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Lanes100
Asked: 2018-10-16 13:44:15 +0800 CST

How to set different scaling on multi monitor (3 monitors)

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I have 3 monitors, the left one is 4k, while the other 2 are 1080p. The problem I am having is that if I have the 1080p monitors on normal scaling, the 4k monitor is basically unusable because everything is too small, but if i set the 4k monitor to 200%, gnome automatically changes the scaling of the other 2 monitors and makes them unusable due to everything being too far zoomed in.

What can I do here? Is there anything in gnome tweaks that can fix this?

gnome multiple-monitors display-resolution display scaling

3 Answers

  1. This works fine in my case, using 3k notebook and 1600px monitor with different scale:

    1. open dconf editor
    2. /org/gnome/mutter/experimental-features
    3. Disable "Use default value"
    4. write custom value: ['scale-monitor-framebuffer', 'x11-randr-fractional-scaling']
    5. now you can use different scale for each screen in the display settings

    dconf setting capture

    scale 200% in screen 3000x2000px

    scale 100% in secondary screen 1600x900px

    test in: ubuntu 19.10 gnome 3.34.2 regards

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  2. If someone is looking for help with this in 2020 or later, probably the solution is to change your session to use wayland instead of xorg. It depends on your distro but you usually can choose what kind of session you want before logging in into your session. You should see some kind of cog icon and you should choose something like "GNOME on Wayland" or "GNOME" if there is some other option which says anything about xorg.

    Please be aware that some apps might not change their scale when you move them from one screen to the other.

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  3. I turned on "fractional scaling" in Settings/Displays and it now lets me set different scaling factors for the different displays. Hooray! I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to use my external monitor with my new laptop.

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