scale monitors differently without everything becoming blurry?

Question

problem

My Laptop has a 1920x1080, 34.4x19.3 cm Monitor and I connect it to a 1280x1024, 37.6x30.1 cm external Monitor. Since the external monitor has a 30% lower pixel density, everything on it looks substantially larger.

How could I configure my system so that everything is displayed equally large on both monitors? I would also be willing to consider using another Desktop environment to accomplish this.

(Using Ubuntu 15.10)

unsatisfactory/partial solutions

I can change the dpi of the external monitor (as explained here), but this leaves everything on my external monitor blurry.

gnome-tweak-tool allows you to set a scaling factor that makes the content of all Windows larger or smaller. The problem is of course, that this applies to both screens. Is it somehow possible though to specify different scaling factors for different monitors?

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 28 '15 at 10:56

Ubuntu (and most linux distrost) come with xrandr command. Bellow you can see the sample output of xrandr where I have one internal laptop LVDS screen, and external VGA-0 screen

$ xrandr                                                                                       
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 2390 x 768, maximum 8192 x 8192
VGA-0 connected primary 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm
   1024x768       60.0* 
   800x600        60.3     56.2  
   848x480        60.0  
   640x480        59.9  
LVDS connected 1366x768+1024+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 193mm
   1366x768       60.0*+
   1280x720       59.9  
   1152x768       59.8  
   1024x768       59.9  
   800x600        59.9  
   848x480        59.7  
   720x480        59.7  
   640x480        59.4

As you can see there is several resolutions to chose from.

One could use xrandr --output VGA-0 --mode 1024x768 --output LVDS --mode 1024x768 to bring them both to the same resolution. The point is - this can be scripted and used as autostart command on every GUI login.

There are ways to also add new modes. For instance, here's an example from man xrandr

Forces to use a 1024x768 mode on an output called VGA:
              xrandr --newmode "1024x768" 63.50  1024 1072 1176 1328  768 771 775 798  -hsync
              +vsync
              xrandr --addmode VGA 1024x768
              xrandr --output VGA --mode 1024x768

Refer to Arch Wiki for detailed explanation on that

However, GUI is quite capable of doing that same task - review System Settings -> Displays settings

scale monitors differently without everything becoming blurry?

problem

unsatisfactory/partial solutions

1 Answers1