Xfce Forum

mister_OKb

Member

Registered: 2020-02-08

Posts: 1

need advice for XFCE 4.14 and HiDPI laptop (3840x2160)

Hi XFCEers,
I'm a relative newbie to XFCE, and am just learning how to configure it.

I currently have Xubuntu 19.10 (which uses XFCE 4.14) happily installed on a PenguinPro desktop, bought in 2014 from ThinkPenguin.

I recently got a new Librem 15 laptop, which comes with PureOS, with Gnome as its default DE, and I didn't like it.

So I had a USB image of Ubuntu-MATE 19.10, which installed just fine and looked good, but I then decided I wanted to have XFCE on the laptop instead, so I tried installing Xubuntu 19.10.  (yes, I am a bit fickle about my desktop environments.)

Well, this laptop has 4K/HiDPI graphics, with 3840x2160 resolution, which is new territory for me.  And perhaps for Xubuntu as well, because I got errors at the grub boot-up, which I bypassed by typing Help.

After using some terminal commands like xrandr I was able to get a usable resolution to intall Xubuntu.

Since then, I have been able to make adjustments, but there are still some icon/text objects which are cramped in certain windows, etc.  In general, it doesn't look nearly as nice as my 4.14 desktop.

I have read a number of forum entries on HiDPI setups which usually will say something like "after 4.12, this will be easier because of GTK3 integration, etc."

Has someone compiled a revised list of HiDPI tricks with 4.14?  I think I may have made unnecessary or counter-productive "fixes" because I'm new and the forum suggestions all seem to relate to pre-4.14 setups.

Could someone point me to a list (or create one ;-)) of tips for HiDPI under 4.14?

Sorry for the lengthy post.
Thanks.

alcornoqui

Member

Registered: 2014-07-28

Posts: 832

Re: need advice for XFCE 4.14 and HiDPI laptop (3840x2160)

Did you...?

1. Go to Settings Manager > Appearance > Settings > Window Scaling and select 2 as the scaling factor.
2. Go to Settings Manager > Window Manager > Style and select Default-xhdpi theme.

The steps above would set 2x scaled resolution for Xfce and other GTK 3 apps.

Scaling for Qt 5 apps should be set manually.

Source:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI#Xfce
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI#Qt_5

But it's not Arch specific, should work more or less the same in your setup.

edit: Welcome to the forum!

Last edited by alcornoqui (2020-02-08 23:27:43)