There are some steps to take:
1. System wide Menu and titlebar scaling
Starting with Ubuntu 14.04 we have an option that helps a bit:
Scaling Support
open the System Settings (here in english:)
LANG=c unity-control-center
Go to "Displays" and set the "Scale for menu and title bars":
Since Ubuntu 17.10 the scaling can be set in
LANG=c gnome-control-center
Go to Settings > Devices > Displays
there
see also: How to find and change the screen DPI?
2. Universal Access
Go to "Universal Access" (unity-control-center universal-access
) and select "Large Text".
Note: not all applications handle this correctly, some will not reserve the extra space, so some UI elements are not accessible with this option!
3.increase unity dock size
In unity-control-center
->Appearance
->Look
at the botom, you can adjust the size
4. adapt Firefox
see: Adjust Firefox and Thunderbird to a High DPI touchscreen display (retina)
(or use Chrome, which works fine since Version 41.0.2272.76 Ubuntu 14.10, though Chrome will need to be restarted to take effect)
5. increase font in Pidgin
There is a plugin you can install
sudo apt-get install pidgin-extprefs
Then you can increase the font in Plugins->Extended Prefs
6. create starter for applications that still don't scale
Some applications still don't obey the global scaling (mainly java) for those few applications you can create a starter to only Fix scaling of java-based applications for a high DPI screen
in older Ubuntu versions, with unity-tweak-util in the section "Fonts" you can set the "Text Scaling Factor" to 2.0. This will scale the fonts in most applications to double size.
It is again a workaround, but a lighter one than the one mentioned in the comment: you can install vncserver, start an additional lightweight X session (openbox or similar) and run icaclient there.
There are vncclients which can do clipboard sync so the experience is really seamless, and you don't need to run a full virtual machine.
(I can even imagine putting icaclient to your ~/.vnc/xstartup without any window manager for a super light experience.)
Best Answer
You can (at least temporarily, until the app's next update, then you might have to do this again) solve this by adding
--force-device-scale-factor=2
as a command line parameter.This can be done by editing the specific app's (e.g. KeepassXC) .desktop file. To find and edit it, follow those steps in a terminal (ctrl + alt + t):
List the files to find the desktop file to edit:
Open gedit as admin (
sudo
can't [EDIT: couldn't, at least back in 2018] open graphical apps on Wayland. If you're on X, you can also usesudo
instead of theadmin://
pseudo-protocol), for example:At the
Exec=
line, add--force-device-scale-factor=2
before%U