Ubuntu Gnome: screen "zoomed" in and stuck

Question

I tried switching from Gnome (Metacity) to Ubuntu (default) because I wanted to try something with Unity. The screen appeared WAY zoomed in, with the Gnome menu bar still at the top, and the side dock momentarily visible, then disappeared. I tried switching back and logging in, and the desktop is screwed up: menus and icons about 4x the size they should be, the upper menu bar almost useless.

The screen resolution reports as 1920x1080, but is actually 1/4 of that, zoomed into the upper left quadrant. xrandr also reports 1920x1080, but if I use --scale 2.0 x 2.0, it refreshes at the correct resolution (but the menus, cursor, etc. are all wrong).

Other users are still fine; it's just my account.

Any ideas how I can "reset" this back to its correct size, etc.?

Further investigation: a screenshot came out 840x545, even though the control panel and xrandr both claim the desktop is in 1920x1080 and changing to other resolutions has no effect. — ExNASATerry, Apr 23 '15 at 17:25
Fore people accidentally enabling zoom the shortcut to enable/disable is by default Super+Alt+8 — Pablo Bianchi, May 22 '20 at 08:18

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 05 '18 at 01:10

3

What a mess...

I got stuck in this after kids mash the keyboard.

This worked for me:

Settings -> Universal Access -> Seeing -> Zoom.

Switch it to off.

answered Jul 05 '18 at 01:10

Bram

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score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Sep 04 '17 at 14:01

2

I ended up restoring all my configuration files (ie those files and directories in my home directory whose names begin with a . or have paths beginning ~/.) from a backup and that fixed it. But I never figured out what caused it.

edited Sep 04 '17 at 14:01

Zanna

70,465

answered Jul 23 '15 at 15:32

ExNASATerry

323

Ubuntu Gnome: screen "zoomed" in and stuck

2 Answers2

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