I'd like to give a fresh description of this bug. I think I can do so more concisely, as it affects gnome-shell. I was in two minds about whether to report it as a new bug, but honestly feared if I did so it would just be marked a duplicate of this one and ignored. :-)
Also to update for current versions: gnome-shell: 3.26.0-0ubuntu1 Under Xorg only (not Wayland), the *text* elements of gnome-shell do not reflect the scale setting chosen in Settings->Devices->Displays (set to 200% to reproduce), but instead just show the text at the size specified in gnome-shell.css as if the scale was set to 100%. The non-text elements of the gnome-shell UI are scaled correctly for the chosen scale factor, so the size of icons and other elements, and the placement of them, across the full screen is correct. Only the text size is wrong. Workaround 1: Using gsettings org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling- factor to match the selected desktop scale, eg: setting it to 2.00, corrects the error in gnome-shell, it then looks fine. But this is useless as a workaround as it also scales up all text on the desktop that was already scaled correctly. Workaround 2: If the shell theme in use has a gnome-shell.css file, edit it to set the stage font-size to double its original. eg: for Arc theme, as I use, change it from 9pt to 18pt. Obviously you need to change this whenever you change your desktop scale setting and force the theme to be reloaded. Note: This bug affects the default shell theme too, but as far as I can see, that doesn't have a comparable gnome-shell.css file to fix, so I don't know how to work around it with that. (I expect it is possible, I just don't know where.) Requested fix: in Xorg (it already works in Wayland), font size should be multiplied by desktop scaling factor. This is a regression because it used to work when desktop scaling was controlled by gsettings org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor. I think especially seeing as fractional scaling didn't make it into gnome 3.26, except in experimental (and somewhat broken, I did try it) form, it's not unreasonable to expect non-fractional scaling factors to continue to work as they did in 3.24, even if controlled from a different setting. :-) Slightly wider note on HiDPI: Forcing wayland on my nvidia system seemed to work for a while, but actually became more unstable over time as more updates came in, until as of writing, both nouveau and nvidia proprietary drivers fail catastrophically under kernel 4.13, apparently crashing in the DRM supporting code, making the system completely unusable. (I had to ssh in to recover.) Well, kms isn't supported under nvidia yet, so I was asking for trouble trying to force it to work, so this isn't a bug report about that. We know it's broken. Hence me going back to trying to use Xorg. On my non- nVidia machine I'm happy with Wayland, but I'm sure I'm not the only nvidia user out there with a HiDPI monitor who's about to see their systems become completely unusable under Linux. That's a lot of users who, right now, can't step up to Wayland, and there's probably more that have other rational reasons for needing to stick with Xorg right now. And the vexing thing is, it's so *close* to working pretty well under Xorg. I've needed to do just three workarounds to get the system back to being completely usable, even with two monitors of different sizes. The first is the one described above, to fix gnome-shell's text size. The second is to explicitly set gsettings org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor to 2 as well, as some apps, including some gnome apps like Nautilus, are still obeying that and not the new scale setting in the control center. I'm sure those apps will come around to the new setting eventually but they probably should get a separate bug report. (And will someone *please* tell me where that new setting is? I could really do with being able to set and read it via a script. Presumably it's a gsettings value somewhere? But I can't find it.) The third is to use Xrandr to provide something like fractional scaling in exactly the manner that macOS does it (so I really don't feel that it's slumming it, and if it's cheating, rather than "properly" doing fractional scaling, I'm happy with the cheat to have something that works *now*). This lets me, for instance, match a 27" 1440p monitor to a 27" 4K monitor both showing desktops of the same size, with scale set in displays prefs to 200%: To get a "Looks like 1080p" on a 1440p monitor, equivalent to 133.33...% scaling: xrandr --output DP-2 --scale-from 3840x2160 --auto --panning 3840x2160 That then pairs nicely with my 4K monitor at 200% and native resolution. Or to get a "Looks like 1440p" on a 4K monitor, equivalent to 150% scaling: xrandr --output DP-4 --scale-from 5120x2880 --auto --panning 5120x2880 (Actually on nvidia I can set this via the nvidia-settings app, but it's just doing xrandr as above, so it's not an nvidia-specific method.) It would be great if this behaviour could be put behind the Displays user interface, because the underlying display system can already do it. As I said, this *is* how it works in macOS (obviously not actually using xrandr...): "Retina" modes are all 200%, but so-called fractional scaling modes are scaled down from larger desktop areas. The "Looks like 2560x1440" is, you can see if you take a screenshot, a full 5K desktop area. Their user interface even warns that it's not as optimal as the default scaling mode, but they let you do it and it works fine, and on a fast GPU you don't really notice or care it's not optimal. And xorg can do it *right now* (I'm using it this minute) using xrandr and a fixed scaling factor of 200%. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to gnome-shell in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1713323 Title: HiDPI support partially broken after upgrade to Gnome 3.25 Status in gnome-shell package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: After an upgrade this morning that took in the new version of this package, and a suite of gnome-session/gnome-settings packages, which may also be implicated, support for scaling on HiDPI screens seems to have partially failed. Partially. BTW I invoked the bug reporter with "ubuntu-bug ubuntu-session" but when I got to the launchpad page it had pre-filled "gnome-session". One presumes there's a reason for that so I've left it, especially as this does affect "GNOME" as well as "Ubuntu" sessions. But I do note a settings migrations utility in ubuntu-session which I wonder if it might be implicated. (TBH looking at it it's not obvious why, though it does reset scaling - that's not the problem, the problem is that it can't be set back to a combination that works.) Reminder all the stuff I'm reporting below as being wrongly-scaled was scaled correctly before the update that just took place. Enpass got a little help from having some QT env variables set, but that's it. Logging in under session "Ubuntu" (Wayland - on a different machine as this one being nvidia doesn't support it) or session "Ubuntu on Xorg" - also affects GNOME sessions: * The fonts in the top bar, and the menus and indicators accessible from there, are unscaled. The indicator icons *are* scaled correctly. * The fonts in the applications view are unscaled, but the icons and layout *are* scaled correctly. * Menu titlebar *text* is unscaled. close/minimize/maximize widgets *are* scaled correctly, as is the titlebar's size itself. * The mouse pointer is unscaled. * Non-Gnome apps, either QT or GTK (examples: enpass, nextcloud- client, hexchat, sublime text 3) are unscaled, or in some cases are a bit confused, with some elements correctly scaled, but again fonts are not. * Also on a personal note, Java 9 JavaFX apps are no longer scaled. (In Java 8 it was already broken; I was targeting Java 9 with my development partly *because* its HiDPI support was working in Linux.) FYI Java 9 JavaFX uses GTK3, Java 8 uses GTK2. ## What is working: * Gnome apps (eg: Terminal, Transmission, Settings, Tweaks, Nautilus, Gedit etc. etc.) are all fine. Although note those that use a "normal" titlebar (eg: Terminal) rather than an integrated one (eg: Nautilus) show small titlebar text as mentioned above * Google Chrome, Thunderbird, Firefox are fine (although the latter two aren't being updated for Artful yet, just sayin' ;-) ## What happens if I try to fix it: gsettings org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor appears to no longer be operational. Changing its value from 0 (default), 1 and 2 appears to have no effect on anything any more. It used to be setting it to 2 fixed the few things that weren't right by having it set to 0... Correction, that *does* fix it for Java 9 JavaFX, it must be reading that setting directly. But nothing else reported as broken above is affected by changing this setting. Nor in fact does setting it to 1 cause gnome apps to be unscaled. gsettings org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-size is working. I can set it to 48, double its normal size, to get back normal-sized cursors when the pointer is over newly-launched applications. But that's obviously a workaround. gsettings org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor set to 2.0, also exposed in Gnome Tweaks, unsurprisingly makes text twice as large. That "fixes" it for the applications that are reported as being unscaled above, but it also doubles the size of text in gnome apps as well, so those are now far too large for the windows they're in. Google Chrome is unaffected by this, as is Java 9 JavaFX, but Thunderbird *is* affected. I noticed a new gsetting: com.ubuntu.user-interface scale-factor, but it seems to have a nonsense-value "@a{si} {}". I have no idea if this is anything in use or if it was an intended Unity 8 thing. I didn't try anything with it. ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.10 Package: ubuntu-session 3.25.90-0ubuntu2 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.12.0-11.12-generic 4.12.5 Uname: Linux 4.12.0-11-generic x86_64 NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm nvidia_modeset nvidia ApportVersion: 2.20.6-0ubuntu7 Architecture: amd64 CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME Date: Sun Aug 27 13:03:53 2017 InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-07-30 (27 days ago) InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-GNOME 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" - Release amd64 (20170412) SourcePackage: gnome-session UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to artful on 2017-08-22 (5 days ago) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1713323/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
