Ubuntu HiDPI Support

30 Jun 2016

I have recently received my ThinkPad P50 mobile workstation and intended to use it for development. And I have used VMWare Workstation to host multiple guest operating systems (since that great machine has 64 GB of memory). However as I’ve installed Ubuntu I found it very hard to read the tiny text on screen - and it is hardly possible to do any proper adjustment through system settings.

After exploring I found the following resources:

HiDPI Support in Gnome
Scale Title Bars and Menu

And the final solution would be:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings overrides \
   "{ 'Gdk/WindowScalingFactor':<2>, 'Gdk/UnscaledDPI':<92160> }"
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 2

Where the first line sets contents within an application window and the second line sets the Gnome interface.