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I have a 3200x1800 ultrabook and I would like to decrease the resolution of the screen 2x. The problem is that once I do it all the GUI elements increase in size too much

enter image description here

Is there a way how to scale down the size of everything that Gnome Shell shows ?

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  • What do you mean by decrease resolution ? You used a 1080p resolution ?
    – hg8
    Sep 3, 2015 at 8:34
  • sorry for not being precise ... by the decrease I mean from 3200x1800 to 1920x1080
    – dawe134
    Sep 3, 2015 at 9:34

1 Answer 1

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Your best bet is to keep the 3200x1800 resolution and just change the interface scaling factor of GNOME.

Command line method:

Open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and execute :

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 2

You can reset this setting later by running :

gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor

Graphical method:

You can use the gnome-tweak-tool:

sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool 

Go to "Windows" and set "Window Scaling" to 2:

gnome-tweak-tool screenshot
Credit to PCWorld for the screenshot

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  • 2
    Thanks, it seems that this fixes the issue to some extent on my primary builtin 3200x1800 display. However, once I connect a secondary one which has a native resolution of 1920x1080 the secondary display shows the same issue. Setting the scaling factor to a lower value doesnt really improve the situation.
    – dawe134
    Sep 3, 2015 at 9:46
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    Screenshot of the current situation. The right part is the external display, the left is the builtin ultrabook display.
    – dawe134
    Sep 3, 2015 at 9:53
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    THANKS! Although I have the gnome screen scaling bug the thread seems like a great resource.
    – dawe134
    Sep 7, 2015 at 15:31
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    Neither of these options work on Ubuntu 17.10, in Gnome-Tweak-Tools there is no "Window scaling" option on this page (but others like in the above screenshot).
    – Thomas S.
    Nov 9, 2017 at 8:11
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    On my Ubuntu 17.10 I tried doing gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']" but it didn't add any settings. I didn't have an HDPI section in the tweak tool. The only thing that worked was gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 2 after logging out and logging back in. Scaling-factor can only take integers
    – Alexander
    Nov 15, 2017 at 2:18

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