I have a new laptop and it has a really high resolution. I saw that xfce 4.16 has a few nice features for scaling. Is it possible to update xfce in dom0 and if yes, what’s the best way to do this?
Thanks!
The XFCE version used in R4.1 works perfectly fine with HiDPI displays. In fact I am writing this on a 4K monitor. Just set the DPI correctly in the Settings app.
No XFCE feature will help with the scaling INSIDE qubes, but how to do this has also been discussed and solved many times over … and documented in this forum and the community documentation. Search and you shall find! 
Hi Sven! Thanks for your answer!
I thought fractional scaling with 4.16 would be exactly the thing I was looking for, because correcting DPI only affects the appearance/themes/fonts etc., right?
Also the DPI setting would be globally, right? I would like to set this per display, since the internal display is the main issue here, but my external 4k is looking perfect using the DPI configured.
Back to my original question just because I am curious, is there a way to update xfce on dom0 and if yes, how? Would I have to download and compile it by hand?
Thanks!
Before you spend all that effort, please realize: whatever you configure in XFCE will only have effect for the GUI elements that are actually running in dom0. Like the panel, the window borders, the app menu etc.
However everything INSIDE your qubes will be entirely unaffected by any changes you made in XFCE. So even if you get the new XFCE version to run and configured the way you like (different scaling on different monitors) … only your window borders will adhere to it. The contents inside the windows running in your qubes won’t.
For that reason one global DPI setting is actually the better choice, since you need to set that exact same DPI setting also in your qubes. In my case I have a 14" 1K display on the laptop and an external 32" 4K display … there is a DPI difference, but not as extreme as in your case. I just accepted that on my laptop stuff looks a little bit bigger than on the external screen. I can see how your case is more of an issue.
For the qubes to update their scaling on the fly, something in dom0 would need to watch on which monitor the windows is displayed and then send a qrexec call to that qube, which would need to run some code to update the settings daemon there on the fly. That functionality does not (yet) exist.
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