Any Way to make everything on screen bigger without resolution change?

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@qubesn00b you want exactly what @tech3599 mentioned.

Custom DPI setting.

DPI stands for dots per inch (printing) and is often used interchangeably with PPI (pixels per inch). The default on most systems including Linux / Qubes OS is 96. So if your screen has a PPI ratio greater than 96, things start to look small or even tiny.

  1. Find out what your actual DPI setting should be. My laptop screen is 14 inches with 1920x1080 pixels (157 PPI) and my desk screen is 32 inches with 3840x2160 pixels (138 PPI). You can use https://www.sven.de/dpi/ to calculate yours easily. No, this is not my domain but I would love to have it. :wink:

  2. Most software works best if the PPI is a multiple of 6. So in the above example the best PPI setting for my laptop screen is 156 PPI and for my desk screen it is 138 PPI.

  3. There really is no good way to switch DPI/PPI dynamically based on the screen currently in use. So I picked 138 PPI because more than 95% of the time I work on my desk and when using my laptop screen I don’t mind if things are a bit smaller (138 is still a lot better than 96).

  4. Setting this in dom0 couldn’t be easier. Just go to XFCE Settings | Appearance | Fonts and set the DPI to whatever value fits for your screen. After changing this in the settings dialog you should see an immediate effect on all dom0 windows like the settings dialog or the Qube Manager. Annoyingly the window borders don’t scale with the DPI setting in XFCE but there are two border styles that are configured to be larger for this very purpose: XFCE Settings | Window Manager | Style … choose Default-hdpi or Default-xhdpi whichever one works best for you. Personally I like the B5 style so much that I just stick with it even though it’s a bit smaller.

  5. Your qubes have no idea what DPI/PPI value you use in dom0. If your template do not use a xsettings daemon like gnome-settings-daemon, you are in luck. In that case you simply add the line “Xft.dpi: 138” or whatever your DPI setting is to the respective /etc/X11/Xresources (Fedora) or /etc/X11/Xresources/x11-common (Debian), shutdown the template and restart the qubes based on them and you are done.

  6. The standard Fedora template comes with the Gnome settings daemon installed. This means you have to install e.g. gnome-tweaks in the template and then run it in every single one of your qubes once. In it, under “Fonts” you can set a scaling factor (96 = 1 so in my case 138/96 = 1.44). It’s annoying, but on the upside you only have to do it once per qube.

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