Ubuntu – Having trouble with HiDPI scaling in Zesty

display-resolutionfontshdpiscalingunity

I just upgraded to Zesty on my Surface Pro 3. On Yakkety, I had "Scale for menu and title bars" in System Settings > Displays set to 1.5, and the scale was fine. On Zesty, something really strange is happening, and I cant even explain.

Look at the following pictures:

Link to all above images: I can't post more than two links, so here is a link to all the links.

When the scale go past 1.5, the text and window buttons go tiny, and only the unity launcher scales properly. On Yakkety, scale at 1.5 looked like scale at 1.38, just a bit bigger (the way it should be).

How do I change the scaling to how it was in yakkety?

Best Answer

You should restate your problem as a question since it's not clear what you expect.

A patch was applied to Unity 7 for the Zesty release that claims to improve automatic scaling on HiDPI displays, but it completely broke HiDPI settings and behavior for me as well. Like you, in Yakkety and earlier releases, I had Unity's display scale factor set to 1.5, and the UI and font scaling was perfect on my 2560x1440 display. After upgrading and rebooting into Zesty my fonts shrank to tiny proportions, and now I have to settle for a scale factor of 1.38 (which is almost below the comfort threshold for my old eyes) because at 1.5 fonts appear much smaller than they do at 1.38, which is obviously broken behavior.

Here's the changelog documenting the offending change in Unity:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/7.5.0+17.04.20161130-0ubuntu1

Here's the diff between the prior Unity release and the current, it contains the new (broken) scaling code:

https://launchpadlibrarian.net/295698352/unity_7.5.0+17.04.20161111.1-0ubuntu1_7.5.0+17.04.20161130-0ubuntu1.diff.gz

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