On Mon, Aug 25, 2025 at 21:25 (+0000), dep via tde-users wrote:
said Jim via tde-users:
? Are you saying you use xrandr to set your screen to a lower resolution? If so, why would you do that? (I am using a 142 dpi laptop screen, and my wife's is something like 160 dpi, and neither of us are staring at hard-to-read text or teeny-tiny icons.)
I am using a 168-dpi subnotebook with a 7-inch screen. TDE defaults to 92 dpi. So everything is half the size it should be. That's why.
Good to hear that your and your wife's vision are in good order, and hope that condition remains. Often it does not. --
Somewhere along the line I think someone/people didn't think things through, and decided to continue pretending that screens were 96 (92? really?) DPI, and then went through various contortions to cover up that lie with more lies.
For a long time I have just been telling X (I don't use wayland, don't know the situation there) the actual DPI of my screen with a command like xrandr --dpi 141.7 and letting Xft know the truth with a command like echo Xft.dpi: 141.7 | xrdb -merge and most things I use just work now.
Rather than specifying font sizes in terms of pixels (which was a bad idea from day 1), I specify my font sizes in points. Given the Xft now knows the truth (i.e., what the actual DPI of the screen is), when I ask for (say) a 12pt font, it shows up on my screen at 12pt. Not at some teeny-tiny 6 point or something, as I think you are implying when you so nicely congratulate us on our vision.
Some programs do need a bit of encouragement to get their icons and other stuff at the correct size. I have set the environment variables GDK_USE_XFT=1 GDK_DPI_SCALE=1.2 but when I start firefox, I do env GDK_DPI_SCALE=0.8 firefox to get the icon sizes to come out at about the right size.
Doing this has made my life (where I use multiple different screens with different DPIs) a lot more livable, I can use the same configs across the bourd: all I have to do is to contradict the lie that someone has promulgated to X by telling xrandr and Xft what the real DPI is.
Any time I've seen someone making their fonts bigger by saying the DPI is smaller than the actual screen, to me the fonts on their screen have looked poor. YMMV.
But for anyone interested in trying this out, I think you might find that letting the software know the true DPI has benefits, and after the initial set-up may make things easier.
Cheers. Jim