I recently got a new 4k external display and my laptop only supports 1080p and I was wondering how I can scale the screens independently on Cinnamon to make the 4k screen usable on it’s full resolution.
While the display settings outlines “User Interface Scale” it seems to be for both displays.
xrandr could do that… but i was wondering that Cinnamon is known for goo hdpi support it should allow to set this independently for each display
Here’s what I am seeing.
The closest I got is if I set the scaling to 2x and then fractionally scale the laptop screen but with that the main display looks fussy.
I am facing the same issue. Gnome Wayland has the best support for such situation. But I have one such laptop converted to cinnamon last week. Trying to figure this out. The worst case you have to scale down the 4k resolution. This is the most annoying part of desktop Linux that needs to be fixed.
Edit: also couple of discussions about this
In the second link shown above my conclusion last year was:
The setup I used under Settings/Displays was user interface normal (make sure to select this n soption for both screens, then 200% fractional scaling for laptop (my resolution 3840x2160) and 100% for external monitor (my resolution 2568x1440). Basically clicking on each monitor, make changes then apply.
Don’t know if that still works.
Totally doable with Cinnamon. The question I have is, does your laptop’s GPU support 4K? You say though that “my laptop only supports 1080p”.
what does command xrandr show for you?
you can pastebin it also:
xrandr | eos-sendlog
The screen is only 1080p but it can certainly output 4k just fine to an external.
The GPU is - Intel CometLake-H GT2 [UHD Graphics]
Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 3000 x 1920, maximum 32767 x 32767
eDP1 connected primary 1920x1080+1080+692 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 340mm x 190mm
1920x1080 60.00*+ 48.00
DP1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP3 connected 1080x1920+0+0 left (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 700mm x 400mm
3840x2160 60.00 + 30.00 29.97
2560x1440 59.95
1920x1080 60.00* 59.94 59.93
1280x720 60.00 59.94
1024x768 60.00
800x600 60.32
720x480 60.00 59.94
640x480 60.00 59.94
VIRTUAL1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
I’m running the external at 1080p at the moment.
That seems to work but things look a bit fuzzy now.
I think it’s as good as it gets without Wayland unfortunately. Gnome maybe your friend.
As in using Wayland as well? That’s something I could try but I always had issues with Wayland, especially with my clipboard manager (clipit) not working.
Yes, gnome Wayland works pretty well nowadays and it is possible to switch login to xorg.
I tried the scaling on cinnamon this morning, doesn’t work that well for me on hybrid Nvidia. I also use i3wm, then when scaling down resolution one doesn’t notice it too much.