Text/Icon/Window Sizing Issues

[psytech140]

I am running Debian Jessie with Gnome 3.14.2 on a Macbook Pro 15" with retina display. My resolution is currently set to 2880:1800 and any time I try to lower it, the whole screen goes to black (even if I change it to something in the 16:10 ratio) and I just have to keep force restarting when doing that. I want to lower it because a lot of stuff is really small. Certain aspects of windows in programs are so small, and in order to properly view stuff on my web browser I have to increase the magnification to around 250% for it to be reasonable. Some things seem normally sized in the windows, and thus make things awkward on the screen, especially in chrome. Is there a way to fix this without having to change my resolution and/or font sizes? Making font sizes bigger on the gnome tweak tool makes things look a bit more awkward because it squeezes the text into small spaces. I would rather keep a higher resolution for a better picture, and changing it seems to mess things up. Here is what my browser looks like (without magnifying). Notice how the font size in the bookmark bar is disproportionately large compared to the buttons in the top right to close/max/min the window.



And this problem isn't just in the browser, but for example, in matlab everything is extremely tiny. I want to make everything larger, not just the text... Can anyone help me here? There must be a simple solution to this I'd imagine.

[mhofert]

Hi,

I just want to say that I'm 'affected' by the same 'bug' as well. I call it a 'bug' because I don't think this is wanted behavior in Debian's default DE Gnome. I have a HQD display (2560x1440) and everything is *huge*, even the cursor. I also installed LXDE recently and there the problem was the other way around, everything was really tiny -- but I preferred that as it allowed me to display a lot of content on my 14" Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon (3rd gen., 2015).

I found this post http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions ... ome-debian but I also hope for a simpler overall approach.

Cheers,
Marius

[mardybear]

@psytech140: Try logging in to Gnome Classic i believe it's called. At least you will have a useable system until you are able to fix the problem. Or if it is an actual bug, until a bug fix is released.

@mhofert: LXDE/openbox is almost infinitely configurable for font sizes and appearance via obconf GUI (appearance tab, fonts) and another GUI i believe is called appearances from the main menu. You can manually update config files, but the GUI is fast and easy. Title bars can be right-clicked/undecorated to save space on small monitors or undecorated permanently via config file.

[mhofert]

the GUI is fast and easy

... that's what I thought, too..., but I was rather disappointed that with google-chrome, for example, if I clicked and dragged the window from one side to another, I could see that the window produced 'shadows' of itself... and I could hear the fan coming up just because of that...

[mardybear]

@mhofert - I meant the GUI tools are a fast and easy way to change appearance settings, rather than muck around in the config files. If you have problems running Gnome3 and now some sort of shadow effect running openbox, which is lightweight, then you may need to confirm you are utilizing the best graphic driver. I don't want to hijack psytech140's issue, so won't reply to this thread again. If you are still having problems, consider starting a new thread.

[mhofert]

... I found out what's (part of) the problem: Tweak Tool -> Windows -> HiDPI -> Window scaling. Set this value to 1 and you get a reasonable font size. The problem is that this only applies to system windows such as Settings or Terminal but not, e.g., Emacs or Google Chrome Windows.

[mhofert]

... and I dealt with the huge 'paddings' around the menu/title bars with a trick described here: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions ... ome-debian That overall solves my problem, but I'm still frustrated about
1) The amount of work it takes to make something so basic to work as expected. I think 'surprised' is also a good word here, as I would have never expected that a *default* desktop like Gnome 3 does not automatically deal with this (after all, a HQD display is really not something special anymore in 2015...)
2) ... Google Chrome still completely messes up font sizes... No solution for this yet.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I would have never expected that a *default* desktop like Gnome 3 does not automatically deal with this

The problems you are having seem to be with programs that are not part of the official GNOME desktop -- for example, have you tried Ephiphany instead of Chrome/Chromium?