High-DPI Linux?

December 2, 2013 4:27 PM

I have a Yoga 2 Pro, freshly purchased, with an insanely high resolution screen (3800 x 1800). I generally run Xubuntu in a VM alongside windows, but I'm struggling to make it truly workable. What is the state of the art in resolution independence when it comes to Linux? What window manager should I be looking at, are there guides and tweaks etc.?

KDE is mostly OK, and I plan on trying out enlightenment soon, but I'd love to learn from others if possible.

If there are hacks for Virtualbox that would resolve this issue, that would also be very welcome.

posted by jsturgill to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

It looks like HiDPI support is in the works for GNOME. There seems to be a few extra branches you need to check out to get it to work, though.
posted by Fortran at 4:41 PM on December 2, 2013

I believe it's also in the works for Unity 8, which is slated to be released with Ubuntu 14.04 (but not stable enough to be the default), and the default DE for Ubuntu 14.10. See also this Reddit thread and this other Reddit thread. I couldn't find anything about Xfce hi-res support though. It does tend to be more conservative than GNOME, KDE, and Unity. At some point they'll have to tackle it as these resolutions become more mainstream, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
posted by pont at 11:19 PM on December 2, 2013

Response by poster: Enlightenment, as currently in the Ubuntu repos, wasn't so hot.

I'll be installing and trying out Gnome 3.10 soon, as apparently it has better support.

I also attempted to set the resolution to 1600 x 900 using randr, which should scale nicely. The screen would go black after changing the resolution using the display manager and then revert back after the timeout period. Any thoughts on what might be causing that?
posted by jsturgill at 9:00 AM on December 3, 2013