I want to plugin an external monitor through the HDMI expansion card and use a dual monitor set up. The monitor is pretty standard 1920x1080 one. I expect to use it with a scaling factor of 100%.
I also want to keep using the framework builtin display with a scaling factor of 200%, because otherwise things are tiny.
What I would expect
To simply plug the external monitor in through HDMI, set up display config as desired and things to work out properly.
What is actually happening
Some windows are completely off when it comes to size/resolution/scaling.
For example:
I start a new firefox window.
It appears in the external monitor. It looks great.
I drag it to the built-in monitor.
Everything looks tiny. Characters are barely readable. The scaling is obviously not being respected.
Or:
Switch the built-in monitor to be the main one.
Start a new firefox window.
It appears in the built-in monitor. It looks great. The scaling is obviously respected.
I drag it to the external monitor.
Everything looks huge. The window barely fits in the monitor. The scaling is obviously not being respected.
This will happen with some apps. Other apps, like Nautilus or the Settings window, look good on both (scaling is respected in both displays, regardless of where the window first appeared).
A shitty work-around is to set the built-in monitor resolution to 1280x800. But I feel pretty stupid using that resolution after paying a kidney for a nice screen capable of 2256x1504.
What can I do to solve this? Happy to share any logs/terminal outputs that might help debug.
This could really come down to individual apps and the Desktop Environment you are using. I have the same issue with my Non-Framework Laptop which has a 4k screen and my external 1080p monitor. I’ve found the easiest solution is to set the resolution/scaling separately for when I have my 1080p monitor plugged in. (it’s a hassle, but once I set it up it was only an issue with apps that didn’t rescale themselves after the resolution change which was rare)
Ubuntu 22.x uses wayland as default display server.
Gnome is IMHO not running as smooth with it as the latest KDE plasma.
Check out if switching to X-Windows display server works better with the gnome apps.
Hi,
and even with KDE Plasma things doesn’t always go smooth. I have a new widescreen running at 100% scaling as external monitor and libreoffice is just not usable if internal display is active with 125% scaling. I ended up disabling the internal display when the external monitor is connected.
I’m using Fedora 39.
@S.H sound slike libreoffice is possibly running as a flatpak. I would install flatseal and see if you can expose the needed settings to the flatpak…or since the rpm is now available via rpmfusion if I remember correctly yoou could try installing the rpm. Either way I am using the internal at 125% on Wayland and have used an external at 100% and another at 150% and experienced no issues.
I have the exact issue as described by the original poster on Ubuntu 24.10 with a framework 13 AMD laptop I received just a few days ago. It is really annoying.
Ok after messing around I found a solution. It seems that if you have fractional scaling turned off in the gnome settings for displays then you have the problem described here. But if I turn on fractional scaling and set it to 200% (same as when I did not have fractional scaling turned on) then things work as expected.
So this works as expected (albeit with some really minor artefacts that show up very rarely and disappear quickly)
