If you have a nice 27" or larger 4K monitor, you probably don't need this info. But if you have a laptop or a small-ish monitor, you may need to make some adjustments to make it more readable. The work detailed here was done on a Lenovo Yoga 730 with a 15.6" 4K monitor.
The default install of Kubuntu 22.04 really left this laptop unusable due to the sizes of the fonts in several separate areas. These are, in order of appearance;
The easiest solution is to change the GRUB graphic mode to something smaller than 3840x2160. I edited /etc/default/grub and enable this line:
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480
by removing the "comment" character "#" (number, hash or pound sign) and running "sudo update-grub". I left it 640x480 but you can choose something more suitable to your liking.
2. The sddm boot menu was readable, but still much too small for my liking. There's advice on the internet to add a file to /etc/sddm.conf.d to enable "Hi DPI" but all my research revealed this does not actually work - and it didn't for me. For reference here's what I did:
Created the file /etc/sddm.conf.d/hidpi.conf and put this in it:
but the results were unchanged. I don't know if this ever will actually work, but you never know, maybe an update to sddm in the future will make that happen. In the mean time, I found another solution - manually set the DPI to force the sddm screen to scale larger. My screen defaulted to 96 DPI so I doubled it to 192. To do this another file goes into /etc/sddm.conf.d - dpi.conf. Here's the contents:
This did the job perfectly.
3. The desktop was easy. I just set the global scale to 200%. Again, there's options here other than 200% but that "normalizes" the desktop look for me.
4. Finally, the terminal. Here, I just used a larger font. The settings exist in /etc/default/console-setup. You can edit this manually but it's far easier to use this command:
just step though the re-configuration choices. You can leave everything as is and just change the font. I used TerminusBold 32x16. This worked great.
Could you just change the resolution to 1920x1080? Sure. but then you're not using the native resolution of your screen. With these changes, my laptop is totally readable AND I can watch movies at 4K.
The default install of Kubuntu 22.04 really left this laptop unusable due to the sizes of the fonts in several separate areas. These are, in order of appearance;
- grub
- sddm
- the desktop
- the terminal
The easiest solution is to change the GRUB graphic mode to something smaller than 3840x2160. I edited /etc/default/grub and enable this line:
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480
by removing the "comment" character "#" (number, hash or pound sign) and running "sudo update-grub". I left it 640x480 but you can choose something more suitable to your liking.
2. The sddm boot menu was readable, but still much too small for my liking. There's advice on the internet to add a file to /etc/sddm.conf.d to enable "Hi DPI" but all my research revealed this does not actually work - and it didn't for me. For reference here's what I did:
Created the file /etc/sddm.conf.d/hidpi.conf and put this in it:
Code:
[Wayland] EnableHiDPI=true [X11] EnableHiDPI=true
Code:
[X11] ServerArguments=-nolisten tcp -dpi 192
3. The desktop was easy. I just set the global scale to 200%. Again, there's options here other than 200% but that "normalizes" the desktop look for me.
4. Finally, the terminal. Here, I just used a larger font. The settings exist in /etc/default/console-setup. You can edit this manually but it's far easier to use this command:
Code:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup
Could you just change the resolution to 1920x1080? Sure. but then you're not using the native resolution of your screen. With these changes, my laptop is totally readable AND I can watch movies at 4K.