I recently got a new laptop, on which I installed a fresh new installation of Fedora Workstation 43 (that's a Linux distribution), running GNOME version 49. The laptop has a pretty high DPI, so when the default choice for Fedora and GNOME was to have Wayland's fractional scaling enabled and set to 125%, I chose to keep it.

But Minecraft doesn't play well with Wayland's fractional scaling. The issue I got was that it would render at a huge resolution, and then be scaled down to sort of awkwardly fit the screen. For example, with no resolution specifically set in the launcher, the game would use its normal default resolution of 854x480, but the actual size of the window on the screen would be 534x300. This was at a scaling level of 125%, set in GNOME's settings' Displays screen. Now, 534 is not 854÷1.25 (it's actually closer to 854÷1.6, and 300=480÷1.6 exactly), so I don't know where it's getting this size in particular. Playing in fullscreen (by pressing F11 in-game) renders at double resolution, so my computer is wasting resources rendering the game at 3072x1728 while my display only has 1920x1080 pixels.

This is a known issue (see issue MC-127399 in the bug tracker), but I doubt there's an official fix coming any time soon. It's also an issue on high-resolution Macs, it's probably the same root cause. There are forum posts from years ago that suggest that a mod may be able to add in an extra instruction in Minecraft's graphics initialization code that allows it to actually display perfectly, but idk if that's true; in any case, it's extra friction we shouldn't have to deal with.

The same scaling issue repeats with the Minecraft Launcher, where it's rendered at a super high resolution and then awkwardly scaled down, with the result that it looks way too tiny.

The obvious workaround is "don't use scaling, just set it at 100%". But that's rather unacceptable too, since I really do prefer to have it turned on, because I'd like to be able to read what's on the screen without straining my eyes trying to make out two-millimeter-tall letters. But, this does work: with the scale set to 100%, the launcher renders correctly and so does the screen.

There's a different issue, too. I downloaded the launcher directly from minecraft.net, as a .tar.gz because they don't provide an RPM, decompressed it, and ran the minecraft-launcher executable within, in a terminal. It brought up a small window with a progress bar, and once the progress bar was complete, it printed "OK" in the terminal, then did it again. Then it did nothing more. It did create a .minecraft folder in my home directory, so I ran the ~/.minecraf/launcher/minecraft-launcher executable, but that just terminated with a segmentation fault. I tried installing the java-latest-openjdk package with dnf, but that didn't fix the segfault. (By the way, you generally don't want to bother with the java-latest-openjdk-headless package: "headless" means "no GUI support", so if you e.g. try to run the Fabric installer JAR file, it won't work, because there's no GUI support for Java then.)

Based on this post, the segfault was apparently caused by the Minecraft launcher being too dumb to autodetect my video hardware – it's a laptop, so it has Intel's integrated graphics, and the driver for those is just the default Mesa driver, which works fine. So, I told it specifically to use the Mesa driver: in the terminal, I ran __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=mesa ~/.minecraft/launcher/minecraft-launcher. It worked.

I also solved the scaling issue, but for the launcher only: I can pass extra environment variables to tell it about the scaling, or rather, not to scale at all. I ran in the terminal:
__GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=mesa GDK_SCALE=1 GDK_DPI_SCALE=1 ~/.minecraft/launcher/minecraft-launcher
and the launcher looked fine.

The GDK_SCALE and GDK_DPI_SCALE environment variables apparently didn't make it to Minecraft itself, though, sadly, so it still looks too small and renders at a too high resolution if I have display scaling enabled. I'm looking at different workarounds, now.

An update on 2026-02-07: The combination of the mod WayGL with its dependencies Cloth Config and Fabric API, running on a client modded to use Fabric, sort of works? It solves the issue of the window being scaled way too low, so that at the default resolution of 854x480 the window looks like a 854x480 size window (and not tinier), but the F3 menu still tells me that the game itself is spending lots of resources running at 1.6x the resolution – so the 854x480 window is rendered internally at 1708x960. It's still a huge waste of resources, but honestly video games are that anyway, and I manage to get over 40 fps and that's an improvement over what I'm used to, so for now, this is good enough.

Page created on 2026-02-07, last edited on 2026-02-07. Index.