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Ubuntu 18.04 and 4k display

This weekend I took the plunge and upgraded from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS. The main reason was support for TLS DNS in systemd. Turns out I was in for a bigger surprise.

My work laptop is connected to an external 27" 4k display, a Dell P2715Q. In Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial I could scale the display to 1.5 so that the desktop would look just the right size.

2x scaling would make the desktop too large wasting the precious real estate of the 4k screen, while 1x would make everything ludicrously small. So small that it would even be hard to correctly use the mouse to click a button, select some text, etc. I'm not sure how the scaling worked under the hood, but it was good enough. Not perfect, because some fonts would have a not-right feel as in spacing between and around glyphs would appear to be off. Some fonts handled the 1.5x scaling better than others, for instance Liberation Sans Regular seemed to be more affected than a monospaced font like Droid Mono.

With the upgrade to 18.04 I was switched to Gnome 3 by default and much to my surprise the 1.5x scaling option was gone. After some research it turns out the Gnome police decided not to include it, unless using Wayland. After a few tries, including the ugly workaround of setting font scaling to 1.5x, I decided to try to login to Unity again.

I decided to switch back to Unity because over the years I've got used to it, and muscle memory kept interfering while using Gnome. There are also other Gnome quirks that I did not like, but habit was the main reason.

Imagine how surprised I was when I found out that Unity still has the 1.5x scaling option! Guess what, I'm going to stick with Unity for now.

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