How do you deal with high dpi on Linux?

General system Newbie
18

Alright, here is what happened the last 24h.

  • I planned to do a backup and install cinnamon but obviously fell asleep, guess too much red wine and @fbodymechanic gave me a bad conscience to do a fresh install in the middle of the week (lol) …
  • this morning 7 am couldn’t resist, thought about a plan of attack to install cinnamon
  • lunch, I failed quite miserably, thought it would be a 20 min affair, went to work where internet is faster
  • 8 pm today, came back from work, happily used EnOS with cinnamon with my 32’ screen

Here my recommendations, it boils down to 1) choosing the right installation method (or install of nvidia drivers), 2) display setting, 3) minor fixes for grub/login using the terminal:

  • From the start, I decided to do a fresh install after my backup, its easier/faster, less of a hassle rather than installing cinnamon and remove kde. Just took my EnOS usb stick and did the online install.

  • First install failed my purpose. Cinnamon dealt quite well with high dpi from the go, but the second I connected my external screen and changed the global scaling, I ran into trouble with glitches and screen tearing :frowning_face:. I did not install the nvidia driver from the EnOS installer because I have hybrid Intel/Nvidia cards. Went through the wiki, tried to install the nvidia driver (dkms) and optimus via terminal, that’s where I failed miserably and started loosing time, abandoned that.

  • Restarted my usb installer and start from scratch. choose the first option for the installer (the one with non-free, nvidia drivers). In the online installer, just chose the base system, cinnamon, nvidia driver (even though not recommended for hybrid cards).

  • This solved the problem nicely for my system. I had now a driver for my nvidia card, the nvidia settings app was installed. I could then connect the external monitor, and scale the laptop and monitor with different resolutions, easy peasy. I will still have to find a fix to switch intel/nvidia if I am worried about laptop battery time at some point, but at the moment this does not bother me, high dpi laptop and external monitor with resolution work nicely together :grin:

The setup I used under Settings/Displays was user interface normal (make sure to select this option for both screens, then 200% fractional scaling for laptop (my resolution 3840x2160) and 100% for external monitor (my resolution 2568x1440).

few minor fixes for the grub menu and login screen that appears tiny:

#fix grub boot menu by editing its config file either using nano or vim
sudo nano /etc/default/grub

#in nano or vim find the line with GRUB_GFXMODE= auto, and change to  desired resolution
GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768x32

#press Ctrl+o then Ctrl+x to be back at the terminal, then apply settings with:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

To change the resolution of the login screen, in cinnamon just go to Settings/Login Window and in the first tab there is an option to change the font dpi, for example to 180 or 300. Then reboot and enjoy! :beer:

I have actually distro hopped quite a bit and tried most of the DE. My conclusion is that cinnamon is probably the only DE that can deal with two screens with high dpi and different resolutions. Also the nvidia driver must be installed on hybrid cards, just using the internal intel card will not bode well and lead to either screen tearing, glitches, or others.

If I am wrong, I would happily see someone that can explain how they dealt with it using another DE than cinnamon, very curious to learn more. I am surprised that kde did not work out, but hey thats the beauty of open source, the freedom of choice.

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