and scales differently? Or even try the Valve compositor to rescale things? Thinking it loud as I’ve not tried them at all for something like this but maybe worth looking into.
Slightly off-topic. Does any open source LMMS alternative exist?
uhhhh… LMMS is open source. If your looking for other open source Daws, there’s ardour, zrhythm, qtractor, muse, rosegarden, hydrogen drum, and others.
Not that I’ve found, but they may be out there.
It seems LMMS hasn’t been updated for two years, which might imply it has become abandonware. This is bad, because it means it’s not built to use modern libraries, which features updates to things like fractional scaling and cross-display scalability. You can still use it with PipeWire (the new audio server for Linux that’s replacing JACK2 and PulseAudio), but it’s not a “first class citizen” in that regard.
Before reading my huge aside, have you tried setting scaling factor as a launch variable? Here’s a StackOverflow answer that shows you how.
In any case, I could recommend some alternatives since LMMS does seem to be abandone, PipeWire is the new shiny and that people are generally sunsetting X11.
Ardour is probably the most accessible of the open source DAW’s, but it does not have a pattern sequencer that you find in LMMS. But, learning how to edit MIDI and using keyboard shortcuts will help you to compose more easily.
MuSE was originally a tool made for composition and orchestration, but blossomed into a fully featured DAW. It’s written in QT, so it should be blazingly fast.
Traction is semi-proprietary, in that the engine itself is open source, but the applications are not. Traction Waveform Free is available though and it’s gotten quite polished over the years.
Zrythm is the “new kid on the block”, but has blossomed into a fully fledged DAW. It’s GTK based, so if you’re using GNOME it’ll work nicely with Wayland. It’s also copy-left, so there’s little chance it’ll go down the Audacity route (traitor!)
Bitwig is proprietary, but a fantastic fully featured option. It comes with a slew of MIDI effects, audio devices, synthesises, samplers and samples. Similar to LMMS it comes with a built-in sequencer that allows you to create loopable clips instead of copying and modifying MIDI clips all the time, which you play and record into arrangement. If you’d like to use your DAW in performances, this is probably the best option. Essentials cost $99, producer edition costs $199 and the full studio edition $399. It may seem expensive, but Bitwig is a professional DAW with all the bells and whistles. They to provide a demo for you.
I’m sorry if this was a bit of a sidestep from your issue, but the alternative of course is that you can try to contribute back to the GitHub repo or fork the LMMS project to add the features or fixes you want. That being said, Wayland is usurping X11 and soon both GNOME and Plasma will be going Wayland only. So I’m throwing a bone here more or less. At some point you will be forced to make the switch, or adhere to outdated software.
The choice is yours of course. Happy beat making!
LMMS development is perfectly active. The master branch sees new commits every few days. They just haven’t had a release in a while, and well, apart from maybe this scaling issue, I think that’s quite fine.
Fair enough. Checked out the issue tracker and it seems they are in the middle of rebasing the entire project, after reorganizing - which they finished earlier this year.
Can’t wait to see where they go with it! We need more innovative DAW’s on the Linux desktop. But basics like Wayland and PipeWire should be a priority. Seems like most people just default to JACK2 bridge, which is understandable - because PipeWire isn’t that easy. But that seems to be an ignored issue. They also seem to be ignoring Flatpaks, which is a mistake imho.
Also, scaling is an issue since 2016. So it won’t change until the new version is released, whenever that will be.
Well, it’s a non-commercial project. There’s going to be issues in it that may seem smart to fix, for which there’s simply no volunteer. On the flipside, there’s other issues that won’t get prioritised in a commercial DAW, which are not a problem in LMMS.
As for Wayland support, LMMS works under XWayland and I don’t think that’s going away in the next decade. But LMMS is also built with Qt, so it’s likely not a big problem to get native Wayland support.
Yeah, all of this is great, but it’s hard to recommend open source DAW’s when they are inconsistent.
Making tracks in a DAW means they should be accessible at least a decade later, for archiving purposes. Stems are great to have, but you need to be and to retain mixing chains as well - because that can’t easily be remembered.
I am looking for DAW’s to recommend, and as it stands I won’t be recommending LMMS until we see the fruits of their labour. No diss to them and maybe they need to seek funding somehow to bridge the gap so to speak.
I’m actually considering switching from Ableton Live to Bitwig, and that’s because I want to switch my creative workstation to Linux, but I also need professional features and accountability.
But, I’m also hoping ZRythm will get there in regards to clip launching and automation, so that’s where I place my bet.
Guess I’ll stiwch to Ardour then. I have tried both Ardour and LMMS in the past, but found Ardour to be too overwhelming. Thank your for writing such an elaborate comment, it really helps!
Also, I was really confused when I realized that the default Gnome installation which comes with Debian 12 is still X11. I thought gnome would have been Wayland only for some years by now. Might also just be the case because I’m using an NVidia GPU… Cuz yeah, Wayland really is just better to use now then X. That’s my experience on my ThinkPad at least. I tried installing the Wayland version, but couldn’t find it “gnome-session-wayland” in apt. I’ll look further into things there.
Debian is LTS in your traditional sense, so it doesn’t have the full Mutter feature set that current GNOME has. So X11 is probably your best bet if you’re running Debian 12.
Also, judging by this article article Wayland is on by default.
A way to check this is to find the About pane on the GNOME Settings window to see if it’s running under X11 or Wayland.
I already checked via some terminal command, it’s X11.
I remember managing to get this issue solved on my computer. Looks like a QT issue. I may not remember exactly how I fixed it, but try the solutions in this thread and see if it works: https://lmms.io/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34104
In particular run
export QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0and then run LMMS from the same terminal.Also in response to other comments, LMMS is actively being worked on (though updates have been slow) – the last commit on the master branch was from 3 days ago, so that suggests that the project isn’t abandoned but development’s just rolling slowly.
