I have troubles setting up xrandr such that the screen looks “normal sized” for terminals and gui applications like firefox and thunderbird. I’m on arch linux and I wanted to ask if anyone would like to share their xrandr setup.
Currently, I get the “most normal” look with setting the Xft.dpi in ~/.Xresources to 120.
latest versions (Firefox and Thunderbird.) have that in the settings drop-down.
Thunderbird: check for Density/Font size
Firfox has only an integrated zoom function, but it works pretty well.
But, for display, fonts etc, the right approach would be to tell the software the real dimensions first.
What I do, is choose the right settings for the DPI: DPI Calculator / PPI Calculator and configure that in the font configuration →
Display size: 8.7" × 9.66" = 84.04in² (22.1cm × 24.53cm = 542.21cm²) at 259.26 PPI, 0.098mm dot pitch, 67216 PPI²
So you want to configure 259 PPI in the DISPLAY font settings → under KDE Plasma it would look likes this
Note - I have a bigger 4K 32" screen, so the data in that screenshot is not right. But you would have to replace the 144 with 259 for the 2K screen on the 13" FW.
Then you can play with the font sizes on a per application base.
The reason I do that, is to make the display manager aware of the physical resolution and size of the screen. This makes for a very sharp experience under linux.
PS: I only use Wayland now. So your experience may vary.
Welcome to the community!’
I will need a number of other details. Distro, desktop environment, X vs Wayland?
That said, visual appearance scaling should generally be acceptable in Wayland expect with electron applications. Usually the biggest gripe is folks saying things look fuzzy in GNOME, but have had cleaner visuals with KDE.
Fractional scaling in X is going to be a bad time most likely.
I’m running Arch Linux, with GDM login manager and Cinnamon desktop, and good old Xorg. I didn’t set Xft.dpi, rather in the cinnamon display configuration I set “Monitor scale” to 150%. This was hidden behind an “enable fractional scaling (experimental)” toggle until pretty recently. Anyway, it works pretty well for me.
Interestingly, xrandr shows:
$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 3006 x 2004, maximum 16384 x 16384
eDP connected primary 3006x2004+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 285mm x 190mm
2256x1504 60.00*+ 48.00
So the physical display is 2256x1504 but the virtual resolution is 3006x2004. Notice that 3008 / 2 * 1.5 = 2256, and 2008 / 2 * 1.5 = 1504 (and 3008x2008 is very close to 3006x2004) so … I guess it’s rendering at 2x scale, then factoring in the 1.5x? Anyway, it looks good.
EDIT: In font configuration, I have Text Scaling Factor: 1.0 (regular default), Hinting: slight, Antialiasing: greyscale. I don’t exactly recall how much I had to tweak these, but I think you really don’t want sub-pixel/rgb text smoothing when you’re doing the display-level hi-dpi scale-factor thing.
Sorry, I thought I wrote it in my initial post. I’m using arch, X, i3 as window manager and login manager is sddm.
Ah that seems similar to
xrandr --newmode "3000x2000_60.00" 513.44 3000 3240 3568 4136 2000 2001 2004 2069 -HSync +Vsync
xrandr --addmode eDP-1 "3000x2000_60.00"
as suggested in [RESPONDED] Using elementary OS on the Framework Laptop