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Is there a distro/DE/WM that handles UI scaling gracefully? Every time I try to go back to Ubuntu with my 5K monitor I'm met with the worst UI scaling options imaginable. For example, scaling up the titlebars, but leaving everything else tiny... or scaling options being limited to 1.0 or 2.0. I still want to output to the monitor at 5K, but with the whole UI scaled up. Mac OS and Windows 10 (to a lesser extent) handle this without issue. I would love to move to Linux full time, but this has been a hurdle for me.


In all the articles about ubuntu 20 that I saw today one of the main improvements mentioned was HiDPI diplay support, maybe this solves your problem.

Meanwhile, the MS Surface I'm typing this on has a blurry Task Manager and unreadable notifications because 75% of them fall off my Full HD screen.


I wonder why this has been such an issue for Microsoft. If I remember correctly, the entire Computer Management program and all of its subcomponents have no functional UI scaling. As pretty as a Retina monitor is, I'm glad that I went with a cheaper, lower-resolution monitor with good color accuracy and reliability. With subpixel hinting, it's very sharp from my usual sitting position. With laptops, I can see the advantage of going HiDPI.


YMMW but I had a really good experience with 2x scaling on a 4k Laptop Screen in standard Ubuntu and gnome. There are still some apps which ignore dpi settings (zoom) or need to be forced to scale (often electron stuff, although you can usually just zoom with Crtl+ there). Otherwise awesome sharp text and fluid.

Fractional scaling seems to be quite a mess, at least in KDE it breaks a lot of layouts.


2x seems to work well most places... it's definitely fractional scaling that sucks.




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