Introduction
Are you using Ubuntu in combination with a HiDPI 4K display? Then you are definitely familiar with your windows and text being too small after logging in into your Gnome session; a typical result of wrong scaling settings indeed.
This guide will demonstrate how to permanently set your Ubuntu scaling factor to 200%.
The Commands
To start off, open up a new file in which the user-desired scaling factor is defined:
sudo nano /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/90_hidpi.gschema.override
Set the scaling factor to the value of 2 (meaning 200%):
[org.gnome.desktop.interface]
scaling-factor=2
Now save your configuration file and exit from your editor.
Apply the changes with the following command:
sudo glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas
That’s it. Now reboot your computer and enjoy your applied 200% scaling factor.
4 comments
Hello Eero,
Thanks for the post, this worked well.
Br. Kanwar
Thank you! I was finally able to get this working!
Hey Raz, thank you for your heads-up!
It’s indeed more appropriate to define a custom user defined config file, instead of messing around in Gnomes native
/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.desktop.interface.gschema.xml
config file. I’ve since updated this guide to cover for that “best-practice”; Not least because this is also the way I’m scaling Gnome these days.Unfortunately, scaling with decimal point numbers is not supported by
gschema
. But a solution is in the works since I’m also working with virtual machines and need proper fractional scaling for them. Thanks for your input and stay tuned!Hi, really good post!
I was finally able to change default scaling on my virtual machine.
Eero, some people mention to make a “local” copy instead and leave defaults untouched. What’s your recommendation?
The other thing is that I tried a value of 1.5 instead of 2 and gdm refused to start. I was able to SSH though and fix it.
I recommend that you make sure that you can connect via SSH in case you have a typo. You can also do CTRL-ALT-F2 to get a text-based login prompt.