@Kresimir for sure I tried that and tweak global scaling vs font size as trade off between icon sizes and content text. Did not fix my problem unfortunately. Either the external monitor appears with very large menus and windows or the laptop apps are too tiny. At least with my 4k laptop.
Cinnamon allows defining scaling separately on different screens. That seems to be missing on kde. I wish kde could do that too, prefer qt over gtk. Another neat feature is that cinnamon appears to scale qt apps fine with global scaling. Will have to test more. I know that gnome for example had problems with scaling qt apps, then icon menus in these apps appear tiny. Only fix is to start those apps with a script or terminal to autoscale them. Its quite painful, too many tweaks for something that should work out of the box. That was part of my last few weeks distro hoping odyssey. Linux is awesome but high dpi screens, it still is tricky.
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Hmm I moved from Cinnamon because of some bug or annoyance in the past (canât remember what it was, but i vaguely recall some glitches and the need to force restart the DE sometimes). But having this feature would potentially make up for any other minor thing. I will definitely give Cinnamon a go again when I get a bit of spare time. I remember at the time of trying this DE out that I was extremely enthusiastic about it, with that âaaah, no more need to DE-hop ever againâ. But then some minor annoyance came along and I moved on. It was the same thing with MATE. In the end I settled with XFCE, with the same âaaah, no more need to DE-hop ever againâ, but with a bit improved immunity to minor annoyances 
The truth is all of these 3 are very similar and very love-able. Maybe it was Thunar that made me stick with XFCE and Thunarâs less than stellar integration with Cinnamon and MATE (which might have been a thing down to my lack of ability to configure stuff).
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I completely feel that. I donât mind Nemo to be honest, and it feels a lot like dolphin but to me nothing beats good old pcmanfm. . . Or even just midnight commander, which play well on basically everything.
So, ya. I understand. And Cinnamon is much more limited for configuration than say KDE. Hell, even XFCE. But the bonus is that the configurations for me that are there are basically how I set up my kde anyway, AND they all work without breaking something else. Which I think helps the DE overall be more stable than others.
And Iâm getting lazier. Literally the reason I ended up with a second Cinnamon install - I got home from vacation. Installed KDE, several things I was trying to setup werenât working. Got frustrated because I just wanted to watch football. Installed Cinnamon, plugged in TV and then watched the game while I finished setting up Cinnamon on my 3k laptop on a 4k tv and that was it.
Anyway. As people get over hopping I guess, maybe someday we all find our place to be. And I like my computerâs spicy. And yet, in a few weeks, I may be somewhere else again anyway (this is my fun computer after all).
Me too at some point in the past. When I connected an external monitor to my lapto, after some work time it started flickering like a disco bowl, that was linux mint. Then I moved away from cinnamon for a while but I really like it from the look. I also like gnome, but it bugs me that its such a fuss to get icons to display on your desktop, and when I start installing my extensions it starts to get buggy for me.
I would consider MATE too, once the high dpi thing is fixed too.
Certain Qt apps will have tiny icons and text on cinnamon (e.g. qt-creator, nextcloud client, zoom).
Here is an easy fix for my future reference and hope it will help someone else as most forums were unclear to meâŚ
#open ~/.profile in your favorite editor
nano .profile
#append these lines and save
export QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0
export QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS=2 #(adjust as per your display)
#for multiple displays (not tried yet)
export "QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS=1;1" #(adjust as per your display)
Have to try the multi-display options. I wonder if they take values < 1?
I run (XFCE) with QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1.5 - which, with my dpi settings matches well with the GTK on my 4K screen. Be aware there are still a few apps out there that need their own adjustments - including some browsers. They can often be started with a command-line parameter - for instance Chromium-based browser can use âforce-device-scale-factor=1.5 on startupâŚ
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Thanks for the tip. I was wondering about that, the above solution at least fixes nicely 3 of my apps at the same time, instead of changing them separately like I did before with zoom.
I am also wondering about the multi-display, still need to try it out. Would be good to have <1, my laptop has a higher resolution than my screen, which resulted in very large icon and text on the external monitor using xfce or kde. Now i use cinnamon, that problem is solved at least for gtk apps.
My case is a bit different - but my main monitor is 4K (28 inch) and my secondary is 1200x1600 20 inch - so getting the setting different would help for the same reasons. Not luck with that syntax yet - but more testing to comeâŚ
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