Comment by kn100 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kn100 | Hacker News Reader

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W.r.t your hidpi/non-hidpi issue - a 'proper' solution is slowly making its way out of the woodwork. Wayland apparently will allow us to solve this problem, but in the meantime here's my solution if it'll help you.

I have a 4k dell xps 13 and a 2k monitor. I have this script set up to run on boot.

https://gist.github.com/kn100/7193667d393fcf34d4d5c6c359a695...

What this does is it forces your internal display to run at exactly quarter resolution (ie 1600x900), and adds your second display at its native resolution to the setup. Since the panel is running at a multiple of its native resolution, it still looks fine, if not quite as pixel perfect. This has the nice side effect of making the laptop feel a bit faster since it's driving a quarter of the pixels it usually has to drive. This makes the monitor panel do the scaling too, which is nice. With this setup, both displays will be running at a roughly similar DPI which will make scaling issues... a non issue!

I hope this helps.

A couple of thoughts: * That's exactly the point. I don't want to give up on my 4k resolution, I specifically bought a laptop with high resolution. * I'm running Ubuntu on my Dell XPS 15. I solved the problem by scaling the external display (--scale 2x2 in xrandr), which also solves the problem but allows me to keep the 4k resolution on the built-in display. The only issue is, that select programs with nonstandard UI components (telegram client) break, everything else works like a charm * Thanks for the gist.

BTW, this is the command I'm using:

sudo xrandr --output DP-3 --scale 2x2 --mode 1920x1080 --fb 7680x2160 --pos 3840x0 --output eDP-1 --mode 3840x2160 --pos 0x0

DP-3 being my external full-HD display, placed to the right.

What errors do you get if you try without sudo? I have a script that runs xrandr commands, but doesn't need sudo.

You're very kind to offer help like this, but from the article: "... the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best" quote seems apt.

There's a tool called arandr that'll let you do most of this visually: I use it everytime I rearrange my monitors.

This is insane. I thought issues like these were solved problems ? Is there no distro/display server that just works for a setup such as this?

The wayland protocol solve this. I do think that at least gnome 3.34+ and wlroot based window managers support this, but it needs to be confirmed as i don't have this setup and just used ratios on same dpi monitors. Not sure how it works with X based app also that are run through xwayland.

The irony of this comment, given the content of the article.

I was aware of the irony - I just chose to provide help because some of us don't have an option to use anything other than desktop linux in this configuration and the gist is helpful to others. It's clearly not a just works solution, as I stated in the comment, but it does solve the problem until Wayland comes together and provides us with a proper scaling solution.

Epic comment :)

If it makes anyone feel better wrt their religion of choice, Mac users have been using scripts in this spirit to force WiFi reconnection on wakeup.

Sent from my iPhone

Do you have any links or feature tracker for the Wayland development?

The gripe is coming from the fact that Apple had this fixed in 2012.

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