How to set display scale to be 150% in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS?

Question

I just installed ubuntu on my 15 inch (1920x1080) laptop, and things look very small. It is displaying things as if I had a larger monitor.

Things looked fine in my windows partition, and when I checked the seetings I noticed that the display scaling setttings was set as "150% (recommended)". But Ubuntu only lets me do 100% or 200% scaling, which is abnormally large.

When googling, everyone recommends using the following command:

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"

but it is not working for me, I still only have 100% and 200% scale settings.

Setting the "Large text" setting on universal access, makes things better, but it still doesen't look perfect, and only affects font.

Is there a solution which actually solves the problem as opposed to work around it (e.g. increasing font size) ?

Solution

I had the same problem and solved it with xrandr. I followed the following steps:

1. Find out what resolution is currently being used.

   Run xrandr. It will list all possible resolutions and mark the current one with an asterisk (*).

   Here is my output:

▶xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 2560 x 1600, maximum 16384 x 16384
eDP-1 connected primary 2560x1600+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 286mm x 179mm
   2560x1600     60.00*+  59.99    59.97  
   2560x1440     59.99    59.99    59.96    59.95  
   2048x1536     60.00  
   1920x1440     60.00  
   1856x1392     60.01  
   1792x1344     60.01  
   2048x1152     59.99    59.98    59.90    59.91  
   1920x1200     59.88    59.95  
   1920x1080     60.01    59.97    59.96    59.93  
   1600x1200     60.00  
   1680x1050     59.95    59.88  
   1600x1024     60.17  
   1400x1050     59.98  
   1600x900      59.99    59.94    59.95    59.82  
   1280x1024     60.02  
   1440x900      59.89  
   1400x900      59.96    59.88  
   1280x960      60.00  
   1440x810      60.00    59.97  
   1368x768      59.88    59.85  
   1360x768      59.80    59.96  
   1280x800      59.99    59.97    59.81    59.91  
   1152x864      60.00  
   1280x720      60.00    59.99    59.86    59.74  
   1024x768      60.04    60.00  
   960x720       60.00  
   928x696       60.05  
   896x672       60.01  
   1024x576      59.95    59.96    59.90    59.82  
   960x600       59.93    60.00  
   960x540       59.96    59.99    59.63    59.82  
   800x600       60.00    60.32    56.25  
   840x525       60.01    59.88  
   864x486       59.92    59.57  
   800x512       60.17  
   700x525       59.98  
   800x450       59.95    59.82  
   640x512       60.02  
   720x450       59.89  
   700x450       59.96    59.88  
   640x480       60.00    59.94  
   720x405       59.51    58.99  
   684x384       59.88    59.85  
   680x384       59.80    59.96  
   640x400       59.88    59.98  
   576x432       60.06  
   640x360       59.86    59.83    59.84    59.32  
   512x384       60.00  
   512x288       60.00    59.92  
   480x270       59.63    59.82  
   400x300       60.32    56.34  
   432x243       59.92    59.57  
   320x240       60.05  
   360x202       59.51    59.13  
   320x180       59.84    59.32  
DP-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

2. Set the desired resolution with xrandr -s 7, where 7 indicates the 8th entry from the list displayed in the first step (counting starts with 0).

This should do the job. To double check the outcome you can run xrandr again to verify that the asterisk has moved to number 7. This answer is based on this youtube video I have found.

Comments

[Marco]

Yea, that solution seems to be the one that works best, but I still feel like there should be a better solution for this. Because when I see my friend's laptops with Ubuntu, they look just fine by default, but mine looks comparitively tiny. Something must be wrong with my Ubuntu.

[giague]

I don't know, if it's a fresh install you can try to download driver for that specific video card. I have a dell xps 9560 and initially I had lots of problem issued from video card driver that wheren't present and I had to download directly from nvidia.

[Marco]

Thank you for your response! I think this is close to what the correct solution. I ran the command, and it turned out that 0.66x0.66 made things too large, so I did 0.8x0.8 (125%) instead, and while things look ok size-wise, they were all blurry.