Let me guess... You're running an X.Org based WM/DE?
X11 Doesn't support fractional scaling properly . So some DEs will simulate it by scaling the apps the same way you scale a rasterized image like a PNG or JPEG, and as a result everything looks blurry. You'll generally also have the same issue with XWayland apps on a Wayland display.
The best way to combat this? Try to use Wayland native apps as much as possible.
2nd best? Use non fractional values for scaling (x1 or x2 instead of x1.25)
How dare you use standard display tech on any commercial laptop bought within the last 5+ years. You should be like me, vastly superior in every human way, with my old tech. I am very smart.
Mac OS has has this nailed down basically perfectly for over 10 years now, even windows has been great in the last 5+ years. Not having scaling done right in the age of 4k displays being cheap is a sin.
Use KDE, especially Plasma 6. Hasn't been an issue for me FW13 12Gen Intel since the last few Plasma 5 releases. I tried GNOME for a while but it can go pound sand.
HiDPI is pretty good though, I'm running Fedora Workstation (GNOME) on a 4K 14" Thinkpad X1 Yoga with 2.5x scaling. Everything looks crisp except for a few applications like Audacity and Minecraft.
I’d love to switch back to Linux but this is why I moved back to macOS for good several years ago. Once I got a taste of reading code at 4k/retina (faux-4k) – not to mention the better font support – there was no going back, for me at least.
If it’s considered user error for someone to want a high DPI display in 2024, then I can only surmise that people who share that sentiment have convinced themselves that more eye strain is a worthwhile tradeoff for FOSS. Commendable but a tough sell.
Until I disabled my nVidia GPU and switched to Wayland the only problem I had with my HiDPI screen was with mixing in a low DPI display. That was easily solved by just running the HiDPI display at half the resolution. Now with Wayland even that problem is gone.
Do you even have blurry fonts with Wayland applications? There must be something wrong with your configuration.
I was excited for the Framework 17 but the GPU in the addon module they're offering at launch is rather pathetic, especially for the price. Maybe one day there'll be other options but it's really not compelling as a performance laptop.
framework 16 over here, running hyprland, the only blurry fonts have been in Darktable, everything else is fine (telegram, discord, vscode, thunderbird, firefox, waybar, quodlibet, thunar, alacritty, seahorse, synology drive client...)