For anyone coming back to this thread, after some more trial and error trying to get the best designer experience on my Linux workstation, I’ve learned a few more things dealing with the designer on HiDPI displays.
The KDE desktop environment seems to handle the launcher portion of the designer best out of the box.
The arguments I use to get correct display scaling, and font smoothing are the following.
-Dsun.java2d.uiScale.enabled=true;-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on;-Dsun.java2d.uiScale=2.0
There is also some large appearance gains when using a Wayland session as opposed to X11.
Update:
Added “-Dsun.java2d.uiScale=2.0” because it’s essential on Gnome DE distros and it doesn’t hurt with KDE.