Dtyjlui

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 15.04 with Gnome 3.16, which is working really great on my machine (despite what I found on many forums around the web). Having a high DPI screen however (13.3" with 1920x1080) I need to scale the entire system to use it. There is a setting for that in the TweakTool, but it only seems to accept integers as scaling factor.

Does anybody know about a workaround for this? Scaling by two is way too large for my screen. The value I want is closer to 1.2

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

I checked with my Fedora 21 install where I have Gnome 3.14.2 and it doesn't seem to be possible to set your desired value:

[btegge@za21 ~]$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 1.2

invalid character in number:

  1.2

   ^

[btegge@za21 ~]$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 1,2

expected end of input:

  1,2

   ^

My assumptions:

• There is a another setting to achieve what you want. The only thing that comes to my mind is font rendering related, though that is not exactly what you are looking for.


• It's a mistake that the key only accepts integers as datatype and you should file a bug.

I am not sure if this got resolved or not, but there are two scaling options in Gnome to achieve this. The "window scaling" attribute that you are doing either accepts 1 or 2 (or 0, but this is "undefined" I think). If you want, you can do text scaling, which accepts floating numbers.

In Gnome Tweak Tool, this is available under the font section. Alternatively, you can access both in the dconf-editor under org.gnome.desktop.interface I have noticed this option tends to work better, as Gnome Tweak Tool can sometimes not update setting correctly, causing weird scaling issues.

Non-integer scaling is not (yet) supported in Gnome and therefore Ubuntu. Athough, it is possible to achieve with some workarounds using xrandr, which involves an upscaling and a subsequent downscaling, I cannot recommend this as it is very CPU/GPU intensive and comes with other quirks and problems and does not necessarily lead to the desired result. There are a lot of ongoing debates and argues on r/linux over at reddit if you are interested and here is also an article from one of the elementary devs (a distro based on Ubuntu) who talks a bit more about High DPI in depth: link. Hope this helps a bit.