>> > My laptop's 13" screen has a native resolution of 3200x1800 which >> > makes everything crazy small on-screen. Is there a good method for >> > telling Xorg or xfce4 to compensate, or should I one-at-a-time my >> > applications? I can adjust the resolution down but it makes the >> > colors look weird. >> >> >> After some more research, it turns out this is a pretty well-known >> problem on the Linux desktop (it's called HiDPI) without a good >> solution... except for this: >> >> https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=159064 >> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94816 >> >> The solution is to patch xrandr with the capability to do nearest >> neighbor filtering and run xrandr like this: >> >> xrandr --output eDP1 --mode "3200x1800" --scale "0.5x0.5" >> >> It works great. >> > > I don't see how it can be called great. This is pretty much losing most > of the benefits you have with a HiDPI screen, by just making it be > almost the same as a 1600x900 screen, except the scaling involves some > nearest neighbor filtering, which sometimes might be good, sometimes > bad, and never as good as rendering things in HiDPI. > > For HiDPI you want the toolkit to support it properly and configure it > as such. GTK+3 is such a toolkit, but outside of GNOME (where it works > out of the box), I don't know what exactly it takes to set things up. > Plus you'll need a solution for your gtk2/whatever other things, > preferably one that doesn't make things worse for gtk3 things, like > that xrandr hack does. > > Probably something like > gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 2 > combined with something for the other stuff that doesn't mess with the > former. > Outside GNOME, maybe exporting GDK_SCALE=2 works, if the dconf setting > isn't honored outside it.
I hope you'll agree that sounds like a mess. When I said it was great I meant in comparison to running 3200x1800 with defaults (unusable) or running 1600x900 (blurry and hard to look at). Admittedly this is not a good place for Linux desktop to be. Is there a good way to run xrandr when X starts so it doesn't have to be run per user and will apply to lightdm? - Grant
