Re: HiDPI, laptop, external display, font size...

[Daniel Pocock <daniel pocock pro>]

On 14/10/16 08:32, Daniel Svensson wrote:
> Hi,
> While HiDPI works a lot better nowadays, there are still some parts
> that needs a bit more polish. I use a ThinkPad X1 Carbon 4th gen, with
> a 1440p 14" screen which gives about 210 PPI. To get reasonable UI
> that isn't too big or too small I use Window scaling of 1, and a
> Scaling Factor of 0.5, with fonts in Gnome, Emacs and RXVT set to
> 16px.
>
> When I get to work and connect my Dell 28" 3840x2160 monitor at about
> 160 PPI, I've configured my setup to disable the laptop monitor as I
> only use that external screen. What I get to now is the need-of-polish
> part. The GDM login screen is now insanely tiny. I can barely read
> what it says, and once logged in everything else is ofc also tiny.
>
> My remedy to this is to change the Scaling Factor back to 1.0, and
> everything is at the expected size on the external monitor again.
>
> I do this every morning (0.5 -> 1.0), and every evening (1.0 -> 0.5).
> It would be nice if Gnome remembered the settings per monitor basis
> instead, and thus dealing with the switching on its own.
>
> How are other people dealing with this?
>
> I'm currently using Fedora 25, using Gnome 3.22.


We discussed[1] this in Debian last year and started a wiki[2] about it

One key point that came out of the discussion is that it is not just a
GNOME or X issue, some notable applications (e.g. Firefox[3]) also do
their own thing.

It would be great to track this issue across distributions and desktops,
choose a strategy to resolve it and finally put it to rest.

Regards,

Daniel


1. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2015/08/msg00107.html
2. https://wiki.debian.org/MonitorDPI
3. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2015/08/msg00110.html