{"id":3523,"date":"2019-10-21T10:00:11","date_gmt":"2019-10-21T15:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/?p=3523"},"modified":"2022-08-18T16:25:06","modified_gmt":"2022-08-18T21:25:06","slug":"simple-hidpi-monitor-scaling-with-wayland-in-ubuntu-18-04","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/simple-hidpi-monitor-scaling-with-wayland-in-ubuntu-18-04\/","title":{"rendered":"Simple HiDPI Monitor Scaling with Wayland in Ubuntu 18.04"},"content":{"rendered":"

My company<\/a> helped me purchase a new Dell 7390 XPS 13 Developer Edition<\/a>. The biggest hurdle I had when setting it up was getting my external monitor to work correctly. It’s a standard HD monitor (1920×1080), and the laptop screen is 4K (3840×2160) – known as a “HiDPI” monitor because while it’s run at 3840×2160 it’s scaled 200% so actual humans can read the fonts.<\/p>\n

This presented a problem because the scaling was affecting the external monitor – it was appearing as if the resolution was half of HD – 960×540. Hello 1990s!<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

X Scaling Problems<\/h2>\n

So I turned off the external monitor, but some applications still weren’t scaling right on the 4K (200% scaled) laptop screen. I began to experiment with individual application scaling factors<\/a> like QT_DEVICE_PIXEL_RATIO=1<\/code> for QT applications such as VLC and Zoom, and --force-device-scale-factor=2<\/code> for Spotify.<\/p>\n

It was fine for a week but I really missed my 2nd monitor, so I invested some time getting to know xrandr, trying to get things working<\/a>. While doing so, I bumped into other issues using xrandr like:<\/p>\n

xrandr: screen cannot be larger than 8192x8192<\/code><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then I found some chatter about Wayland and its ability to handle scaling automagically<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Wayland: Scaling the Easy Way<\/h2>\n

First, WTF is Wayland? It’s a next-generation X server that replaces Xorg<\/a>. It was apparently included as default with Ubuntu 17.10 (which I skipped because I was on LTS). Then because it was deemed to not be ready for LTS prime-time, it was installed on 18.04 but Xorg became the default again.<\/p>\n

So how do you switch? Easy, before you log in, just click the gear icon and select “Ubuntu on Wayland.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After logging in, enable gnome’s “experimental” per-monitor scaling, by runing this command in a terminal:<\/p>\n

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features \"['scale-monitor-framebuffer']\"<\/code><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here’s the conversation on reddit I found regarding these settings:<\/p>\n

Comment<\/a> from discussion gitfeh’s comment from discussion "Dual monitor scaling one HiDPI and the other not"<\/a>.<\/div>\n